cf.Objective() 2008 Wrap-Up
by Brian Rinaldi
Having attended cf.Objective() every year since its first year in 2006, I had high expectations for this year's conference. These expectations were more than met. This year cf.Objective() seemed to me to reflect the maturation of the ColdFusion developer community, with both a heavy focus on integrating technologies such as Java and Flex to build complex enterprise applications and some fascinating debate about the future of ColdFusion. I hope to cover this in more detail on my blog at a later date, but I recommend Brian Kotek's discussion on this topic. As always, the so-called "thought leaders"
in the ColdFusion community were all in attendance, meaning this event was superb simply for the networking opportunities. Indeed, as much could be learned outside the sessions as inside. In this article, I plan to give a broad overview of what I saw as the highlights.
Keynote – Interrupted
Much of Jason Delmore's keynote covered familiar ground for many of us. He spoke about the success of ColdFusion 8 in terms of sales and press coverage, some of the changes in the 8.0.1 release and informed us, again, that they were working on version 9, codenamed Centaur. As I stated, none of this was news to the majority of the room, I assume, until he turned to a slide that announced the "ColdFusion Open Process Initiative."
The room appeared to perk up dramatically as Jason discussed the bullet points including an open bug-base and a language steering committee. Suddenly, someone in the audience collapsed of an apparent seizure. Fortunately, from what I hear, this person was eventually ok, but the details of the keynote were never fully revisited, leaving the "ColdFusion Open-Process Initiative"
shrouded in mystery for the moment.
Flex and Java Crash the Party
As the ColdFusion developer community continues to mature and creates more complex applications, it is clear they are learning that CFML doesn't contain the answer to every problem. Increasingly, we are relying on the Java underlying ColdFusion or external Java libraries to build our application models, integrate additional technologies and improve the performance of complex business logic. This was apparent in sessions such as Jason Delmore's "Building Hybrid Applications with ColdFusion and Java"
, Mark Mandel's discussion of Transfer caching mechanisms and Andrew Powell's presentation on using ColdFusion with Hibernate. Outside of the sessions, I found many people talking about using Groovy, Maven and Spring for their applications. It seems to me that as ColdFusion developers become comfortable with object-oriented development, they are becoming less fearful of venturing into Java to solve problems not easily addressed in CFML.
In addition, Flex seemed to appear around every turn, so much so that some potentially important announcements for the Flex community were made at this, a ColdFusion conference. Laura Arguello and Nahuel Foronda publicly released and presented on their ground-breaking Flex framework called Mate (pronounced "mah-teh") which I covered in detail in my session summary. Maxim Porges presented on developing Flex without a formalized framework, but with design patterns common in other frameworks (again, see my session summary). Also, Chris Scott released his dependency injection framework called Swiz, which while not formally presented was discussed in some detail during his advanced ColdSpring session. Personally, I presented Cairngorm which, while incurring somewhat of a backlash lately, is still the predominant Flex framework (see my presentation and code on my blog). There were a number of other presentations that focused on Flex, meaning you could spend nearly the entire conference focused on that topic, as I did.
Plugging In to the Network
I don't mean the wireless which, while free, was clearly pressed to its limit. What I am referring to is the top-notch people in attendance. I was continually amazed and humbled by the work our community is doing. I was able to meet many people I haven't formally met before like Todd Sharp, Dan Wilson, Paul Marcotte, Terrence Ryan, John Mason and many more (who will hopefully forgive me for not listing everyone). I also was able to spend time talking to many people whom I have met but never talked to in much depth (at least offline) such as Laura Arguello, Nahuel Foronda, Maxim Porges, Andrew Powell and others. I am still digesting all that I was able to learn from the folks I met and it was, in large part, these discussions that have brought me home inspired to learn more. Thanks to you all.
Besides technical conversation there was great fun to be had, such as a large informally planned outing to see "Iron Man" (which was great) and riding the Spongebob Squarepants ride at the Mall of America (which was much more intense than it may sound) and smoking cigars and drinking scotch outside the hotel (I love cigars but it had been a while). I could go on describing everything that was fun or interesting or exciting or inspiring in my brief three day stay, but I will sum it all up by saying that cf.Objective() continues to grow as a conference and has solidified its place as a "must attend" event each year!
Brian Rinaldi is a web developer at Sun Life Financial, Inc. He is the manager of the Boston ColdFusion User Group and an Advanced Certified ColdFusion MX Developer, as well as a Microsoft Certified Professional. Brian is most well known for his efforts promoting open-source projects in ColdFusion, especially for maintaining the ColdFusion open-source list as well as the weekly updates, both of which you can find via his web site at http://www.remotesynthesis.com.