Fusebox and Frameworks Conference 2005

 
Dec 08, 2005

by S. Isaac Dealey

The Fusebox and Frameworks Conference 2005 rocked! Granted that I am in all likelihood biased, as it was my first conference and also my first conference as a presenter. The conference, hosted at the Bethesda North Marriott in Rockville, Maryland, ran from September 28 to 30 and boasted 16 speakers, 93 attendants and 27 presentations. Hal Helms and Jeff Peters kicked off the whole affair with an interesting keynote speech in which they provided a stage performance akin to the golden age of radio, featuring a day in the life of a framework psychiatrist. Though I'm not certain some of the attendees weren't thinking quietly to themselves that the performers might avail themselves of such services, it was entertaining and well received.

Although Macromedia Press, CFDynamics, Hal Helms Inc., Teratech and Peachpit Press all sponsored the conference, the sponsorships remained scarcely noticeable. Likely, this is because the sponsorships were mostly limited to the program (with the exception of a coupon from Peachpit in the goodie bag). I scarcely glanced at the program myself, although it did provide thumbnails of the presentations. It isn't as good as being able to see the presentation, though with three rooms for simultaneous presentations you could see at most a third of them (9) over the course of two days.

I was also somewhat nervous about giving a presentation at my first conference. I wasn't sure how my presentation would be received or how I would be perceived by the other presenters. I was pleasantly surprised to find that all of the presenters were very friendly and approachable, with or without an open bar. Jeff Peters even took the time to approach me personally to inquire about the onTap framework (he and I had a simultaneous presentation) so that he could understand it better for his general frameworks presentation at MAX (which I won't be able to attend), in spite of having apparently been quite jet-lagged at the time. On meeting John Paul Ashenfelter, I even received a lead on a new job in Virginia, which I accepted just last week. This surprised me at the time, although I heard from others that such things are reasonably common at these conferences.

I also learned (the hard way) that most of the attendees begin to leave early just after lunch on the second day and as a result, I presented to a throng of six attendees. Next year I'll have to arrange an urgent appointment elsewhere during the latter half of the last day to make sure I can present earlier. I can't say that I blame them, however. I'd never been to the DC metro area before and being nervous that I might miss my flight, I tagged along with Matt Woodward back to the Airport immediately following the last presentation and missed the final panel discussion on Friday.

With the recent explosion of frameworks in the ColdFusion community, it made sense for Michael Smith and the folks at Teratech to expand the conference and change the name. It's no longer the Fusebox Conference; this year it was the Fusebox and Frameworks Conference. While nearly half of the presentations focused on Fusebox, as a whole they covered everything from Mach-II and Model Glue to using the Java Spring framework to build model components, Ruby on Rails (which isn't even a part of the ColdFusion landscape) and a non-technical presentation by Scott Knaub entitled "Managing Your Career as a Developer". Overall it was a good, diverse lineup, though this change in the ColdFusion landscape is still rather recent and I suspect this conference was transitional. It would not surprise me at all if the frameworks conference grows to rival CFUnited in size, with many more presentations on other frameworks and that as early as next year, the name Fusebox may be dropped altogether from the name of the Conference to reflect the variety of presentations.


The best part of most conferences is the chance to network with fellow programmers, and this year's Frameworks Conference was no exception.
Personally I didn't come away from the conference with a wealth of newfound technical expertise. This may in part be due to the fact that I wasn't able to sit in on many of the presentations. My own presentation and a job interview during the first half of Friday limited my time at the conference. I've heard from others that these conferences are often more valuable for the opportunity to network. This was certainly true in my case, where networking got me a better job!

I was able to attend Maxim Porges' presentation on using the Java Spring framework to develop the model components of a ColdFusion application in Java, which was a good presentation and provided me with some good insight and ideas. Most notable was the knowledge that Java programmers by and large have abandoned the Struts framework due to its complexity, in favor of other frameworks like Spring and important techniques for improving code maintainability like Inversion of Control (IOC). Still, I was a bit removed from the content in spite of having done fairly extensive work with Java through reflection in ColdFusion.

I attended John Paul Ashenfelter's presentation about Ruby on Rails (RoR) due in no small part to its similarities to my own framework. John managed to convey plenty of good information about the nature of RoR (such as the fact that it uses a language called YAML instead of XML, database integration, DAO tools, etc.) in spite of the fact that the demonstration application on John's laptop wasn't working, forcing him to make up in enthusiasm what he lacked in visual aid. I also marveled (as many of us did) at the similarity between Mach-II and Model-Glue in presentations by Joe Rinehart and Matt Woodward, who littered his PowerPoint presentation with clip-art and used post-it notes, beanies and a beach-ball to represent event-flow during an audience participation portion of his presentation.

After that it was back to the airport for me, with a fist-full of new contacts and a head full of fond memories.

(Picture courtesy of Michael Smith of TeraTech, Inc. You'll find many more pictures of the Frameworks conference at the CFConf.org website.)

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