I’m writ­ing this on the plane on the way back to Perth from Mel­bourne after two mind-blowing days of Cold­Fu­sion con­fer­ence good­ness at cf.Objective(ANZ). I’m sur­rounded by scream­ing babies, some­one behind me keeps kick­ing me in the back and the per­son in front put their seat back the sec­ond the seat­belt light went off, mean­ing my notebook’s key­board is pressed into my chest and typ­ing is next to impos­si­ble. And there’s only three hours left to go. *sigh*

Huge thanky­ous are due to the whole cf.Objective(ANZ) team for pulling it off – con­fer­ence hosts Jared Rypka-Hauer and Steven Hauer, unfor­tu­nately nei­ther of whom could make the trip down under; Jim Louis, meet­ing plan­ner extra­or­di­naire (“meet­ing plan­ner” being the US term for what we would refer to here as an “event man­ager”); and my fel­low Aus­tralian and New Zealand based com­mit­tee mem­bers Barry Beatty, Toby Tremayne, Andrew Mer­cer, Kai Koenig and espe­cially Mark Man­del, who did an unholy amount of work in the leadup to the conference.

A great com­mit­tee is not enough: con­fer­ences don’t hap­pen with­out the gen­er­ous finan­cial sup­port of spon­sors; the exper­tise and will­ing­ness to go the extra mile of speak­ers; and of course, the peo­ple who buy tick­ets and come along. So credit is due to all.

Despite the fact that I was tweak­ing, refin­ing and test­ing my own pre­sen­ta­tion right up until 15 min­utes before I went on stage, I only man­aged to miss two ses­sions the entire con­fer­ence. But given that there were two simul­ta­ne­ous tracks, there were a whole stack of dif­fi­cult deci­sions that had to be made.

Here are some notes from the pre­sen­ta­tions that I got to see:

Ben Forta and Ter­rence Ryan: Open­ing keynote

The con­fer­ence was kicked off by host Jared Rypka-Hauer via a pre-recorded video, dur­ing which is strongly sug­gested that we make sure that Jim didn’t have to buy his own drinks. Then it was over to Mark Man­del to intro­duce the keynote ses­sion: the orig­i­nal CF guru Ben Forta.

Ben gave an overview of the cur­rent state of Cold­Fu­sion, includ­ing the marked increase in devel­oper num­bers since Macro­me­dia was acquired by Adobe. The mes­sage he was preach­ing: it’s a good time to be a Cold­Fu­sion developer.

Ben didn’t spend much time on stage how­ever, hand­ing over to evan­ge­list Terry Ryan. Terry ran over some of the coolest fea­tures: in CF9 and shared some of their inter­nal per­for­mance fig­ures which clearly show how much faster CF9 is than pre­vi­ous ver­sions: again, good news for developers.

Andy Welsh: Get­ting Social with CF

After morn­ing tea, faced with a choice between Andrew Muller’s ses­sion on publish-subscribe RIAs and Andy Welsh on “Get­ting social with CF”, I elected to go to Andy’s Facebook-focused ses­sion. While I don’t have any plans Face­book appli­ca­tions any­time soon, I was inter­ested in the tech­nol­ogy and impressed with how far the plat­form has come. Andy had plenty of warn­ings for us, how­ever: Face­book don’t give any use­ful sup­port to devel­op­ers, they change things con­stantly and with­out warn­ing (with the side effect that the doc­u­men­ta­tion is often out of date), and in peak times (i.e. lunchtime) things on Face­book grind to a halt. Despite all this, there is huge poten­tial in the mar­ket – as  Andy said, that set of chal­lenges is noth­ing small busi­nesses and free­lancers don’t face daily — and Andy will be releas­ing his “Angry Ape” frame­work for build­ing Face­book apps in CF some­time shortly.

