First of all I'd like to say thanks to Russ MIchaels, Niklas Richardson and the Slammer Girls for giving us a very good conference day.
I was a bit late for Russ Michaels kick off presentation and basically when I got checked in and found an available sit, Ben Forta was starting his speech.
He talked mostly about ColdFusion's (codenamed Scorpio) new features and Adobe Livecycle. I was really impressed about how much they can do.
It looks like Adobe is now trying to put everything together as you can integrate your PDF files with Flex, and generate web forms based on it's layout and fields. As this two guys are integrated and we already have Flex and ColdFusion integration, that means we can now create really good stuff using Flex and CF.
He also demoed the new functionalities on Scorpio which IMHO are gonna put CF on the top. Now we have a real good server monitor, image support with more than 50 functions for image processing including Captcha, new tags for creating Acrobat Connect (AKA Breeze) presentations and a few more news to come.
I was pretty sad because this time he wasn't dressed as the Scorpio Man as he did two weeks ago on Max, but anyway, It was a very good presentation.
After that we had one of the guys from Adobe talking about RIA, it was pretty interesting in the beginning, but then he started to talk about numbers and figures and I had to leave the room to smoke a cigarette and take some fresh air. So I'll leave this topic for someone else's blog.
Then we had Nick Tong talking about the benefits of public API's or even create API's for private systems as sometimes you need to have some kind of control of your data and can reuse the code but having rules for different applications.
We had Alex Skinner showing his company's (Pixl8) CMS (Preside) using BlueDragon.NET.
It was pretty cool to see it's code as they sometimes have ASP.NET and CFML code on the same page. The CMS looks really good and integrates with MS Sharepoint. He also shown some examples of the integration.
Mark Drew came up with some cool new features on CFEclipse, which in my opinion promises to be the next most used IDE. The Java guys have been using Eclipse for a while, so why not give it a try? I've been using it for a year already and at this point I can say I've abandoned all the other IDE's and am using CFEclipse for 100% of my CF development.
Kevin Roche explained how to use Custom Lexicons on Fusebox 5 and showed it's integration with Reactor. I was really impressed with the verbs creation but still need to run some tests between Fusebox and Reactor. I do like reactor, but still think it's not really reliable for production. Besides some people say it's good for production, I'm still not convinced at all.
And then Vince Bonfati came to give us a BlueDragon presentation and the most impressive thing I saw there, was cfthread and the render() function. I really look forward to see Adobe doing the same and implementing some of the BlueDragon's cool features. I'm sure Adobe is very busy with all the products they have, and know it's easier to New Atlanta as they are mainly focused on BlueDragon, but: "Adobe, let's try to follow New Atlanta and release more cool features!"
To close the conference we had Charlie Arehart talking about Fusion Debug and Fusion reactor. It was a very quick presentation, maybe the quickest presentation I have ever seen, as he managed to cover the two products in less than 45 min.
Fusion Debug looks pretty good, it was the first time I saw it in action, and was very impressed with breakpoints thing. It saves a lot of time when you're working on a project where you can't really see what's going on while the CF page loads (Ajax and Flex?). :-)
I don't have too much to say about Fusion Reactor, but it does seem to help a lot when you have to take care of the server. I shall install it here and see if I can give more reviews about it.
To sum up, I can say that the presentations were all really good and with excellent content.
The party was wicked and a really good opportunity for meeting people. I met some really nice guys as Kola, Andy, Mark Drew, Trond Ulseth, Marco Martins and many other I can't remember the name because after the sixth tequila I couldn't even remember my own name.
Again I have to say thanks to everybody for organizing this conference and for participating as well. I hope to see you all in the next UK CFUG meeting!
