CF.Objective() 2011 Notes from Day 1
posted under category: ColdFusion on May 22, 2011 by Nathan
Well it's been a week since CF.Objective() ended, I thought I would share my notes on the various sessions I attended.
There was the keynote.
I don't really have any notes on it except it was good and I wish it could have gone longer.
First session, Progressive Enhancement with Barney Boisvert
Slides
Somehow I was expecting something different. Stick with me here. The way Barney presented progressive enhancement versus graceful degradation was surprising. It's hard to explain, but he had the whole room on the edge of their seats with an escalator metaphor. His delivery was great and the content was perfect for the current state of web development (HTMl5, CSS3, javascript frameworks). The overall idea is that you should make your web applications work on the most minimal browsers, then progressively enhance the experience for better browsers. Hoping your application degrades gracefully isn't good enough. Great session. Really made me think.
Next, ORM Zen with Marc Esher
Slides
Marc has a really good presence on stage, and the way he presents and speaks somehow creates interest in every word. What came out this time was a very practical, very real-life discussion on making CF's Hibernate-based ORM work. There are a lot of finer points that I didn't know about, having only done one small ORM project in the past, so it was really helpful. Some of the takeaways I had were to turn off ORM sessions, always use transaction{}, always set the inverse property on a one-to-many join. I am going to hang on to his slide deck, as it's full of good insight.
After lunch, I went to ColdSpring 2.1 (alpha 1) - What's New and Improved with Mark Mandel
No slides
I gathered from the audience that this is the annual ColdSpring 2.0 talk. It's not vaporware, in case you were wondering, nobody said it was (certainly not me). The alpha release is coming as soon as Mark writes more documentation. I understand that, especially after seeing it in action, CS2.0 does a lot of new things. Mark's always fun to listen to, and he's crazy smart. Some of the new features include easier XML configuration, a pluggable architecture with xml namespaces, including one that will make AOP much easier to do. Annotation-based injection could make a debut for CS2.1. Thanks, Mark, we're all looking forward to it!
Here is Mark Mandel and Louis Majano, the authors of the top two dependency injection frameworks in ColdFusion, discussing how to borrow features from the other.
The final one of Friday was on Continuous Integration with Marc Esher again
Slides
Again, Marc is great to watch, always has well polished sessions. I don't know that I picked up a lot from this talk, but the slides were good. I don't do continuous integration, it's kind of tough in my corporate environment, but Marc is the second speaker I have heard mention how amazingly good Jenkins (formerly Hudson) is. Above that, I do Ant ("You can't avoid Ant any longer"), and I use MXUnit for unit tests ("No project ever started with 500 tests, they all start at zero, so it's always a good time to start"). The way Marc related Ant to CFML was brilliant. cfparam = property, cffunction = target, cfinclude = import & taskdef. Check his slides for the rest. It was a good talk, well done.
Here is Marc on stage.
Later that night were the lightning talks. I was up third, and I think only Ray was as nervous as I was, which made me feel ok for being nervous. The talks were surprisingly varied. The baseball card market, the philadelphia library, apps for coldfusion, brewing beer, love, CF server troubleshooting, motorcycles and much more. I think mine about client variables went pretty good, I had some good reactions from the crowd, and I'll get that content up here pretty soon.
That's the end of the first day. I'll have the next day up soon.