I want to take a quick few minutes and thank Bob Flynn and the rest of the team for putting on such a wonderful conference. I would have written this last night but, honestly, my brain was mush after driving home.
The entire thing was superbly organized, the facilities were absolutely top-notch, and the tracks were well-thought-out and nicely delivered. I took my brother up with me and put him through the intermediate ColdFusion track which was an introduction to Mach II taught by folks from Team Mach II. His feedback was very positive as well. While not specifically going to the conference for the Flex content, he was very impressed with the capabilities of Flex and came away with a lot of good ideas for his company.
If I had to pick a favorite session from each day, I’d have to say I enjoyed Mike Brunt’s talk on Clustering, Administering and Tuning ColdFusion and Aaron West’s talk on Integrating Air, ColdFusion and BlazeDS. Deserving very honorable mention in the ColdFusion track however is Adam Lehman’s talk on ColdFusion Application Security.
All in all it was a great conference. I got to catch up with several people I’ve met through previous conference circuits and meet face-to-face for the first time some more folks that I regularly see on the blog/twitter scene. Of course the price absolutely couldn’t be beat either.
Keep up the good work Bob and team. I’m already looking forward to next year.
I just got my conference and hotel reservations created for the BFusion/BFlex event in Bloomington, IN Sep 6-7. If you don’t know about the event, it is 2 days of free (yes, you read that correctly) training sessions on Adobe ColdFusion and Flex.
Bloomington is between 4 and 5 hours’ drive from my house so I’m just going to drive up rather than fly and deal with all that. The drive will give me a chance to catch up on a bunch of podcasts I’ve not listened to yet.
The 615Flex group is hosting a meeting tonight featuring Scot Clausing giving a presentation about Cairngorm. For those that might not be familiar, Cairngorm is a “micro-architecture” used for building robust Flex applications. We had a (short) discussion on the email list regarding what barriers we as individuals have to building Flex apps the “Cairngorm way”.
My biggest challenge at the moment is just finding enough time to stay up to speed on everything (some might call it an excuse, but hey, I have to sleep sometime). My primary bread-winning skillset at the moment is ColdFusion development. Adobe released ColdFusion 8 a few months ago and, while I’ve had it running on my Macbook Pro for development since it shipped, my clients are only now starting to migrate to the new version. That translates into considerable amounts of time spent trying to figure out not only how to use the new features of CF8, but WHEN to use those new features.
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Last night Ben Forta made quick stop in Nashville to demo Flex 3 and AIR to the Nashville Area (Ben has posted a PDF of his slides at Flex.org). The event was sponsored primary by 615Flex (the Flex user group in Nashville). I didn’t hear the final count of how many folks attended, but my guess is somewhere between 60 and 70 people were there.
Ben mentioned right at the top of the meeting that there wasn’t really any new stuff left to show off with Flex 3 since it had been in public alpha and beta for so long. Nevertheless, he did demo some things that I’ve not really had a chance to play with in Flex. I’ve not really jumped on the whole AIR bandwagon yet, but after last night’s demo, I definitely have a couple of ideas of how an AIR application could help some of my clients.
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You ever had one of those ‘light-bulb’ moments? I love when those come along because it usually means that something ‘clicks’ that I’ve been noodling on. Today was one of those days.
The last 3 weeks, I have been working on converting a small content management application from ’spaghetti code’ to a Mach II application. The things that I’ve learned just in that endeavor are amazing. As pretty much any developer will tell you, there’s always a way that something could have been done “better”. But I’ve decided that I really don’t want to build any more applications without some sort of framework.
One of the concepts I’ve been interested in lately is the concept of using a service layer in your application. The idea sounds great and reasonable on paper, but I’ve found it hard to figure out exactly how best to do that when coding–until now. The concept really clicked home with me when I began creating a *very* small Flex application for one of the more intricate CRUD functions in the aforementioned application. I figured out that I had been thinking of the service layer at the wrong point in the “stack”. For some reason I had in my head that your service layer was actually one step higher in your application stack than your controllers. Obviously that’s not the case as I found out when I started trying to figure out how to leverage the code I had written for the Mach II app to be reused for the Flex app.
Anyway, the lightbulb went off and it dawned on me that my Mach II controllers should be talking to the service layer AND the controller functions in my Flex app could talk to the same service components without worrying about issues arising from framework specific code (as they would the way I have things coded now).
Now I have to go back and do a bit of refactoring, but even that will be easier because the application is now built with Mach II. At least I learned something this week…
