Day two started early for me, as I woke early to spend some more time polishing my presentation. After meeting Kevin Roche at breakfast, I decided to go to his session on “Fusebox Scaffolding” first up, over Terry Ryan’s session “ORM Basic to Advanced”.

Kevin demonstrated a project he’s been working on intermittently for some time, which allows users to generate basic Fusebox starter code simply by pointing the scaffolding application to a database. The resultant files can then be tweaked and customised as required.

Kevin’s system uses a template system developed by Peter Bell, which allows developers to write their own output templates using CFML itself – a mind-bendingly clever concept. Kevin will be releasing the SQL Server version of the code soon, and is looking for developers interested in helping out with Oracle and MySQL versions.

Next I had a choice of Dan Wilson’s “Model Glue 3: Gesture” or Mark Szulc’s ColdFusion + LiveCycle = Enterprise Innovation”. I chose a third option: make final last minute panicky adjustments to my presentation, which was up next.

Finally I was up, opposite Ron Hopper’s “Behaviour Driven Development with CFSpec”. I’d reversed the colours in Dreamweaver to try and make my code samples easier to see on the projectors, which were quite low contrast, but an unintended side effect of this was that it was hard for me to see my mouse cursor, which made things a little more difficult than they had to be. Nevertheless, the presentation went well and there were some nice comments in the Twitter stream (admittedly, mostly from my friends).

After another tasty lunch of various wraps, sandwiches, salads and cake, followed by a show of card tricks from the Magic Industries camp, “The Ancient Art of Software: Wisdom of the ages applied to today’s software developers” with Toby Tremayne was on at the same time as Mark Stanton’s “Masters of WAR”. I’d heard that there was going to be fire in Toby’s presentation so that’s where I headed.

Toby is the best known magician in the ColdFusion world today and his presentation presented the four archetypes of magic practioners: The Trickster, The Sorcerer, The Oracle and The Sage. Describing the traditional attributes of the four, Toby then likened each to a type of software developer, using well-known members of the ColdFusion community as examples, with strategies to help acolytes ascend through the ranks.

And of course, there was magic – Toby made a cube disappear from a wooden chest, produced a list of words provided by random audiences from a locked box displayed at the beginning of the session, and finally burnt a card marked with audience supplied words in a wall of flame before producing it again, only slightly singed, from the deck.

Straight after, I chose to see Mike Brunt’s “Clustering ColdFusion” over Terry Ryan’s “Extending ColdFusion Builder” – not so much because I have any need for clustering in the projects that i do, but mostly because Mike is a well-respected expert in that topic as well as a very funny bloke, and I wanted to see what he had to say.

Mike didn’t disappoint. As well as imparting some good advice – for example, the default install settings for ColdFusion are mostly incorrect for high performing sites – he also delivered some humorous gems.

After afternoon tea, the very last sessions of cf.Objective(ANZ) for 2009: “Testing Testing 123” with Robin Hilliard, and “Using a Java Domain Layer with ColdFusion” with Jaime Metcher. I went to Robin’s session, wherein he promised that anyone who took up unit testing as part of their development process would, within one week of starting, have an epiphany about the usefulness of the system and would never go back.

He then demonstrated using RocketBoots’ own testing framework, RocketUnit, and how he uses it to unit test continually while coding the model layer of his applications, ensuring logic errors are caught right away.

And then it was over. Assembling everyone in the ballroom for Closing Remarks, Mark Mandel thanked everyone involved and acting as barrel girl, I drew the winners of the three raffles from the attendees who had completed evaluation sheets: one copy of ColdFusion Standard, one copy of Flash Builder and one copy of Fusion Reactor. The organisers present toasted with a glass of champagne and then it was time for us to vacate the venue.

See you all next year!

Posted from kay lives here

cf.Objective(ANZ) Day 2 Wrapup: more wizardry than you can poke a mouse pointer at

It’s been a long haul but next week – November 12 and 13 – is the cf.Objective(ANZ) conference in Melbourne, Australia.

Although I’ve only just recovered from the Edge of the Web conference here in Perth, next Wednesday morning I’ll be getting on the plane to Melbourne for three days of geek nirvana, CF style. We know it’s going to be huge because that almighty CF guru, Ben Forta, is making the journey too!

