Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

If you are heading to London on the 24th and 25th of May for the awesome Scotch on the Rocks conference you might also want to know that for the rest of the week there will be a post conference training in the Coldbox Framework.

Not only is ColdBox an awesome framework, but the training will be done by the framework's author, Luis Majano! This is a great opportunity to get up to speed and even become an expert on the framework (I have seen Luis train and this really is a fantastic opportunity!)

Not only can you sign up for this training, but after a bit of arm twisting and smooth talking, I have managed to get an awesome discount for you to sign up for this class. Just follow the following link to get your discount! http://coldbox-uk.eventbrite.com/?discount=mdUKLives

No, no need to thank me, just sign up and expand your framework knowledge!

With the upcoming conferences you have the great opportunity to meet the guys from Railo at a conference near you!

So who is going to be where?

CF.Objective(), Minneapolis - April, 22-24 2010

As a Gold sponsor we will have a booth where Mark Drew and Gert Franz will be present most of the time. Sean Corfield and Peter Bell are presenting some topics.

WebDU, Sydney - Australia - May, 6-7 2010

In Sydney Australia Peter Bell is going to present and represent Railo with some talks. We try to be back as sponsors again next year.

Scotch on the Rocks, London - England - May, 24-25 2010

At Scotch on the Rocks as a Gold sponsor we will have a booth as well. Mark Drew, Peter Bell and Gert Franz will be hosting it.

In addition you will be able to meet Michael Offner the main architect behind the Open Source engine as well as Andrea Campolonghi the author of the AJAX extensions in Railo.

Mark Drew and Gert Franz will have two presentations about Railo (and Railo 4.0) and Peter will cover a project management topic.

CF United - Washington - July, 28-31st, 2010

This year we will return to the Landsdowne Resort in Washington as a silver sponsor, where this year's CFUnited will take place.
We will have a booth in the sponsor area and a couple of talks with Gert Franz and Sean Corfield.
Mark Drew shall also be attending.

We will blog about out appearances later this year soon.

A few people have asked me to post my presentations, and I should have done so anyway straight after the conferences, but of course, since I did three presentations + a Mystery Theatre at cfobjective and four presentations at Scotch on the Road I have been falling behind normal work and blog postings.

So, here for your delectation are all the presentations for you to download... (apart from the Mystery Theatre 3000 since that has a naughty picture in it)

• Atomic Reactor: or how I stopped worrying and love the ORM
• ColdSpring: Better Living through configuration
• Which Framework? ColdBox, Mach-ii and Model Glue compared
• Whats Railo 3.1 Open Source?
• Railo in the Cloud
• ModelGlue and You

I just finished presenting my "Better living through configuration" presentation at A Wee Dram of Scotch in London. Its a great presentation so far with Adam Lehman and Claude from Adobe kicking off the proceedings and showing the (possible) Hibernate features in Centaur (or the "Eagerly Awaited next version of ColdFusion"). 

The rest of the day should be really interesting, and currently Peter Bell is telling us about RAD OO.

This is the smallest conference I have been to, and I think its great, there are only about 70 people in the same room and its only one day... a great way to really meet other developers (rather than the immense scale of other conferences)

If the wireless picks up, I shall try and post some more today, if not I shall give you a breakdown (after the hangover ) tomorrow!

In the meantime, here is my presentation and code for you to play with!

Coming up this Thursday 25th of September, the "a Wee Dram of Scotch" one day conference is taking place in London.

This is a great replacement to the cancelled CFDevCon that was meant to be happening over in Brighton, but alas didn't for various reasons. Which brings to mind whether we should have more conferences like this, one day, very cheap (at £10 for entry its surely the cheapest conference there is!) but with still some awesome speakers such as Sean Corfield, Peter Bell and Mike Brunt, not to mention Adam Lehman from Adobe doing the keynote!

So what do you think? Should there be more one day conferences? Would you like your CFUG to cover this instead? More cheap (or free) training in your locality?

Also, how would we expand the use of CF? Is this a good medium for this?

Would love to hear people's opinions on this.

For those of you who attended my FreshAir presentation at Scotch on the Rocks, firstly, an apology about the wireless. My presentation was going swimmingly until I hit a problem with the firewall that stopped "json" requests to twitter, which meant that you couldn't see the listing coming through! I have posted my code here for you to have a look at as well as the presentation itself so you can work your way through it. Let me know what you think! And I hope at least, problems notwithstanding, that you enjoyed the presentation and found it useful! Unzip the sample code and use Eclipse's/Aptana Studio's "Import... -> Existing Projects" feature to get it going. Attachments:

• FreshAir 2008 Presentation
• sotr_air sample code

As promised, I wanted to share my "ColdSpring: Better Living through Configuration" presentation materials. I am not including the source code, since its very simple and its covered in the presentation itself (and if you work through it, you will get a better understanding!) Attachment: ColdSpringScotch2008.pdf

Another year over at Scotch on the Rocks and what a hell of a conference it was! A great line up of speakers, and lots of kudos to Andy Allan for sorting out the travel and accommodation for us speakers. He even managed to pull in speakers all the way from the US, such as Scott Stroz, Joe Rinehart, Dough Hughes, Charlie Arehart, Sean "The Real one" Corfield and Matt Woodward. Not to mention speakers from afar a field as Australia! What a turn up! It has been a fantastic conference, with the great support of the Adobe ColdFusion team, and a bit thanks has to go to Kristen Schofield for upgrading the version of ColdFusion given away at the raffle from Standard to Enterprise! I could gush for hours about the Adobe team, and interestingly in the BOF a lot of feedback was given to the features that developers want in the "anticipated next version" of ColdFusion, this time, mainly about the language itself rather than other features of the server. Of course, I should not fail to mention the great time I had hanging out with Gert Franz from Railo. His fantastic teaming up with Luc (sorry, didnt catch the last name!) from Jboss.org to announce the Open Sourcing and teaming up of Railo and Red Hat. Now *THAT* is the way to open source a project! I think everyone at the conference will join me in thanking the organizers for such a wonderful event!

I finally made it to Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh. Next time, I take the train. The problem is this, in the UK we dont have identity cards and have no need to carry any form of identification... except when flying. So guess who forgot his passport at home this morning? Well, I made it home and then to the airport, just in time to miss the flight. The problem being that the transport from one terminal (south) to the other (north) in Gatwick decided to stop working... so the precious last few minutes that I had were lost. BA were kind enough to move me to a later flight, but heart attacks and sweat from running from one side of London to another then back down to Gatwick not wistanding, I managed to make it to Edinburgh. So, just so you know I am at the George hotel, room 210 if you want to catch up. Let the Scotch begin!

Tomorrow I shall be heading to Edinburgh for the fantastic Scotch on the Rocks conference. I know Andy Allan has been working really hard to get this conference going and last year's event was a real blast! This year I shall be presenting a couple of topics, ColdSpring: Better Living through Configuration and a new topic which is FreshAIR: Developing Adobe AIR applications using Aptana Studio. This makes a change to my usual CFEclipse presentations and I have been working hard on making them both informative and entertaining (no, no juggling... sorry!) I am really looking forward to meeting some old friends as well as new ones! So come and say hello!