Updates run with the latest on top

11:47 - We walked out because they started serving lunch. Thanks for reading!

11:45 - AM: Is there anyway to move someone with a “good track record” to get put on special servers. HMS: We used to just deploy on a new server out new customers. This was bad because you would get dev code along with uploading etc. This was a bad idea. We now will take it case by case and try to add you to a stable one. You can also call them and have them move a site if you feel that it is a problem. Support will never say know” - HMS2: “Just know that it is 1 person that causes it to go down and it is VERY hard to get that down to 0″

11:40 - Charlie Arehart just stepped up to the mic to ask “A lot of times you can save resources by stopping sessions for spiders and bots… Do you guys have a solution for this?” - Not really but we are monitoring better through the CF* monitoring

11:39 - Most of these questions are diecrlt about their services so not really relevant… sorry

11:30 - Taking questions from the audience

11:27 - Guy is giving a testimonial about them… I am thinking this is a plant from HMS.

11:20 - Wachovia Equity Partners has purchased them which gives them additional capital to be able to expand. This will also help expand the CF community because Wachovia will now have access to a CF platform through HMS for their other companies.

11:16 - They are talking about what they want in CF9… ok guys thanks… tell Adobe not us

11:12 - Catering to web hosting from a business standpoint (I think he is talking directly to Adobe but I am not sure)

11:11

• Hosting and Software-as-service are the future
• Better focus on developing features for multi-tenant usage
• Support programs tailored to web hosts
• Better business programs for web hosts create better opportunities for developers

11:09 - Ok I will continue because people are actually reading this

11:03 - Suddenly realizing that this didn’t need a live blog because they are just talking about junk.

11:02 - Security escorts Ray Camden to the show floor

11:01 - Ray Camden starts making monkey noises

10:55 - He says that this is not a commercial for HMS… never trust anyone that tells you they are not lying!

10:53 - Thinking this may be a sales presentation and not so much a keynote

10:45 - Lame Guns and Roses intro with a very akward letdown to the buildup

1. Micheal Smith must have forgotten that he was doing a keynote

2. CF Programmers do not drink Diet Coke

3. Apparently CF Programmers don’t drink juice for breakfast

4. Drink lots of caffeine to get through 5 sessions!

5. Kalamata Olives are AWESOME!

More to come! :-)

Latest updates at the top

That’s it! Great stuff released and on to some great sessions!

Forta: I would like to think there is :-) It was version 1 and we will probably have a version 2 sometime :-)

AM: Anything new in the roadmap for CFREPORT?

Last Questions

10:21 am

Forta:Talk to Kristen :-) It is on the radar

Applause from the audience

AM: Staging license?

Forta: No RTFs? ok we will write it down

AM: Word document generation?

10:23 am -Time for some more questions

Forta: We didn’t see a usecase for this

AM: Dynamic PDF form creation without LiveCycle

Forta: On the wishlist but not promising

AM: iCal/vCal type features?

Forta: ::hesitant:: um well that might go under “ColdFusion Developer Experience”… Adam: SO yeah see you at Max :-)

AM: Tooling for CF: MindMap etc.

Forta: that is being looked into yes

AM: Caching support in general i.e. memcache

forta: Actually a great question. It should have been a function to begin with and will probably be done so that we can do it in cfscript

AM: Any plans to use cfqueryparam outside of cfquery

Forta: We always have plans to improve everything… nothing specific yet but we always have our ears open.

AM: Plans to improve server monitoring?

Forta: Nothing official yet

AM:What about official CF Admin training?

Forta: Nothing will be broken

AM: Will the THIS scope be kept?

Adam: one word… yes… that’s all I can say

AM: Multi server administration easier?

Forta: Do you want it to go up or down? Down? ok noted. There has been no talk… way too early

AM: Any idea on price?

Forta: This was a bar being set so that the group is made of up those that “have demonstrated an ability to work together and a committment to the CFML community”

AM: Who made up the CFML team?

Forta: Poll about who uses what for an IDE We see about 1/3 using eclipse, 1/3 dreamweaver, 1/3 something else. Some to Max to see about the “ColdFusion developer experience”

AM: What is the story with an official CF IDE?

Adam: Intent is to have the ability to do that but nothing solid yet

AM: Will we be able to upgrade Hibernate ourselves?