Kai Koenig: Cre­at­ing Online and Offline Work­flows with CFPDFFORM

After another break, it was a choice between Mark Mandel’s ses­sion “Rapid OO Devel­op­ment with Cold­Fu­sion Frame­works” or “Cre­at­ing Online and Offline work­flows with ColdFusion’s CFPDFFORM” with Kai Koenig. Kai’s like the “big bro” I never had, so I decided to show my sup­port upstairs in the Her­itage Room. In the ses­sion, Kai exam­ined just what was pos­si­ble with ColdFusion’s PDF func­tion­al­ity, ver­sus what was pos­si­ble with the much more expen­sive Live­Cy­cle ser­vices, and urged devel­op­ers to be sure that they actu­ally needed the full Live­Cy­cle before let­ting their organ­i­sa­tions com­mit to the pur­chase. He talked about sit­u­a­tions where hybrid online and offline PDF work­flows were needed, and demon­strated a cus­tomis­able PDF Christ­mas card gen­er­a­tor that he had worked on.

Andrew Mer­cer: Future Proof­ing Your Appli­ca­tion Development

After a very nice lunch of sand­wiches, salad and lit­tle cakes, I decided to miss both Andrew Spaulding’s ses­sion “From Flash Cat­a­lyst to Flash Builder and Cold­Fu­sion: The Ulti­mate RIA Work­flow” and Mike Schierberl’s very pop­u­lar ses­sion “JVM Tun­ing and Opti­mi­sa­tion” to spend some qual­ity time in my room with my pre­sen­ta­tion. But I made sure I made it back in time for fel­low West Aus­tralian Andrew Mercer’s ses­sion “Future Proof­ing Your Appli­ca­tion Devel­op­ment”, up against Indy Nagpal’s “Improve Cold­Fu­sion Devel­op­ment Process: Using Decen­tralised Ver­sion Con­trol with Test­ing and Con­tin­u­ous Integration’.

Andrew took the bold move of pre­sent­ing with no slides. He described some com­mon sce­nar­ios faced by pro­gram­mers of var­i­ous skill lev­els and the pos­si­ble out­comes. He reit­er­ated the idea that design pat­terns solve a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem – and if you’re not hav­ing that prob­lem, then you don’t need that design pat­tern. He also urged devel­op­ers not to feel pres­sured into div­ing into OO devel­op­ment if they don’t under­stand or don’t have need to.

Andrew also talked about three rel­a­tively new “lite” frame­works, which have each been designed as a anti­dote to the trend for the major frame­works to be large and cum­ber­some. The ses­sion had plenty of time allowed for audi­ence dis­cus­sion and a spir­ited dis­cus­sion of var­i­ous frame­works ensued – sev­eral atten­dees myself included) express­ing a fond­ness for the days of Fuse­box 3 when devel­op­ment was much sim­pler and more fun.

Justin Mclean: Con­nect­ing Hard­ware up to ColdFusion

The final ses­sion of the day was a choice of Justin Mclean’s “Con­nect­ing Hard­ware up to Cold­Fu­sion” or Geoff Bow­ers’ “Cas­cad­ing View Inher­i­tance”. Given that I’d seen Justin’s ses­sion in Perth at Edge of the Web which had used Flex code sam­ples, and had in fact ordered an Arduino starter kit of my own, i decided to catch his pre­sen­ta­tion again and see if i could pick up some extra ideas as this time he was using Cold­Fu­sion sam­ple code.

The hard­ware referred to in Justin’s pre­sen­ta­tion title is in fact a small hobby elec­tron­ics com­po­nent set made in Italy called Arduino. A num­ber of dif­fer­ent com­po­nents are cheaply avail­able, enabling devel­op­ers to cob­ble together any­thing from point­less flash­ing LEDs, to use­ful envi­ron­men­tal sen­sors of all descrip­tions, to fight­ing robots and even web servers. Justin has just released his Cold­Fu­sion library for devel­op­ing Arduino appli­ca­tions in Cold­Fu­sion to RIA Forge.

All in all, it was an exhaust­ingly busy day and I came away with a head full of ideas and new knowl­edge. After din­ner with a whole bunch of conference-goers at a Japan­ese restau­rant called “Choco­late Bud­dha” in nearby Fed­er­a­tion Square, I man­aged to tear myself away from the bar after just one beer, and work on my pre­sen­ta­tion for the fol­low­ing day.

Stay tuned for my day two wrap up!