BFusion and BFlex: Beyond the Flex Camp : An Interview with Bob Flynn

by Judith Dinowitz, Editor-in-Chief

Those who read the blogs may have seen mention of BFusion and BFlex, two free one-day training events in Indiana for ColdFusion and Flex. I took the time to find out more from Bob Flynn, the organizer of these mini-conferences.

How and why did you decide to do BFusion and BFlex?

Last year, we did BFlex, and we just did the Flex thing. I was out at the Adobe Community Summit, and I was chatting with Zach Stepek, and he said, "I have this friend in Bloomington who I haven't visited in a while, and I would be happy to come and speak at the user group. Mike Labriola is also in Chicago, so perhaps I can get him to come as well." That was the start of the idea.

In addition to my general Web technologies user group, there is a Flash User group and a Flex user group in Bloomington. When I got back to Bloomington, I got the managers together to share the idea and we decided to work together to set up the event.

We limited BFlex 2007 to 80 people.

The publishers were great about sending us books for everyone and we managed to get a bunch of great swag from Adobe and other sponsors.

We got other instructors to come join Stepek and Labriola. Jeff Tapper was in the area that week and Mike Nimer came down from Chicago. Adobe sent Matt Boles. They all came down and helped make the event a huge success. We packed in 71/2 hours of Flex and AIR training. Everyone, attendees and instructors alike, thought it was a great event, so we thought we'd do it again.

This year, I was on a university-wide task force looking at Web content management systems. Along the way I repeatedly ran into some real ignorance about ColdFusion.

One person said they didn't want to use ColdFusion because they would have to use IIS. I explained that many people use ColdFusion on Apache. They didn't know this was possible.

Another person said they didn't want to use ColdFusion because it was proprietary software, made by a company that could go out of business tomorrow. I asked them if they knew Adobe was the fifth largest software company in the world... and besides, they were regularly using Microsoft Word, which is also proprietary software, from a company that is just as likely to go out of business tomorrow.

We ran a hands-on evaluation of CommonSpot, a ColdFusion-based CMS, at the university. One evaluator's only response was "ColdFusion? Yuck!" I thought, now there's a real enlightened (and helpful) response!

As a ColdFusion developer and user group manager, I was determined to battle some of that ignorance. So this year, I said, let's try to get a ColdFusion day in here as well. That's where BFusion was born and added to BFlex. We put together the whole weekend.

BFusion is happening on Saturday, September 6, and BFlex is on Sunday September 7.

I understand the event is free. How can you pull this off for free?

We got the facilities at no cost. We got space at the university during a weekend when no one had booked the facilities. We have 60- and 80-seat cohort classrooms with dual projectors and power and data to each seat. It's really first class.

We use donations from sponsors to help us pay for lunch, cover the speaker's hotel rooms and give a tiny honorarium. We'd like to be able to pay for their travel, but we couldn't afford to do that this year.

We're leveraging the university wherever we can, borrowing some technology from the technology services at the university.

The event is so much bigger this year than last year. We have a much bigger number of attendees – 400 vs. 80. And we have a lot more sponsors than last year.

How many are signed up for both days?

We have 210 signed up for ColdFusion, and 230 for Flex, but many of those are waitlisted. Some will drop. We'll finish with 200 of each. There are about 260 individuals coming. Of course there are people coming just for BFlex or just for ColdFusion. I'd estimate that roughly 3/4 are doing both.

What makes BFusion and BFlex different from other ColdFusion and Flex one-day events?

This is not your standard talk-at-you conference. At a more conventional conference event, like a Flex camp, you might have 300 attendees, and in the course of the day, you have five or six speakers. At our event you have a classroom of about 80 people doing hands-on training, and I need not only the instructor, but five or six assistants to help out where needed. For each day, I need about 15 to 20 people helping. That means it takes more sponsorship money to cover the speaker costs.

At BFusion/BFlex, you will have a more meaningful encounter with the technology. Instead of 5-6 presentations in a day you will have six hours of hands-on training. You're building your first ColdFusion application or you're building your first Flex application.

At BFusion, we have five classrooms going on. We have a pure beginner's track, where all they have to know coming in is HTML. We have a CF beginner's track for people who have worked with other technologies and are new to ColdFusion. We have an intermediate and advanced track as well. The intermediate track will take those with some CF experience and teach them to develop in a framework. Matt Woodward was kind enough to offer to do a one-day class on Mach-II. Perhaps next year we can get Joe Rinehart to do Model-Glue.

On the advanced side on ColdFusion, the talks are more presentation-based. In that sense, the advanced track for the ColdFusion day is more like a traditional conference. But the advanced track for Flex is all hands-on.

For BFlex, we thought we could get 80 people for the beginners track. It shot past that quickly and we had to cap it at 160 before instituting a wait list.

For ColdFusion, we are at roughly 140 ColdFusion beginners, a combination of the pure beginner and the CF beginner.

The Advanced tracks are more speaker-intensive and the numbers are so much smaller. This will provide a very intimate conversation for those advanced users, another advantage over regular events.

The numbers and the speed we filled up show that people are just hungry for this kind of experience with these technologies. We sold out in one week.

Is there a great need for ColdFusion and Flex training in the Indiana area? How many of those attending are from Indiana?

We did specifically ask. Two of our sponsors are university entities, and they asked us to find out how many are affiliated with the university.

Eighty percent are affiliated with the university. Indiana University has eight campuses and I haven't parsed the data to see how many of that 80% come from which campus, but I'm sure the vast majority will be from the Bloomington campus.

We also have people signed up from as far as Washington State, Minnesota, Tennessee and North Carolina.

One person registered with an address from India, but I doubt they are coming just for this!

Do you have a lot of interest in Flex from ColdFusion developers, and vice versa?

This is how I think the trends go. When ColdFusion developers see the kinds of interfaces you can do with Flex, they're all over it. And when Flex developers start doing things with live data, and they see how easy it is to do it with ColdFusion, it opens their eyes. So the trends go in both directions.

What do you suggest for those who would like to get into ColdFusion (besides attending your event)?

Go to your local user group. There's great stuff on Adobe Devnet – the getting started stuff there. Charlie Arehart's Meetup group. One of the things we're providing attendees is a list of resources – gathering together URLs like CFQuickDocs, Ray's blog, House of Fusion, Ben's blog, that kind of thing.

What do you suggest for those who would like to get into Flex (besides attending your event)?

Because it's so new, and because people come from so many different directions, there are so many different people blogging about Flex. Go to Flex.org and see what's there. And of course, there's so much on Devnet as well.

The single best thing is the Flex 3: Training from The Source book by Tapper, Labriola, Boles and Talbot from Adobe Press. It's tight, and it's a great project that you work through. You learn a real variety of skills, and you learn from some of the top guys in the field.

Thanks so much for speaking with me, Bob. I'm really excited about BFusion and BFlex.

So am I, Judith. Thanks for helping us promote the events!

Judith Dinowitz is the Master Editor-in-Chief of the House of Fusion magazines and journals, where she enjoys serving up ColdFusion and Flex goodness on a weekly and quarterly basis.

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