Forta: um well, we wish but for now we are still having some issues with the syntax

AM: If you can do components in CFSCRIPT does this mean you can do EVERYTHING in script?

Adam: It is still being developed and we can do some cool stuff with it… but still could axe it at anytime

Forta: It is still being supported and will probably be used but we reserve the right to change it in the future

Audience Member (AM): What are your plans for jRun

9:57 am - Floor is open to questions, will type the ones I can hear and are relevant.

Forta: Max will show much more so signup now!

Adam: This will ship sometime in 2009

Adam: that might be fixed and may make it in to make it fast

Someone asks about performance of this

9:49 am - Forta: What does this do to a query? It’s a gotcha so we have to bridge between the 2… objects to query opjects

Adam: CFG Files will be under the hood if you want access to it.

Adam: Automatic CFC creation based on a table in the database.

Adam: ORM is going to be integrated into CF9 and powered 100% by Hibernate

Adam: New CF namespace for Flex. Put CFML-like tags directly into a flex app

Adam: CF9 is going to have better AIR Integration

Moving on to CF and Air

Adam: New Server.cfc - works like Application.cfc but runs at the start of the cf servers - OnServerStart/OnServerEnd. You can preload things instead of a first time a person hits.

Adam: Implicit getters and setters “Don’t know why it has taken us this long”

Adam: New method named init() - implicit constructors

<CFFINALLY>  - New try/catch functionality

<CFCONTINUE> - Kicks you back to the top of a loop but not out

9:27 - Adam: Explicit LOCAL scope keeps local variables local; can be used anywhere within the function

Adam: Would make porting functions from Javascript etc. easier

Adam: Things that may or may not be in CF9. Language Enhancement. CFSCRIPT for CFCs.

Forta: Newly formed “CFML Language Advisory Commitee”  This will help form CFML.

Forta: Big Announcement #2… there’s more!

Forta: Reason for it is to create momentum for not just ColdFusion but for RIA’s in general. This will help Flex hand in hand. This is all going to be similar to the Flex Builder for Education model.

Forta: Full version to students and academic use FOR FREE!; Long time coming! Hoped to have had it for today but it is coming VERY soon.

Forta: Problem: Growing the ColdFusion Base: Lack of Developers is a problem. Good news for devs, bad for corporate

Forta: Work on Centaur (CF9) has already begun. Advancing CFML, improved integration story, improved developer experience (CF IDE?!?!?!?!?)

Forta: CF Open Process Initiative released: Public Bug Database, Public enhancement request system. Customer Advisory Boards: Community Leaders, Focused committees

Forta: 8.0.1 released early 2008 and allowed us to update 3rd party stuff

Forta: CF8 shipped a year ago. Adobe is strict about numbers due to shareholder info. Outgoing CEO spilled some numbers so we can now say that sales are doing VERY well.

Blank screen is up and they joke about this is what happens when you use something other then CF :-)

Forta: Keynotes are usually us talking at you… this year is going to be different. We want you to interact us.

Forta: CFUNITED is where we make the big announcements and this year will be no exception. I’m doing all the highlevel talks and Adam is doing the tech stuff.

9:00 - After 30 minutes of nothing from Micheal Smith Forta is taking the stage

Ways to helps make better code (Thrown out from the audience) -

• wow Ray Camden really IS tall and skinny
• ::Still wondering where this is going::
• Prototyping
• Coding Standards - Who actually uses them? about 50%
• OK… Mark Drew and I both agree that Micheal Smith did not preparing anything
• refactoring code
• Code Reuse
• Database: Indexing and proper data structures.
• Access makes people laugh
• Profiling your code and optimization piece by piece - Don’t waste your time on milliseconds, look for SQL with seconds.
• Monitoring (I think that someone from Fusion reactor just threw that one out)
• SOURCE CONTROL!!!!!
• Frameworks = Filing Cabinet / Spaghetti = Messy desk!
• Documentation
• Code review helps to have standards and the “hit by a bus” scenario.
• Accessibility,
• Usability Testing,
• Code Reviews - These are all crucial.

Micheal Smith is on the stage “There is a healthcare crisis in software programming, we encourage you to learn how to fix them this week”

8:31 - Here we go!

