CFUnited 2006

I’m back from CFUnited and I have to say it was great. It was my first trip to the conference and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve been to many lame training classes before where screwing with the trainers computer was the most interesting thing, however, I was very impressed by the amount of information available. Everyone seemed very knowledgable about the topics they presented and it was very rewarding to talk to the other attendees. Adobe team members made themselves available to all attendees and I was able to speak with many big time CFer’s. Here is a synopsis of some of the sessions I attended and what I seemed to glean from them:

Managing CF Components with Factories – Sean Corfield

• This talk centered around the fact that we can create these things called Factories to create/instantiate objects for us in code. This can help us manage dependencies on objects and keep all hardcoded paths (which are needed when you instantiate an object) in the factory instead of sprinkled throughout our application.

Government Accessibility and Section 508 – Adam Lehman

• The bottom line is that if disabled people cannot access your site and you don’t take reasonable steps to provide access (even through an alternative site) then you can be held liable. Adam told a story of the Sydney Olympic webpage did not make an attempt to resolve problems with their accessibility and they were eventually sued. There are simple steps to take which can easily be found on the internet.

Farcry 3.0 – Steve Rittler

• Farcry is an open-source free content management system. If you could use a CMS check this out before you buy.

Agile CF: Delivering Applications in Less Time: John Paul Ashenfelter

• Very, very solid session. John Paul spoke about the Agile movement in software development. He mentioned the importance of being Agile, responsive to continuous changes in requirements, technologies, etc. He advised the attendees to read the Agile series of books (Agile Software Development, Agile Project Management). I bought the Agile Project Management book at the conference and have really enjoyed it so far.

MVC for You and Me – Joe Rinehart

• Great overview on the MVC design pattern. Joe is now living in the Raleigh-Durham area where I work so I hope to run into him again.

Practical Design Patterns – Sean Corfield filling in for Hal Helms

• This was a solid session. There is a jump from being knowledgable of object oriented design to using design patterns. There are a handfull of design patterns that come up fairly often then a bunch that are very unique and specific for a situation. I would advise learning the MVC and the Factory pattern. If you are totally new to patterns I would start with those since they seem to be the two that come up most often.

Inversion of Control and Coldfusion: Using Coldspring – Dave Ross

• Typically in applications that use a well defined MVC framework you would pass values such as a DSN value down through your objects to your DAO/Gateways. Insteand of passing these values top-down you can use an inversion of control design pattern (IOC) to manage the dependencies of your objects. Basically this entails setting up an XML file stating the dependencies and asking the a Factory object to request the objects. That way you can allow the Factory to manage the dependencies and you can make all changes to one XML file. If you have no idea what this means then start off by learning the MVC and factory pattern by using a framework such as Model Glue.

CFMX Server Configuration and Troubleshooting – Dave Watts

• This guy was on top of his game. He gave many good tips and tricks to optimizing your CF server. If you are using components and object oriented design it will become much more important to tune your application server. As objects get created/destroyed and persist in places like the application scope it becomes much more important to make sure that you are caching the correct amount of templates and so forth. It used to be that many developers never had to make any changes to performance in the CF administrator, however, if you are making the jump to OOD you will without a doubt be making some changes.

The conference was great. If you haven’t attended and it looks like these sessions would have interested you then you should really try to attend next year. I would even consider paying my own way if necessary, I think it was that informative.