Geoff and the Daemon team have a couple of economy-stimulating initiatives that might be of interest to anyone who would like to come to the WebDU geek rock concert conference next month.

From today’s email:

Whether it be economic or pandemic, zombie invasion or bikie warfare,
escape it all at webDU in the Star City Casino where the doors can be
barricaded and there’s a few weeks supply of water and food.

Sounds good, yeah?

If you’ve been negatively affected by the economic downturn, there’s a scholarship program you can apply for. http://www.webdu.com.au/about/scholarships

If you want to win a ticket, there’s a Twitter competition on too. The guys are giving away five tickets for the most creative reasons to want to go. http://www.webdu.com.au/about/twitter-competition

There’s heaps of flight deals at the moment too, on Virgin Blue, QANTAS and JetStar, so you can get over there pretty cheaply from anywhere in Australia or the surrounding regions.

I’m going to be going, and I’m pretty stoked – I’m a conference junkie and it’s going to be great. I’ll also be reporting on all the action for SitePoint.

Code Wars will be running on Day 0 as well, as has now become traditional, and I’m going to be part of the WANZAC team (West Australian/New Zealand Awesome Coders) with AJ Mercer, Kai Koenig and Campbell Anderson.

So who else?

Posted from kay lives here

Wanna go to WebDU for nix?

The big announcement today: ColdFusion 8 has been released!

To celebrate, the ColdFusion User Group of WA is holding a trade-show style launch event. We’ll be watching a special presentation by ColdFusion guru Ben Forta and listening to some local developers explain which new features they’re excited about. There’s be food and drinks provided, and opportunities for networking. Adobe has even provided a copy of ColdFusion 8 which will be given away on the night.

As well as existing ColdFusion developers, we’d like to invite along others who may be interested in seeing what ColdFusion has to offer. So if you believed the articles that said it was dead, are curious as to what it’s all about, or are wondering if it’s good solution for your organisation, you’re more than welcome to come along.

RSVP your intention to come along at the CFUGWA web site.

Posted from kay lives here

CFUGWA hosting ColdFusion 8 Launch Extravaganza

When people ask what the difference is between ColdFusion and other server-side scripting languages, I tend to say something along the lines of “it’s designed to make the simple tasks you do all the time really, really easy”. Things like querying databases and looping over results, sending email etc are common tasks that take fewer lines of code in ColdFusion than other languages.

I just read about a new feature of ColdFusion 8 on Ben Forta’s blog that blew me away – not because it was ground-breaking or tricky or a major feature people had been begging for, but because it illustrates exactly what’s cool about ColdFusion: CFQUERY returns a RESULT structure, and if appropriate and the database supports it, the last created identity/auto-increment value is returned automatically for you.

According to Ben, it’s DBMS-specific and the actual name of the variable depends on the database being used, but still it is very handy. It’s easy enough to manually return that value with your query when you need it, but it’s even easier if it’s already there. It probably won’t save anyone a ton of time, but shows that people at Adobe are thinking about how they can make our lives just a little bit easier.

Posted from kay lives here

Yet another example of how ColdFusion makes coders’ lives easier

Ben Forta briefly explains the difference between the client-server version and the embedded version of Derby, and then describes how to create an embedded database at the same time as the datasource is created in the ColdFusion Administrator – you just need to add “create=true” to the connection string field in the advanced settings, to tell the engine to create the database if it doesn’t already exist. Pretty simple:

For sample applications, which are typically installed on development machines that have access to the ColdFusion administrator, it can be done entirely through code using the AdminAPI:

This is a great addition to ColdFusion and definitely something I’m going to be using. The end of reliance on Access, imagine that!

Posted from kay lives here

Creating Derby embedded databases in ColdFusion 8