As is typical when geeks geographically converge, there will be a number of other events happening around the conference:

• In Sydney, there’s a CF User Group meeting and then drinks with Ben Forta and fellow CF evangelist Terry Ryan, starting at Adobe’s offices at 2pm before moving on to “a pub somewhere”. Check the CFAUSSIE mailing list for updates.
• The 11th of November in Melbourne will be the FarCry Dev Camp, at Melbourne Law School. Come along to this free event to learn about the future direction of the open source FarCry framework and CMS as well as in-depth technical sessions, case studies and “general developer tom-foolery”, according to FarCry’s benevolent dictator Geoff Bowers.
• Then of course there’s the conference itself. Tickets (and hotel rooms) are still available but you’d better get in quick. There’s a ton of great speakers, including but not limited to Andy Welsh on using social applications with CF, Kai Koenig on the PDF features in CF, Justin McLean on connecting hardware to CF, Kevin Roche on Fusebox Scaffolding, Dan Wilson on ModelGlue 3, Robin Hilliard on testing… plus Terry Ryan and Ben Forta, plus Australian Adobe staff Mark Szulc and Andrew Spauling and a whole stack of others. I’ll be presenting on doing damage with CFGRID, and my fellow West Australian Andrew Mercer will be talking about future proofing your application with some of the new light-weight frameworks.

The conference wouldn’t have happened without the support of some very special sponsors, so a big shout-out to platinum sponsor Adobe, gold sponsors RocketBoots and Daemon, Silver Sponsors Nova Host and Magic Industries, bronze sponsors Gruden and Railo, and supporters The Rohans and Ventego Creative.

Hope to see you there!

Posted from kay lives here

Ben Forta in the house: ColdFusion Week down under!

Last year AWIA ran the inaugural Edge of the Web conference, a one day affair in November. It was a huge success and so this year we’re doing it all again, this time in a two day format, from 4–5 November 2009. Once more EOTW will be held at the UWA Club at the University of Western Australia, Perth.

The full speaker line up has been released and it looks awesome. Blogging pioneer Anil Dash, community design dude Derek Powazek and Alex Payne — from Twitter, no less — are our international guests, and we have a great line up of national and local speakers too. You can see the full program here.

Notable for the Adobe geeks is the addition of Justin Mclean, who will be talking about web-enabling hardware.

There’s also a day of workshops on Friday 6 November, where you can spend half a day with Alex Payne or Derek Powazek in the morning, and with Lachlan Hardy or Dmitry Baranovskiy in the afternoon – or if search engine optimisation is more your thing, you can spend a full day with Scott and Cheryl Gledhill exploring the topic. Friday the 6th is also the Australian Web Awards presentation night, a crazy black tie dinner done only the way the web industry can.

Oh, and did I mention fringe events? There’s a ton of those too…

So if you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard any of this, I can also tell you that the early bird pricing ends on September 30, which does not leave very long. So hop to it!

Posted from kay lives here

Coming to the Edge?

Organising something like a ColdFusion conference is always going to be fraught with unexpected difficulties – but even more so when it’s being organised across four countries in four separate timezones. This has been the case with cfObjective(ANZ), the first international offshoot of the US-based cfObjective() conference, planned for Melbourne in November 2009.

Well, I’m happy to announce that the hurdles have been leapt over and all is now absolutely, definitely GO. The program is finalised, the venue is booked and registrations are now open (early bird pricing until October 12!). And it’s thanks, in no small way, to some wonderful sponsors: Adobe in Platinum spot, RocketBoots in Gold, Gruden as Bronze sponsor, and supporters Rob and Kristin Rohan.

Program: http://www.cfobjective.com.au/go/program
Pricing: http://www.cfobjective.com.au/go/pricing
Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cfobjective_anz

Subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up to the newsletter to make sure you’re in the loop.

And yes, that IS me on Day 2. I’ll be talking about the largely untapped wonders of CFGRID.

Hope to see you there!

Posted from kay lives here

cf.Objective(ANZ) conference – Registrations open!

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?