CFUNITED Express Chicago: A Taste

by Dana Tierney, MAX Correspondant

"It's the best two-day event I ever attended," quipped a CFUnited Express participant when TeraTech organizers asked for feedback on the Sunday-only event.

The sessions did all mostly consist of highlights and a handout for later. The speakers were highly prepared and the slides bristled with URLs, conveying the dizzying array of new features in the ColdFusion 8 release while providing the references to build on them later.

"Just the fact that CFHTTP does secure sessions is going to make my life like a million times easier," exclaimed Angie McGregor, a webmaster at UCLA. She was referring to one of the 75-odd Hidden Gems in CF8 Charlie Arehart detailed in his second presentation of the day. Someone else expressed awe at the new CFPRESENTATION tag, which creates an Acrobat Connect on the fly, which can then be saved to disk and sent to others, who need not have ColdFusion to view it.

Adam Howitt joined the discussion fresh from a presentation on how Amazon Web Services saved his marriage, decluttered his closets, gave his business redundancy and saved him money to boot. What if there was a directory that listed consultants by tag expertise?

The session was fertile in ideas, and ideas were the theme of host Michael Smith's presentation, Using your Whole Brain for Developers. He correctly predicted that the audience would contain a significant number of musicians, and expanded on creative and out-of-the-box thinking as a way to add value to applications. "If you are doing something that's very rote and routine, that's not a good sign," he said, noting that TeraTech promotes play among its employees as a way to foster innovation. "It's not just can you move information around... it's can you see the big picture in there?" Innovation and improving processes require more than just technical prowess, he added, because sometimes nobody wants to use an application that is technically beautiful but not user-friendly. The interface is important.

In keeping with this whole-brain theme, the session was held at the beautiful Ascend Training facility in Chicago's stunning Fine Arts Building, up a manned elevator anf down a hall of soaring ceilings and dark panelled woodwork, overlooking a roof patio. Even the matronly waitress at lunch in the coffeeshop downstairs had gotten the memo. "So you're press huh," she said comfortably, noting my badge. "Well, my name is Maggie," she said when I nodded. Later, she asked my how my spinach pie was. I told her it was great. "In that case," she said smiling broadly, "my name is Mary."

Like the sessions themselves, this is a taste for now, and there will be more information later. Raymond Camden made a great presentation on Ajax and CF8. John Farrar presented his COOP project and explained how it promotes dehydrate page processing, by taking DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) to the next level. Shlomy Gantz explained PDFs and the new capabilities that ColdFusion 8 can give them. Charlie Arehart gave a guided tour of the ColdFusion Administrator.

More to come later --same bat time, same bat channel.

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