Devcon 2002: Solidifying the MX Line

By Judith Dinowitz and Tobe Goldfinger

There was a huge sense of excitement this year going into Devcon. You could sense it on the lists at House of Fusion and in other forums. The excitement continued to build well into the Devcon and lasted through the end.

Was the excitement justified? Well, while we didn’t get any major revelations at the conference, this year’s Devcon left us with two major impressions: that Macromedia is on solid ground with ColdFusion, and that ColdFusion is now only part of a larger "MX" world that is waiting to be explored by CF programmers.

By this conference, Macromedia has accomplished what they promised us at previous conferences. They have successfully migrated ColdFusion to the J2EE world, including the creation of the special editions of CFMX for J2EE platforms (JRun, IBM Websphere, Sun ONE, and soon BEA Weblogic). This provides the ColdFusion development community with tremendous integration opportunities in the Java world, as well as a clear migration path for projects that would benefit from increased scalability and robustness in the infrastructure. We came away from the conference energized, and convinced that Macromedia is on the right track with ColdFusion and the other MX tools.

It wasn’t just Macromedia building excitement at the Devcon. The community was out there in force as well, with two independent events: CF_Underground on Sunday, October 27, and the Community Suite running throughout the conference. (Both will be covered in a separate article, to be published in the near future.) There was a sense at this conference that Macromedia and the community are becoming partners in this great enterprise we call ColdFusion.

This Devcon was the first to have a mixed audience, composed of people from both the designer and developer worlds. Attendance was estimated at roughly 2,300 to 2,500 people, with a seemingly high percentage of ColdFusion developers. The program consisted of seven tracks. There were plenty of sessions for designers and users of Dreamweaver and Flash tools to learn about ColdFusion, and sessions that focused on design tools for those who were ColdFusion developers. ColdFusion sessions mainly emphasized the cool new features of CFMX, such as CFCs, XML handling, and Flash Remoting. There was also major coverage for Macromedia’s hot issues these days: accessibility, usability, e-learning and development for devices. These are all areas in which Macromedia is leading the industry.

As an added bonus, Macromedia set up a Community Connection in the exhibit area, with computers connected to the Net with easy access to email, and occasional community programming. This was a welcome addition to the conference.

The Two Keys: Experience and Cross-Pollination

The first is Macromedia’s vision going forward, which can be summed up in the phrase: "It’s All About the Experience."

Rob Burgess, CEO of Macromedia, outlined this vision in the first general session. He explained that we are shifting from a service-based economy (where consumers pay for a specific specialized service) to an experience-based economy (where consumers pay for an “experience.”) The example he gave was coffee, which started out as a commodity that was traded or grown on the farm (commodity-based economy), became a good that is sold in a supermarket (goods-based economy), then became a service paid for at a diner or restaurant (service-based economy) and has now become an "experience" at Starbucks.

How does this relate to the Web and the economy we’re moving into? On the Web or off of it, "a bad experience lasts a long time." On the other hand, if you give people a good experience, you can really hang on to your customers. So the end-user experience matters. And Macromedia wants you to know that the tools they sell can help you create that good Web experience for your customers.

The second message that came out of Devcon is that with the release of MX, Macromedia feels very strongly about the integration of their products. The conference really reflected the idea that Macromedia would like to cross-pollinate their developer communities.

(You can find out more about the keynotes in Mike Chambers’ blog, http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/categories/devcon/2002/10/28.html#a323.)

One other message we took from this conference: ColdFusion developers should start getting into Dreamweaver MX. Ultimately, Dreamweaver will be the IDE for ColdFusion development, so it's not too soon to start using it, getting comfortable with it, and learning to take advantage of its many powerful features.

One thing that created quite a buzz were the sneak peeks given to a new product that hasn't launched yet. People who were willing to sign an NDA were treated to private sessions highlighting this product.

Technology was in use heavily at the conference to bring highlights to people who couldn’t be there, through blogs and video blogs. Macromedia had their people going through the conference with wireless webcams, composing video blogs on the spot. Some places to look for at-the-scene coverage of the conference:

Sean Corfield: http://www.corfield.org/blog
Mike Chambers: http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/
Vernon Viehe: http://vvmx.blogspot.com
Jeremy Allaire: http://radio.weblogs.com/0113297/
Brandon Hall: http://www.waxpraxis.org/
Matt Brown: http://radio.weblogs.com/0106884/
John Dowdell: http://jdmx.blogspot.com/
A listing of the Video Blogs that were done: http://bilbo.macromedia.com/devconblog/blogitems.cfm

Technology also played a big part at the Community Suite, which was broadcasting presentations by Webcam over a Flash Communications Server set up by a community member in the Netherlands. This experiment in Flashcomm was quite successful. You can find out more about this in our future article on the Community Suite.

The conference also had a substantial exhibit fair, full of interesting products, especially as the fair was not just supporting ColdFusion development but all the MX technologies.

In all, this conference did great things for Macromedia’s image, in portraying that they are solidly behind ColdFusion and willing to work with the developer community. We hope to see you all next year at Devcon, which will take place in San Diego on September 7 – 10.

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