A Review of Scotch on the Rocks 2007

By Kola Oyedeji

The venue for the Scotch on the Rocks Conference, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, May 31 - June 1, 2007, was located right in the center of the city among its many attractions and hotels. Those who had never been to Scotland or Edinburgh before would have been pleasantly surprised. The city is beautiful, with lots of local attractions and cobbled streets.

At the conference were many ColdFusion developers from places all over Europe, such as Germany and Switzerland. It was encouraging talking to developers from these countries and hearing how the increased demand for ColdFusion in the UK seems to mirror that on the continent.

First up was the Keynote with Tim Buntel.

Tim outlined where ColdFusion fits in Adobe's strategy and demoed the new Ajax functionality. He discussed the new CFPRESENTATION tag and how it can dynamically pull in data and SWFs, allowing developers to programmatically alter the presentation to record, for example, how many slides someone has seen. Tim talked about new PDF tags which allow you to piece together multiple PDFs – so you could, for example, create catalogues dynamically, or provide users with forms they can complete offline and submit later. He also mentioned that the Report Builder has been overhauled.

Tim's keynote was one of three on the new features of Scorpio. The keynotes were all focused on different aspects and areas of the new Scorpio features. In particular, Adam Lehman's presentation on the new server monitoring functionality in Scorpio seemed to be well received.

There were also a fair number of Flex sessions. For seasoned Flex developers these were probably too introductory; however, judging by the hands raised, many of the attendees were ColdFusion developers who hadn't really used Flex.

Perhaps one of the nice things about the conference was that there appeared to be less Adobe bias than I have seen elsewhere, with people talking about using BlueDragon and sessions on Railo. It was good to see ColdFusion product manager Tim and the Railo Chief architect engaging in some friendly banter.

Mark Drew: Advanced CFEclipse

I sat in on Mark Drew's advanced CFEclipse talk. I got the feeling that Mark was preaching to the converted, in that most of the audience was already using CFEclipse and, like me, were there to see the new feature Mark was to unveil. Finally, Marked demoed the new Snipex feature, allowing you to add, view and contribute other shared snippets to shared snippet folders hosted remotely. Mark had been busy and, with the help of Ray Camden, had already set up a shared snippet folder for Cflib.org, providing you with all the user-defined functions (UDFs) from Cflib.org as local snippets.

Cinematic effects with Flex

This presentation showcased a number of effects and transitions in Flex. While not perhaps detailed enough for a beginner, it was a good overview of what is possible and how it is achieved with Flex. Certainly enough to whet a developer's appetite.

Integrating ColdFusion and Flex with Apache

Niklas Richardson's talk was on how to get ColdFusion working with Flex Data Services (FDS – now rebranded as LiveCycle Data Services ES), how to get ColdFusion working with Apache and finally how to configure this all to work with Flex Builder. Niklas did a great job of pointing out the many gotchas along the way, as well as troubleshooting tips and what to look at when things are not working correctly. He discussed the benefits of FDS, why you might use this in your application, and also why you would use FDS over ActionScript Messaging Format (AMF) or SOAP webservices. Despite a few technical hitches (a presentation isn't a presentation without technical hitches) I found the steps easy to follow and made copious notes, which I think will come in handy very soon. I was also pleased to hear the process of integrating ColdFusion with FDS in Scorpio has been made more straightforward.

Practical code generation

Prolific blogger Peter Bell's presentation was on practical code generation. He started off talking about the benefits of code generation and moved on to the differences between concatenation (building up strings of code in variables to be executed) and templating, which involves building templates which then have place holders where values are substituted – similar to the way ColdFusion works. Peter then went on to introduce his new templating framework. Cftemplate was developed for code generation using templates but still allows you to harness the full power of ColdFusion. I left with yet another thing to add to my list of things to try out and evaluate.

Railo

One of the great things about being at a conference, particularly when new features are announced, is that if you ask what a particular feature can be used for you get input not just from the speaker but also lots of ideas from the crowd. I left the Railo session with a few ideas on how their slant on CFML could be useful. I also came away feeling that the ColdFusion community is becoming increasingly receptive to alternative CFML engines.

One of the highlights of Scotch on the Rocks was the networking. Above, some of the delegates gather for drinks.

Lunchtime food was great, a wide range of varied food and plenty to go around. It might have been nicer to sample some more traditional Scottish dishes, but there were plenty of restaurants around.

There were a few sessions which had been swapped around but everyone was kept well informed. Some of the unplanned talks, like Mark Drew's talk on ColdSpring, actually added to the breadth of coverage.

All the rooms were well lit, although one in particular was very hot. The organizers quickly responded to feedback and had air conditioning installed by the next morning. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed SOTR. People ask why I go to these conferences and Scotch is a typical example of why. In our day-to-day jobs it's so hard to find the time to play with new things, evaluate new releases, look at new technology or try something different. At these conferences, you are exposed to new things and you can question the presenters to see how something should or can be used. More importantly, in many cases you get to interact with others and find out what new and varied things they are doing, what problems they are solving and how they intend to use some of the things they learned in the conference.

The first Scotch on the Rock (SOTR) was in November 2005. Let's hope we don't have to wait as long for the next one!

Kola Oyedeji is Technical Architect for Collinson Group R & D. Prior to that, he was Technical director of Vivid Lime a London based Digital Marketing agency, and a senior software developer developing Enterprise Loyalty and Insurance Systems. Kola holds a BSc in Computer and Information systems. His blog is available at www.coolskool.blog-city.com.

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