cf.Objective Day 1

Keynote

Jason Delmore delivered the keynote the really gave a good overview of the philosophy around Scorpio. Adam Lehman was evidently worried about Jason’s lack of “marketingese” but I really liked him admitting that the use cases for things like <cfpresentation> and <cfreport> were hard to find.

New confirmed developments include <cfthread> and <cffeed>.

I was a little annoyed with Jason’s response to my question. I asked “Is the Beta feature complete?” He gave me a hard time and cited the NDA. I could have just asked. “If I’m on the beta will you say anything new?” But I was trying to be nice.

Mark Mandel: Developing Applications with Transfer ORM

This was basically a good introduction to using Transfer. Mark Mandel did a really good job speaking. What I can’t figure out is the main difference between Transfer and Reactor. I’m not saying there isn’t one. I just wonder if there is anything that one does that the other doesn’t do or vice versa.

If only I had access to Mark Mandel and ask him without being an ass about it. (Remember to ask before any receptions or parties tonight.)

Dean Saxe: Application Security and Compliance

Dean Saxe‘s presentation on security looked really promising. This is why I signed up for it. What I heard of it was good. However Sean’s twitters about David Keith’s session lured me out.

David Keith: Adobe.com

This was a great opportunity to find out how Adobe runs their site. They use a heavily tiered environment on both the hardware and application side. It validated what we do at Wharton a lot, which I was happy about.

They were also upfont about their weaknesses which was also very helpful. They talked about their single point of failure at the database level, and problems with colliding scheduled tasks.

Lunch

Sean Corfield: AJAX Integration With Scorpio!

Sean Corfield gave this talk despite the fact that he not an Adobe employee (and despite rumors that he was not in fact the real Sean Corfield.)

Interesting little trivia bit – AJAX came out of advancements cause by Outlook Web Access.

Cool features:

• CFC Proxies in JavaScript, automatically
• Yahoo UI controls
• Databinding across controls
• Rich Text textarea’s
• Auto Suggests

New Tags:

• <cflayout>
• <cftooltip>

At this point in the presentation Mark Drew started showing me his Project Unity stuff. Since I’ve seen a lot of what Sean was doing in the Beta, I paid attention to Mark Drew instead.

Adam Lehman: Scorpio: Working with .NET and Microsoft Exchange

Called the audible twice and decided to stay with what brought me to CF in the first place: Microsoft Exchange.

Adam spelled out the different ways that you can currently interact with .Net. Things like webservices, and various other types of wrappers. ColdFusion 8 will allow you to call .Net assemblies like CFC’s or Java classes. Additionally it will perform better than all the other wrapper methods. On the backend ColdFusion creates proxies, much like webservices use skeleton objects on the backend.

He then went on to the Exchange technologies. Claim: ColdFusion Exchange tags can do anything that the Outlook Client can. Eh, not really, but it can do everything that you would want to build an application around. You can manipulate contacts, appointments, mail items, and tasks. You can’t interact with say the Out Of Office message. “You can do anything to the objects CF exposes that you can do in Outlook” would be more accurate.

Interesting Ideas:

• .Net interaction will allow CF to extend Sharepoint.
• .Net interaction will allow CF to interact with IIS

Mark Drew: The CFEclipse Project

Mark Drew confirmed that he was never on the show 24. He then took as on an overview of the CFEclipse project.

Most of the people here are using CFEclipse, so he powered through the existing features. He spent a fair amount of time showing off Snippets which definitely are powerful.

Then he revealed Project Unity. Which I’m pretty sure is the killer application for CFEclpise. It’s a CFFramework inspector that allows developers to basically interact with Frameworks through a variety of methods. One method looks a lot like the Component Explorer, but it also allows snippet like inserts of calls to Framework components.

What’s really cool about it is that it understands the frameworks. So if you inspect a Fusebox project you can inspect individual circuits. If you inspect a Reactor project you can wire together relationships. In addition to viewing them, you can also edit them through a wizrd view that writes the code for you.

Finally it’s full extensible, so if you have a framework, you can write your own XML to make it work with the CFframework explorer.

The key question is: When will it be released?

I figure I’ll blog about the Birds of a Feather session after than tonight.