Last week I went to Web Direc­tions South in Syd­ney – a con­fer­ence that I have been to, every year, since it was Web Essen­tials in 2005. This year, how­ever, was a bit dif­fer­ent: I was at the con­fer­ence to help Adobe on their expo stand. Dave said I was the Cold­Fu­sion Booth Babe. Minus the bikini, of course…

Some peo­ple were sur­prised to see me there – one per­son even asked (before­hand) if I thought that it might harm my cred­i­bil­ity. But in actual fact, I wasn’t intend­ing to go this year, and the idea of pro­mot­ing the just-released Cold­Fu­sion 9 and the soon-to-be-released Cold­Fu­sion Builder to gen­eral web devel­op­ers was a pretty inter­est­ing prospect. I was also pretty happy to be there with all my Perth peeps for the gen­eral shenani­gans that tra­di­tion­ally goes on at Web Direc­tions – the social aspect is what keeps us all com­ing back, year after year.

Adobe’s booth was not in a great area, once again – down the cor­ri­dor in front of the entrance to the two smaller speaker rooms. There’s just not as many peo­ple who came down there. On the plus side it was a lot qui­eter than in the main expo area, so it was eas­ier to talk to the peo­ple who did come along – but I think that we could have spo­ken to a lot more peo­ple in the main area.

On the first day, I wore my “Cold­Fu­sion pixel dude with beer throw­ing horns” t-shirt and was all pre­pared to show off some of the new fea­tures — but mostly what peo­ple wanted to know about was yesterday’s announce­ment from the MAX con­fer­ence in Las Vegas that Flash CS5 would be able to export to an iPhone native for­mat (the only thing we could do was send peo­ple to the Labs page so they can sign up for the beta com­ing later this year). I showed a hand­ful of peo­ple how easy CF made it to do things like editable grids, Google maps, and rich text edi­tors, and also talked quite a bit about the ORM stuff. And showed off Cold­Fu­sion Builder a lit­tle, even though I’m not using it on a day-to-day basis.

The sec­ond day Andrew Muller joined Andrew Larkin and myself to do some Flex and Flash Cat­a­lyst demos – much sex­ier look­ing stuff, from a demon­stra­tion point of view – and while he got a few inter­ested peeps the quiet­ness of the area really played against us. Almost every­one who wanted to see some­thing to do with Cold­Fu­sion had done it the first day, how­ever, so I was pretty quiet.

Over­all I think there was value in being there – so many web devel­op­ers are sim­ply not aware that Cold­Fu­sion is out there and that there are peo­ple still using it – but there would have been even more value if Adobe’s stand was in the main expo area. And maybe if there were a cou­ple of Cold­Fu­sion posters and what not.

Per­haps things can be bet­ter for Edge of the Web?