8:19 - In the hall and waiting for the keynote to start

7:56 - Eating breakfast and getting ready to get in to the keynote.

Refresh this page for updates.

So I am all ready to get out of here for CFUNITED 2008! Due to some family obligations I am only going to sessions on Wednesday/Thursday but I am still super excited!

So I posed an idea on Twitter that we should all post our pictures so that we REALLY know what a person looks  like and not some stylized avatar… so without further ado here is a photo I just took of myself…

Look for me and say “Hey J.J. What’s up man!” I may look at you and say “Hey….. dooood” and might now know you from Adam but oh well I will try my best!

Schedule

Here is my schedule so let me know if you are in a session with me and we can hang out…
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Start     End     Speaker     Session     Track

8:30AM     9:00AM     Michael Smith     TeraTech Keynote

9:00AM     10:30AM     Ben Forta     Adobe Keynote Presentation

11:00AM     12:00PM     Peter Bell     RAD OO

12:00PM     1:30PM         Lunch

1:30PM     2:30PM     Mark Drew     Coldspring: Better living through configuration

2:45PM     3:45PM     Simon Horwith     CF Software Architecture For Web 2.0

4:00PM     5:00PM     Selene Bainum     Report Queries with SQL Server

6:30PM     8:30PM         Networking Event

8:30PM     9:30PM     Nat Papovich     The Secret Club of Remote workers and Telecommuters, a.k.a. SCRAT

Thursday, June 19, 2008
Start     End     Speaker     Session     Track

8:15AM     9:15AM     John Farrar     jQuery/CF Integration

9:30AM     10:30AM     Nate Nelson     Database Design: Avoiding mainentance and performance headaches

10:45AM     12:00PM     Lou Honick     HostMySite Keynote Presentation

12:00PM     1:30PM         Lunch

1:30PM     2:30PM     Adam Lehman, Nate Nelson, Jeremy Kadlec     End to End Performance Tuning

2:45PM     3:45PM     Pete Freitag     Writing Secure CFML

4:00PM     5:00PM     Marc Esher     Automating the build/deployment process with ANT

That’s about it… oh I will be taking lots of Video with my Flip and posting those throughout the week.

So I have been very fortunate (or unfortunate at times) to have dedicated servers and rackspace for most of my CF projects over the last 8 years. I have had a couple of people ask for my recommendations for CF Hosting and I really have no idea who to recommend. I hear blazing wonderful reviews about hostmysite.com and then I hear that they are down all the time and have crappy service from someone else whom I respect greatly.

So who do you use for shared hosting? VPS Hosting? et al.

The guys at ColdFusionWeekly announced today that they are throwing in the towel on the weekly podcast. I don’t really blame them since I can only imagine putting together something like that week in and week out has GOT to be time consuming. I know I will miss my [semi] weekly fix.

But just as the curtain was drawn on CFweekly it was quickly risen on Brian Meloche’s CFconversations.

I just got done listening to the first installement and I am impressed. Yes it isn’t quite as polished as CFPodcast and ColdFusionWeekly became over the years but I think it has a good start. It was in the TWIT format which I think gives to a very lively format and makes things fresh. Because you can pull in different people from week to week it will keep things from getting stale.

Nashville’s own Aaron West was one of the contributors so that was mildly exiciting :-)

So go on over and check it out and add it to your iTunes!

Recorded with a Flip Camera

Just got me one of These.

Expect some Video blogging from CFUNITED 2008!

So I figured I would add to the frenzy…

What are you looking forward to most?

Just meeting the people that I have read and admired over the years. It will also be nice to put a face with a name.

Which speaker will most likely end up on your camera?

Um, Mark Drew… but only because I think he looks like the Ace of Cakes guy (side note: Their website IS in CF so that makes me wonder if Mark has a side life as a celebrity baker!)

What do you plan to do outside conference time? (Clubbing/Bar Hopping, DC Tour, DC dinner cruise, Museum, Fine dining, Live Band shows, etc.)

I am staying with my friend David Steinberg while I am there so we will be hanging out in the off-hours

Fill in the blank: I will mainly be around the ______ booth.

I will treat all booths with equality!

Do you have a new project you are working on and will reveal it at CFUnited?

Yep… Got word that we can Open Source one of our commercial applications so that will be my big reveal.