Attendance Breaks All records-CFUG-oRama Meeting a Great Success!

 
May 15, 2000
by Janet Lathan, Byte Back Director of Education

Ben Forta and Ashley King, both Allaire Product Evangelists, spoke at a free CFUG meeting for ColdFusion and Spectra web developers at the Woodley Parks Marriott in Washington DC, Wednesday, May 17. The evening was co-sponsored by TeraTech, Figleaf and Allaire.

I arrived on time for the meeting, and was already too late to get refreshments. The large ballroom at the Marriott was almost filled with an estimated 700 attendees, who had come early with the promise of information on Spectra, and a talk on ColdFusion development tips by Ben Forta, author of several current ColdFusion books. As John Stanard, President and Senior Developer for Webworld Studios, Inc., remarked, "most of us learned our ColdFusion from Ben's books." Forta's upcoming book, the Spectra E-Business Construction Kit, which will be published by QUE within a few weeks, is currently the first book coming out on Spectra.

Ashley King from Allaire Promoted Spectra

The Spectra presentation was professional and interesting, although I felt like I had tuned in to the middle of the program. Ashley King was taking to the people in the audience who were experienced in ColdFusion and beginning to use Spectra, or already informed about its use. Having come primarily for the ColdFusion information, I needed more background on Spectra, which Stanard later supplied. Stanard confirmed my suspicions that the people who got the most from Ashley's talk were reasonably experienced CF developers interested in or already beginning to use Spectra.

ColdFusion makes it possible for non-technical people to build web-based database applications, while technical developers can do more complex things. That makes ColdFusion a big player on the applications side. Spectra takes this to a new level, a level that will help organizations transfer their entire business to the web. Stanard told me that this is called the "Enterprise" level as opposed to the "Application" level.

Spectra is a set of high-level tools that run on top of the ColdFusion server. Spectra is not usually available at an ISP, as there are many issues, security and otherwise, about running Spectra for more than one Enterprise at a time. Enterprise level generally means: a large numbers of users, a large amount information, many processes, and lots of concerns about privileges and security.

While Spectra consists of hundreds of custom tags, the functionally of the whole is far more complex than the individual tags. As Ashley showed in his presentation, Spectra forms a development platform which services many areas of a company's needs. For example, Spectra functions as a Content Management development tool. This is one of the biggest selling points and the focus of the initial release-as Stanard explains it to me, "Spectra provides tools that enable developers to build web-based interfaces that allow non-technical people to add, create, and manage content." There was applause and some laughter when Ashley made this point in his talk-development programmers do not want to be content managers for the companies they serve, and the Spectra platform will help a company take control of its own content.

As of the current release, Spectra includes over 250 Customs Tags, and more and more functions are being built into the platform. The interface is familiar to ColdFusion developers. The combination of tags and a familiar interface is what makes ColdFusion great, and Spectra continues the tradition. As a programmer, the custom tags make me think of "functions"-modular programming which promotes reusability. You don't have to start from scratch, it reduces debugging, and it promotes teamwork. Ashley King expressed it as follows, "Once the Spectra site is designed, you can hand over the system to non-professionals who can add properties, and if they have some skills they can actually work in design mode." This puts content management back in the hands of the company instead of the developer. An example of a recent site designed this way is the new World Book site.

The web browser gives access to an expanding network; a network where information and workflow become electronic-Spectra is creating momentum to transfer services to this network. Ashley King demonstrated the ease with which a developer could use the Spectra platform to create a dynamic, web-based business site.

(It was noted that the first user group is being formed for Allaire Spectra. The first meeting will be in the DC area on May 30th. For more information, contact bpeters@figleaf.com.)

Ben Forta Gave Development Tips for ColdFusion

While Ashley King's presentation on Spectra was aimed at the future, many of us came to hear the "King" of ColdFusion, Ben Forta, help us improve the present. Forta's talk on Tips and Tricks had information for everyone interested in ColdFusion. His intense, rapid style alternated well with his frequent pauses for questions-and there were plenty of questions. He told us that he is a ColdFusion evangelist, not a salesman and doesn't even know what all the different product configurations cost. ColdFusion, or CFML as he calls it, uses tags as in HTML, which leads to a minimal learning curve and results in effective code, allowing rapid development and deployment of applications. Since I had brought students to hear the presentation, and there were other students sitting in front of me, I really appreciated Forta's starting from scratch. He further defined ColdFusion as "glue" or "middlewear" which binds the browser to the back-end processes such as the database, COM and email.

An intriguing part of the presentation was on learning when not to use ColdFusion. Forta explained that we should not try to do the job of the database, but should let the database enforce referential integrity and data validation. Then, if there is an error, one should handle it in ColdFusion. He explained that the interpretive environment for ColdFusion is much slower than the database. When he is called in to troubleshoot problems in ColdFusion, a very large percent turn out to be problems caused by poorly-designed databases.

Another major tip is to avoid manipulating lists except in the simplest cases where the information will not be reused. Make temporary variables rather than search the list again-the list is a string in ColdFusion and much less efficient than Arrays or Structures. If you are looping or working with elements in the list, the proper data structure is the Array, which uses pointers to facilitate searches. If you are nesting Arrays, consider Structures instead.

One of the easiest ways to improve a site is to use the <CFINCLUDE> tag. Forta recommends its use so long as you do not need to pass data in and out of the include file. The Include also does not have private variables, as it shares scope with the parent file. With those cautions, he says, the code is lightening fast and there are no drawbacks to its use.

There was so much more, including a detailed discussion of stored procedures, caching and locking. While some people left at 9:30 PM when Forta paused and said the evening was officially over, most stayed another hour, and there were still many people there talking with him when I left at 11 PM. Forta said he could stay all night-his plane didn't leave till early morning. And this was typical of his attitude, very helpful and very accessible. In his dynamic introduction to Ben Forta, Michael Smith from TeraTech said that one thing unusual about him is that although he is a very well known author and consultant, if you send him a question about ColdFusion, he answers his e-mail (ben@forta.com). I believe it.

During the meeting, Michael Smith announced that there will be a ColdFusion User Conference at NIH on July 29 and 30, organized by the great team (CPCUG and TeraTech) that did last year's excellent conference (and sponsored by Allaire, as well). This will be well worth a trip to the Washington area. For more information and pre-registration, visit http://www.cfconf.org/.

For a great visual tour of this event, you can view the CFUG-o-Rama photo spread. (Photos courtesy of Michael Smith and TeraTech)


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