CFUN-03 a Blast!

 
Jul 19, 2003
By Judith Dinowitz

CFUN-03, TeraTech's fifth annual conference for the ColdFusion community, took place on June 21st and 22nd 2003 in Gaithersburg, Maryland. It was preceded this year by the CFUG Managers' Day, a mini-conference for CFUG and MMUG managers. Both the CFUG Managers Day and CFUN-03 were well organized and provided what they promised -- a weekend of pure fun, full of new contacts, old friends and well-organized sessions.

I won't go into too much detail about the CFUG Managers' Day, except to say that it was wonderful to meet other CFUG and MMUG managers from all over the country, and the sessions were both professional and thought-provoking. It was particularly inspiring (and energizing) to find that the concerns that we user group managers have on a monthly basis (such as how to find new members and increase the group's size, or how to obtain quality speakers for every meeting) were shared by most, if not all, of the groups there and elicited a multitude of suggestions.

Some highlights of the CFUG Managers Day included the rather humorous composite pictures we drew of the anxieties we feel as speakers (Dynamic Engaging Presentations Success Lab, led by Mark Gorkin) and Simon Horwith's presentation on the new products available from Macromedia, an area that many developers (and CFUG managers) might be fuzzy about.

A Plethora of Programming!

This year's CFUN was definitely more ambitious than its predecessor, sporting four tracks of presentations on both days of the conference. The tracks were: Advanced CF, MX Integration, Empowered Programming and CF Bootcamp. As Michael Dinowitz said, "There were just too many good speakers who usually don't speak at any other conferences. Too many choices. Too many people I wanted to sit in on and couldn't. Hell, I wanted to cancel my own talk to be in on one on the same time slot."

As the technology does not yet exist that would let me be in four places at once, I will give you my overall impression of the content of the conference, focusing on the keynote speeches and some of the highlights that stand out in my mind.

Saturday was a low-key day for me, as it's the Jewish Sabbath and I was therefore limited in what I could do. I spent the day listening in on three or four different presentations and chatting with people in the hall outside the conference rooms. One of my favorite Saturday talks was "Variables" (CF Bootcamp Track) where Hal Helms gave a compelling explanation of the uses of structures and arrays and why they shouldn't intimidate us. His clear examples and his sense of humor made the lesson easy to swallow. It might be well worth it to check out some of his upcoming classes. (You can find out more about them at http://www.halhelms.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=training.detail.)

I was also highly impressed by Sandra Clark's session on Using Fusebox 4 to Create Accessible Sites. She argued against coding for the browser or the speech reader, instead focusing on how to make the content of a page more prominent and therefore more readable (or hearable). Rather than using tables, she advocated using CSS2 and Fusebox 4 to create pages that adhere to accessibility standards, while sending other users who have older browsers to a page to download one of the newer browsers that support accessibility standards. If a significant portion of your public uses something like Netscape 4, you might need to design a page specific to Netscape 4 users - but having one accessible version makes it easier to create additional pages as needed and cuts down on the headaches of programming for twenty different browser types.

The keynote on Saturday morning, called "The Future of ColdFusion," was given by Christian Cantrell, Server Community Manager. This was the first public talk on ColdFusion MX 6.1 (formerly code-named Redsky), which was still in beta at the time, but at this point has already been released. Christian emphasized that Redsky is a "maintenance release," containing mainly bug fixes and installation fixes, and therefore the upgrade is free to anyone with a legal CFMX license. He said that ColdFusion MX users who had complained about installation problems and instability in the CFMX release would be very happy with the stability and ease of installation on the Redsky release. (For more about ColdFusion MX 6.1, see our article in this issue.)

My only criticism of his keynote was that he spent too long on the first part of his presentation, which was a review of the features of CFMX that many users have heard about for a year now, and not enough time on Redsky. But it was good to see Macromedia moving forward with ColdFusion and getting past many of those issues that Christian mentioned.

On Sunday, I sat in on Michael's presentation on Email and spam rules, and though I knew this subject better than most, I still found myself fascinated by the logic behind Michael's spam rules and why they work so well to detect spammers.

Michael is working on a new piece of software that identifies spam before it comes into your mailbox, giving you the opportunity to delete it before your mail is downloaded. I have been beta-testing his product and find it extremely useful in stopping spam. Look to future issues of Fusion Authority for more information on this product.

Technology Saves the Day!

One of the best boons of CFUN-03 was its connectivity. You could ask the hotel for a direct Net connection in your room for no charge, and on the main floor of the conference, Edge Web Hosting, one of the conference sponsors, provided wireless access for anyone who wanted.

Technology was everywhere at CFUN-03, and in some cases it was instrumental in solving problems that sprang up at the conference. For example, Kevin Towes, one of the conference's speakers, was stopped at the Canadian border and not allowed to enter the United States. He couldn't prove that he wasn't being paid for presenting (and therefore would have needed a work visa, which, of course, he didn't have.) It was an added treat (and a proof of the technology) that Kevin managed to give his speech on the uses of the Macromedia Flash Communications Server remotely ? using the very technology he was discussing!

Shlomy Gantz, who was supposed to give a talk called "CF Pest Control" on debugging, got sick and couldn't make it to the conference. Luckily, Tobe Goldfinger, president of JDT Technologies and a speaker for the New York ColdFusion User Group, was able to pinch hit and give Shlomy's talk, to audience acclaim.

There were numerous chances to win prizes, including a survey and a "sponsor card," where anyone who got stamps from all of the sponsors was entered into a raffle. I found this to be a very clever way to get everyone at the conference over to the sponsors' tables, which were on both sides of the hallway in front of the conference rooms, centrally situated. The CFUN-03 sponsors were: Macromedia, New Atlanta, ColdFusion Developers' Journal, Edge Web Hosting, Active PDF, Fusion Authority, Synthis, O'Reilly, Fusetalk and SecretAgents.com

Audience Acclaim

Sandy Clark, a speaker at the conference, gave her view of the conference:

"I loved it! From a speaker's point of view, the audiences were fantastic. Great receptivity to my talks. I kept getting people coming up to me the entire weekend telling me I changed the way they want to design their websites!"

"As a participant, I got to listen to all the gurus and pick up great tips! I got to participate in a very fun CF Squares game and sit right next to Hal Helms on stage.

"Hal's keynote was extremely well done and very poignant. The fact that Kevin Towes did his presentation on Flash Communications Server using Flash Communications Server from Toronto just proved how good that technology was. I missed Michael Dinowitz's talk on the Email, but I heard really good things about it.

"And the best thing about CFUN03?

"Seeing all my old friends and making new ones!"

Tim Heald, member of the CF-Community list on House of Fusion, concurred:

"I have been going the last three years, and I loved it every time. Matt Liotta gave a great talk on CF and Java that really has me thinking in a new direction, Hal Helms gave a last minute key note, and I really think he rocked the house, especially since he was woken up only minutes before from what I understand."

For a visual panorama of the conference, you might want to browse the bevy of pictures that Michael Smith has provided:

Saturday pictures

Sunday Pictures

Michael Smith and TeraTech have again provided us with a worthy conference and community gathering, and I look forward to the next CFUN. TeraTech's next conference will be CF_Underground, which will take place right before MAX (Macromedia Devcon) in November. For more information on that and other ColdFusion conferences, visit http://www.cfconf.org.


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