CFUnited 2009 Session Reviews

by Kunal Shah

CFUnited 2009 (August 12-15, 2009 at the Landsdowne Resort in Leesburg, VA) has provided me with a myriad of positive experiences. I was surprised at the level of professionalism and the caliber of speakers. The sessions and seminars were powerful and provided a wealth of knowledge. The speakers actually shared their experiences and knowledge! I had a wonderful time at this very enriching and rewarding event. I knew then I had found a good community to be part of.

Here is a selection of reviews of sessions that I saw.

• Developing and Marketing A 2.0 Startup

  Presenter: Todd Sharp

  Todd Sharp tried to answer a question which many have asked and aspire to know the answer to: "How do I build a web 2.0 startup?" Now, this is a big question and Todd started out with questions like "I have an Idea ..." and "How do I ...? " and eventually answered this question to the satisfaction of everyone. He touched all the topics, from preparing a business plan, pitching to venture capitalists for funding, legal issues and importance of time management, setting deadlines and a project planning and eventually the most awaited launch of your idea!

• ColdFusion 9, Introduction to ORM

  Presenter: Terrence Ryan

  Object relational mapping (ORM) defines a mapping to leverage the object model to store and retrieve data from the relational database. According to Terrence Ryan, it means "Write less SQL" and "Write less Code". He gave a brief introduction to ORM and using it in ColdFusion 9. He showed the advantages of ORM over Data Access Object (DAO), Services and Beans and Inline queries in a given situation. He emphasized that whether to choose ORM totally depends on the project needs. ColdFusion ORM does not replace other strategies but is an addition to ColdFusion, helpful in many cases.

• ColdFusion 9, Advanced ORM

  Presenters: Manju Kiran Pacchhipulusu and Hemant Khandelwal

  This session went beyond the basics and explored some of the more advanced aspects of ORM. Hemant talked about caching for scalability and performance, transaction management and the underlying Hibernate configuration settings. Other topics in this session included:

  • Relationship: one-to-many, many-to-one, one-to-one and many-to-many
  • Event handling
  • Lazy loading
  • Caching
  • Transactions
  • ORM session management
  • HBM files
  • Development time support: ormreload(), logSQL, savemapping, etc.
  • Generating DDL

• Facebook apps with a ColdFusion backend

  Presenter: Simon Free

  At the beginning of the New Year, Facebook reached a milestone of serving 150 million users total around the globe. Almost 50,000 users enroll in Facebook every day, so Facebook continues to amaze us with its rapid growth and many institutions and businesses want to use Facebook in some way.

  In this session, Simon explained how to create a Facebook application that uses ColdFusion. Step by step, he detailed the process of creating a Facebook application. He showed the differences between a platform and an API, then the registration process. He looked at FBML, a markup language for Facebook applications, and discussed Facebook's extended privacy policy.

• How to set up a local environment?

  Presenter: Yancy Wharton

  Many developers these days need to travel to client locations for their projects. The main difficulty such organizations face is reducing the time lost in setting up the development environments at each of these client locations. Yancy explained a process that sets up an exact image of the production servers on a virtualBox/VM on a portable hard drive, so each developer is ready and set to go with the project just by plugging in the portable drive. He mainly explained focused on the Windows environment.

• Hands-on CSS

  Presenter: Dee Sadler

  As more and more organizations use the web for their processes and users for their daily activities, emphasis on the UI of the application is gaining ground.

  CSS plays an important role, as seen by an unexpected high turnout at the presentation,which gave users hands-on experience with different CSS standards, layouts and floats with different examples. This session stretched into two parts and provided the attendees with good experience.

I was fortunate enough to attend CFUnited and it was so wonderful. What was invaluable to me was getting charged up. It put me right back on track. Thank you, CFUnited!

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