Inte­grat­ing Java with CFMX, pre­sented by Daemon’s Bren­dan Sis­son, was an overview of the basics of using Java classes in CF code. Very inter­est­ing, par­tic­u­larly the zip func­tion­al­ity, I can see lots of uses for that. One of the exam­ples that Bren­dan used was Benoit Hediard’s ImageJ CFC. I’11 have to down­load and try it out, but so far I have not been impressed with the jpeg qual­ity or file size of native java image resiz­ing solu­tions when com­pared to our image­proc.

Next was one of the ses­sions I’d really been look­ing for­ward to — Sean Cor­field on Mach II. Sean did a great job of sanely explain­ing how, where and why Macro­me­dia are using Mach II and all the wildly digit ges­tic­u­lat­ing panic mer­chants on cftalk would really ben­e­fit from hear­ing it.

“Pro­duc­tis­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing appli­ca­tions built with MX” was Grant Straker talk­ing about the busi­ness expe­ri­ences he’s had mar­ket­ing Shado all around the world. That made a nice non-technical inter­lude before the Birds of a Feather ses­sion on design patterns…

…which made my head hurt. Actu­ally, it was inter­est­ing, espe­cially find­ing out that there are design pat­terns that describe what we do already a lot of the time, although the whole dis­cus­sion was a bit more abstract and the­o­ret­i­cal than I would have liked. It’s always good to immerse your­self in dis­cus­sions that are over your head any­way, learn­ing by osmo­sis actu­ally does work.

And of course, after a cou­ple of beers, the only log­i­cal choice for din­ner was another one of those awe­some kebabs. I’m sure my new mate Simon will agree that they are most excellent!

The weather was a bit dis­ap­point­ing — gray, rainy and mis­er­able all day. Prob­a­bly the only down­side to an oth­er­wise excel­lent day.