A Tale of CFML, Flex and a Pineapple
by David Beale
I expected my low cost airline flights would be delayed. I expected Edinburgh would be a highly cultural and historic city. I expected my hotel would be sparse but pleasant. I expected the conference would be a collection of the cream of the UK?s ColdFusion community. What I did not expect, was to walk out of a two day ColdFusion conference holding a pineapple!
Scotch on the Rocks 2007 was a ColdFusion conference held in the UK by the Scottish ColdFusion User Group. It was a deliberately intimate affair with just over 70 delegates and 14 speakers. Organized as two separate tracks of presentations over two days (Thursday May 31st, and Friday June 1st), it covered subjects from CFML and Flex, to virtualised hosting and test-driven development. Each day ended with a prize draw, followed by food and drinks late into the night.
Presentations
The keynotes were given by Tim Buntel and Adam Lehman of Adobe. These detailed "the highly anticipated eighth major release of Adobe ColdFusion", or CF8, as those outside of Adobe know it. Billed as the most feature-rich release of ColdFusion to date, there was certainly a great deal of buzz about the product among the delegates. Tim focused on what CF8 will provide for the end user, including better reporting, presentation generation, PDF forms and numerous Ajax tags. Adam spoke about the features which are targeted towards the developer, such as application mappings, JavaScript style operators, CFC interfaces, native image manipulation and server side printing.
Not to be outdone by the hype surrounding ColdFusion 8, Gert Franz of Railo Technologies demonstrated some features of the next version of their CFML engine - Railo 2.0. These included some very interested configuration options, such as mappings to virtual file systems (such as zip files) and overrides for some of the quirks of ColdFusion. Each web application context can be configured to either work in standard ColdFusion mode or to change the behavior of the CFML language. For example, the this scope, which is normally only for accessing the public properties/methods of a CFC, can be configured to access only the private properties/methods.
Perhaps the biggest surprise, considering Scotch was a ColdFusion conference, was the amount of interest and presentations on Flex. This Flash-based GUI technology is without a doubt the next big thing in software development. Based on the Rich Internet Application paradigm, Flex proves a user experience well beyond anything that Ajax can achieve. Alex Uhlmann of Adobe demonstrated some truly astounding cinematic effects that, when used properly, can greatly enhance the user experience. He demonstrated an effect which was used to do a 3D flip of a log-in dialog box, allowing the user to retrieve a forgotten password by filling in a form on the other side of the log-in form. This type of interaction has tested particularly well in usability trials.
Andy Rayne of Adobe Consulting spoke about using Test Driven Development (TDD) with Flex applications. TDD is a coding methodology which takes an OO design and implements it by first creating a series of test objects, called unit tests, which test the functionality of the actual domain objects. Only when all the unit tests have been completed, does work start coding the domain objects. The idea is that, at first all the unit tests fail and as development of the domain objects progresses, more and more tests pass, eventually leading to all tests passing. Why go to all this bother? Well as the specification for the application changes, which it always does, the changes you make to your design could have a negative effect on existing functionality. These effects will be instantly caught by running the unit tests, thus saving a lot of time and effort debugging systems, which is good for business and good for the developer's state of health! A free framework is available for TDD in flex called flexUint, which makes the whole proses very easy to implement. As TDD is a technique which works well with the increasing popular Agile development methodologies, unit test frameworks are available for most OO languages such as cfcUnit for ColdFusion and jUnit for Java.
Another interesting development in current technologies is virtualization. David Pratt of Firstserv Limited spoke on how it can be used to provide Software as a Service (SaaS). By dividing a hardware server up into many, easy to manage, Virtual Machines, hosting companies can supply conventional software installations such as Microsoft Exchange and Content Management Solutions as a rented service. This lowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for their customers. David showcased Virtuozzo, which is the virtualization software Firstserv uses. This product uses a concept of Virtual Environments rather than Virtual Machines. Although one loses the ability to run virtual servers with different Operating Systems (Windows/Linux), this approach gives a much greater virtual server density than rival products such as VMWare. One amazing ability of Virtuozzo is that a virtual server can be moved between two hardware servers, without disconnecting active connections to the server! It is this ease of management which is driving virtualization solutions on to the front line.
Entertainment
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| Only at a ColdFusion conference: Tim Buntel models his Railo t-shirt (left) while Gert Franz of Railo shows off his ColdFusion 8 shirt (right)! |
Perhaps the main reason for attending a conference like this, is not to attend the presentations, but to meet and network with fellow developers. To this end, as well as providing free food and drink (beer!) at the end of each day, the Scotch organizers hosted a prize draw. All delegates were asked to place their business cards in a hat, and they were drawn out in turn to find the winners.
Each day's prizes started out very sensible and often valuable, such as licences for CF8 standard, Railo and one year's free hosting courtesy of Firstserv Limited. The prizes then became bottles of Scottish Whiskey, books and T-Shirts. As if by comic design, Tim Buntel of Adobe won a Railo T-Shirt, Gert Franz of Railo won a CF8 T-Shirt and Mark Drew, creator of CFEclipse, won a Dreamweaver book! The prizes then turned from the sublime to the ridiculous as various oddly names sweets, 3 cm high bottles of Whiskey and an assortment of fruits where handed out. This is how I ended up walking around the streets of Edinburgh holding a rather large pineapple!
The purpose of these joke prizes, not to mention the free beer, was, of course, to get people into a relaxed and social mood, which was then continued in the local bars of Edinburgh. Indeed, almost a third of the delegates were out on the town until closing time. This created a very friendly and relaxed atmosphere for the conference, exemplified by Tim Buntel and Gert Franz wearing each other's company branded T-Shirts. After all, I think it's very unlikely one will ever see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs doing such a thing!
Conclusion
Overall, I found Scotch to be a very rewarding experience. It was great to meet fellow CFML/Flex developers and discuss the latest treads in software engineering. The presentations provided a broad range of current technological developments which left all delegates excited with the prospect of using the new features of the latest CFML engines and the wonderful user interface provided by Flex. The organizers and venue operators provided excellent facilities and gave the conference a real character of it own.
Although CFML comes second in popularity to the likes of Java and .Net, it is still the leading technology for rapid web application development. In contrast to recent accusations of being a "Dead Language", I see a bright future for CFML and the increasing numbers of its practitioners in the UK and the world.
David Beale is a Senior ColdFusion Developer and Internet Technologies Guru, working in the South of England, UK. He is passionate about Internet software development, promoting; code correctness, web standards, usability and accessibility. You can find him blogging at http://www.BealeARTS.co.uk.