CFUNITED Express NYC: March 8, 2007

 
Mar 12, 2007

by Ben Nadel

Like a young boy sent into the forest with nothing but a spear and a dream, I attended my first CFUNITED event and have returned a man.

What I really meant to say was: I just attended my first CFUNITED event and I can finally see what all the hubbub is about. Michael Smith and TeraTech sure do host an amazing conference. Content aside, the registration process, freebies, setup, catering, and printed materials were all top-notch and very professional.

The event involved fifty ColdFusion enthusiasts,which felt like a perfectly sized group. For someone like myself who is not very social, it felt easy to move around and talk to people without being overwhelmed by the sheer size of the conference. And, as one of the other attendees pointed out, with a small crowd, anybody could just walk up to one of the presenters and ask questions. It was an excellent, comfortable, and cozy environment, well-suited for both socializing and educating.

Shlomy Gantz kicked off the presentations, giving us a somewhat nerve-wracking talk about ColdFusion application security. I have always felt quite confident in the way I secure my applications, but I learned several ways in which my applications might be vulnerable. Of course, I am not happy that they might be vulnerable, but I am now much better equipped to find and eliminate such security holes.

While Shlomy did a great job of helping us see where our applications could be improved, I felt the presentation fell a little short when it came to implementing solutions. He did not really provide any code samples or steps that could be taken to prevent the security issues he described so thoroughly. I understand that fitting code explanations into a one hour presentation can be quite difficult, but I think that a few slides discussing CFQueryParam, CFContent, and perhaps even form data validation would have really taken the presentation home.

Ben Forta followed with a presentation of the product code-named "Apollo". The mandatory disclaimer stated that since this product is not yet released, any aspects of it may still change. But his demo of actual Apollo applications showed that the power of this product, once it's released, is going to be unreal. For those of you not familiar with Apollo, it is basically a "FLEX-plus" runtime environment used to run installed desktop applications built in FLEX and HTML. With all the power of FLEX, access to the client's file system, a built-in browser rendering engine, and additional Apollo-specific extensions, Apollo is going to provide a revolutionary way for web developers to create desktop applications (with occasional web connectivity) in an programming environment with which we are all familiar and comfortable.

If you've ever been to a Ben Forta event, you already know that they are always packed. There is good reason for this: Ben Forta is simply a tremendous speaker. He moves and talks with such comfort and confidence that you just get sucked into whatever he is talking about. If you ever have a chance to see him present on FLEX or Apollo or ColdFusion Scorpio, I highly recommend that you make it a top priority to get there. Ben is doing a tour in the spring on Scorpio, and will be appearing at several user groups around the country. He'll be at the New York ColdFusion User Group on May 15th. For a list of all of his user group appearances, check http://www.forta.com/.

Ray Camden gave an excellent presentation on Adobe Spry, an AJAX framework developed for non-programmers. His presentation went quite quickly and with very little audience interaction. I suspect this is due to the fact that we were all sitting there thinking to ourselves, I can't believe how freakin' easy this stuff is! Using Spry to make AJAX calls and then updating the document object model (DOM) in complex ways took merely a few lines of highly-readable, tag-based code. I can see how the ease of implementation appeals to low level web developers. But at the same time, Spry provides many tag-based and Javascript hooks that give higher level web developers a way to do some really intricate stuff. This was my first introduction to Spry, and I have to say that I was quite impressed.

Ray, like Ben Forta, has excellent presentation skills. There's also something about him that's very easy to connect with. I don't know if it's his use of words like "snob", "sexy", and "jiggle", or if it's some crazy Jedi mind tricks, but it's just fun to listen to him talk. He certainly leaves you wanting to know more, and if you get the opportunity to hear him speak, jump at it.

After Ray, Michael Dinowitz gave a good presentation on User-Defined Functions and ColdFusion Components. As a regular attendee of the New York ColdFusion User Group, hosted by Dinowitz, I had heard most of this before. During his CFUG presentations, Michael has no problem jumping from topic to topic as dictated by the questions and curiosities of the CFUG crowd. It's this shoot-from-the-hip ability and deep passion for ColdFusion that makes Dinowitz such a great source for all-around programming information. At the CFUNITED Express conference, Michael was required to fit a Powerpoint presentation into a set amount of time. I felt like getting him to limit his teachings to a single hour dampened some of the fire behind the delivery. And, while the content of the discussion was great, I felt bad that people were not privy to what I consider the genuine Dinowitz.

Michael Smith closed the conference giving a presentation on Mind Maps. Mind mapping is a neat, iterative way to get all of your ideas down on paper without having to keep track of them or worry about how they interrelate. His presentation was solid but unfortunately, I think he was speaking to a very restless crowd who had been sitting for six hours. The best part of the session was the last 15 minutes, when we all volunteered ideas on how to improve the CFUNITED Express experience. People had some really great suggestions, and I am sure these will make for an even better CFUNITED Express event next time.

Overall, CFUNITED Express NYC proved to be an excellent conference. I want to thank Michael Smith and TeraTech as well as all the speakers who helped to make this possible. I hope that this is something that they continue to have each year, and perhaps even more than once a year.

Ben Nadel has worked with ColdFusion for eight years and is a super ColdFusion enthusiast. He blogs regularly about all aspects of web development on his personal site, http://www.bennadel.com, and does his best to give back to the ColdFusion community through online code demos and his "Ask Ben" blog posts. He is also a Certified Advanced ColdFusion MX7 developer and is one of the lead programmers at Nylon Technology.

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