It seems the must-have device of Christmas 2009 was the ebook reader. I’m seeing an explosion of information and happy post-Christmas reviews.

I myself was excited to find a Sony PRS-600 Touch Edition with my name on it underneath the tree, thanks to my wonderful partner Dave. To be honest, I hadn’t shut up about them for months and the size and shape of the package was about right, so I was pretty sure that’s what it was. Consequently I’d been planning my book purchases already.

I used to read a lot of fiction – ten years ago I used to absolutely devour books, often multiples at a time. But the internet did something to my ability to read books. I was reading so much online every single day, for both my job and for pleasure, that when I did switch off the machine the last thing I felt like doing was picking up a book. A neck injury also meant that reading physical books – say, in bed, where I used to read a lot – became more of a hassle. And reading on screen just got more and more comfortable and normal. I started reading ebooks a little, first on my Pocket PC and then later on my tablet. But the “user experience” of reading on a dedicated device that’s easy on the eyes is far superior to those.

So why the Sony Reader, and not the cheaper and more popular Kindle? Excellent question. Firstly, while there’s no doubt that Amazon have the biggest ebook store on the planet, I don’t like the idea of being limited to just one source for my books. The Sony supports EPUB, the open ebook format, as well as PDF and a whole ton of other formats, and you can load it up with books from any source. In fact, the only major ebook format it doesn’t support is Microsoft’s LIT format – a shame because I already have a (small) number of books in LIT format that I was reading on my tablet.

Secondly, there’s the issue of actually getting books onto the reader. Rather than requiring it’s own wireless provider, the Sony Reader connects up to your PC via USB and you can copy stuff onto it. No matter what they say about wireless providers and the international Kindle (check out the wireless coverage map of Australia here), I can’t get a reliable 3G connection on my own phone in my own living room, so I’m much happier with the syncing option. For a geek i think that’s the ideal situation, although it might not be as good for the less-computer savvy.

Also, there’s the touch screen. I haven’t used the stylus or note taking features much yet, but flicking your finger to flip pages is very cool and a very natural movement, much more so than using the buttons at the bottom.

Another pretty cool feature on the Sony Reader is expandable memory. It supports Memory Stick – no surprise there, it’s a Sony product – but also SD card, which is great because I have a ton of them lying around for my camera and camp MP3 player. So I could put together “libraries” – a tech library, a “current reading” fiction library, a classics library, whatever – on SD cards and have a ton of stuff on close standby when I travel.

Before I get too gushy, there’s also the serious side of privacy and DRM. The EFA have released a comparison of several of the major ebook players on various privacy issues which makes for interesting reading. Basically, if you use a reader that’s closely tied to one of the stores, they’re going to be able to track your purchases. They also include the Google Books service which is not an actual hardware device (at least not yet), but the privacy implications of that are more than a little scary.

As for DRM… I’m going to save that rant for another day. I purchased a title that uses Adobe Digital Editions and the process was a painful albeit interesting one. I’ve also ditched the Sony software (as much as I’m able, anyway) in favour of Calibre, a great open source bookshelf management package.

For the moment though, I’m absolutely loving the screen, the ease on the eyes, the convenience of reading on the device… the overall experience has been fantastic. Highly recommended!

Wow, this is late huh? Day 2 of cf.Objective(ANZ).

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!

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!

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!

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?