Day 1

Keynote

The keynote started with another great animation from Nectarine. After all the MM/Adobe merger banter, Mike Chambers did a sweet demo of flex builder where he created a fully skinned mp3 player in about 5 minutes. He then went on to demo running it as a stand alone desktop app using Apollo. Flex builder is built on top of eclipse and provides a full wysiwyg interface for building flex apps...very nice. I still don't fully understand the full scope of what apollo's trying to achieve, but i think the general idea is trying to take the existing RIA experience offline. From the sounds of it, it's all still very much on the drawing board and no kind of deadline has been set for it's release.

There was also a demonstation of Abobe live cycle at some stage, though it's all kinda blurry now. Live cycle is basically used for form processing. It would for example allow you to take you online form process and take it offline in the PDF form. You could fill out the pdf offline and then repopulate the online form when you reconnect. I'm sure there's more to it than that, but it looks interesting and well worth having a look at in more detail.

Swag

The freebies this year were second to none. Adobe was giving away free webcams, MS was giving away full licences of Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 Standard and that's not to mention all the cool stuff in the now famous bag of swag. I'm a little disappointed there was no stubby cooler in there though. :)

 
Sessions

Data Visualisation in Flex
(James Talbot, from Boston USA)

James demonstrated techniques for charting in flex. Using state transitions you can drill down into chart nodes, showing sub charts, data grids, etc. This is going to make the charting experience much more intuitive for the end user and it seems easier to build using mxml. Flex charting components come as an additional plugin to the standard SDK.

The minefield of CSS based web design
(Pete Ottery, Sydney)

Pete showed basic best practices for CSS. Most of it was stuff we’re already doing, but it’s good to know we’re on the right track. He demoed a cool technique using one image for all the css. It showes a portion of the image by positioning it as a css background  image.  The benefit of this is reducing the number of hit’s on the server, but maybe it’s not such a big deal since most of the time the images are cached on the client anyway. There’s also an issue if the user changes the font size. It can start to display other portions of the image.

Advanced Mail Management in CF
(Lucas Sherwood, Sydney)

Lucas showed a technique for managing mail using a db to store the mail to be queuing. The basic idea is to process it using a scheduled task in order to not flood the smtp mail server. By disabling mail spooling it also allows you to get run time feedback from the mail server and either drop the mail from the queue and process it at a later time using a priority or timestamp set in the db. Another good idea he had was to assign each email a unique id and append it to the message body. That way you can track when messages are replied to or bounced. You could also append the id to any links you have in the email body to track where the clicks are coming from.  For html you can use an embedded image served up by cfcontent. i.e.<img src="blah.cfm?messageid=blah" />  and add any tracking processing you like to the cfm page.  To render email content he used templates with [keys] that could be parsed out at run time and replaced by variable data. This seems like a pretty slow way of doing it. It would be much quicker to pass the variable data into a specific renderer method in your cfc. It is mixing M with V a bit, but the rules are meant to be broken sometimes.

Tips and Tricks and Good Practices for Flash Media Server 2.0
(Graeme Bull, Vancouver Canada)

I thought this was supposed to be an intro to flash media server, but it was more of a best practices session for those people that are already doing it. It was way over my head, but I did start to understand a little bit about how it works.

Ruby on Rails: Beyond the Hype
(Tim Lucas, Sydney)

Tim did an awesome job of explaining a totally new subject matter in an easy to understand and entertaining way. 10 points for presentation Tim. Ok, so now I know what Ruby on Rails is. Ruby is a language and Rails is a development framework. The Ruby syntax seems a little strange to me, but still quite powerful and Rails is an uber code generator. The development methodology also seemed a little odd. Beans are somehow linked to the db table schema at run time in order to determine their properties. The properties aren't actually stored in the code. Rather than actually writing code you basically run command line scripts to generate all the code for you. It's an MVC architecture which is good and it also provides a completely integrated test bed right inside the framework. It also provides features for generating basic CRUD admin forms for your basic data object types too. Very cool, but I don't think I'm ready to give up on Cold Fusion just yet.  It looks like it would be ok for simple stuff, but not too sure how it would handle any sort of complexity.

 
Day 2

Keynote

The keynote animation was pretty funny again. Mark Blair talked a bit about how well CF is doing down under and was followed by Dean Harmon, an engineer with the CF development team.

Dean talked a bit about the upcoming ‘scorpio mystic’ release of cold fusion and a bit of stuff on CF / Flex integration. Flex can use HTTP, SOAP and AMF to talk to coldfusion on the backend. The flex builder will probably cost around $1000, the SDK is free (as I’ve probably mentioned), there is a coldfusion integration extension and a charting extension to the core SDK and there was no mention of the pricing on FES (Flex Enterprise Services). The deployment model for Flex 2 has changed so that rather than running it all on the server, the SDK can be used on the development machine to create the SWF application and then deployed to the server for production. FES is only required if you want to do data pushing applications like live chat, etc. However, it was also mentioned that the CF event gateways could also be used to do data push. Flex 2.0 also uses Action Script 3.0 and is only compatible with the upcoming flash player 8.5. Flex builder has cool tag insight, inline debugging and can run on eclipse or as a stand alone application. Another cool thing he mentioned was that the new version of CF will automatically translate between AS value objects and cold fusion data components maintaining the correct typing and case. CF and Flex will be tightly integrated and will play nicely together now as well. And CF ‘mystic’ will use java 1.5 … very cool.

Dean and Rob Rohan also demoed some of the new features that are going to be built into eclipse, including RDS and other cool and exciting things. CFeclipse will enable you to include different dictionaries for different language versions and will also include a toolbar similar to that of cf studio / homesite with all the handy html elements and cf tags. That’s one of the things I really missed about cfstudio .. glad to see it back. Dean demoed some eclipse wizards built into the RDS plugin that will enable to you auto create DAO’s and Bean based on the DB schema…very handy and also brie