ColdFusion Summit Recap

November 12, 2015

Another successful ColdFusion Summit!  I'm sitting at the airport waiting for my flight home, attempting to wrap my head around everything that's happened the last few days.  There was a metric ton of great content from both Adobe proper and all the presenters.  I saw absolutely no outright bad sessions, everything was top notch (a couple of very minor demo fails, but no real show-stoppers).  I didn't take as many notes as I usually do; all the slide decks were pretty informative and are available for download -- there wasn't much else for me to document.

If my info is correct, this was the largest attendance yet, always a good sign that ColdFusion is alive and well!  There were many people I spoke to that said this was the first CF conference they'd attended in 10 years.  Several people new to ColdFusion said this was their first CF conference.  There was a good mix of content for beginners and advanced developers.

The Aria is an excellent hotel.  Staff are always courteous and helpful; the rooms are modern, everything is high quality.  This is easily my favorite place to stay in Vegas!  When traveling I rarely need more than a clean room and a hot shower -- it's very easy to get spoiled with the way Aria treats its guests!

This was my third year attending and second year as a speaker.  The Aria audio/video staff always take great care of us.  At my request, Tim (the A/V guy in my session) played Depeche Mode non-stop as my pre-session meeting.  I think he noticed the Green Day references in my code; we heard various songs of theirs as the session ended. A nice touch. Thanks, Tim. :)

Adobe did keynote presentations to start off both days.  Monday's keynote included brief "how we use CF" talks from 2 ColdFusion customers.  Next year I'd love to see these expanded out into their own 60 minute sessions, with more details on frameworks used, how the clients handle redundancy, other things to note, etc.  Doing these in the keynote was nice, but a case study showing how people use CF in large real-world apps I think would make a great session by itself.

Tuesday's keynote was Roy Fielding discussing the history of the REST and how that has evolved to where we are now in 2015.  My session on "MVC With and Without a Framework" was immediately after the keynote, so admittedly I wasn't that focused on what Roy was saying -- I was busy going over my slide deck and warming up.  But everyone I spoke to seemed to really enjoy it.

Day 2 ended with the closing remarks from Adobe, where they made mention of ColdFusion Summit 2016! No details were given except that it will again be in October and again in Las Vegas.  Please book it at the Aria. :)

I received a lot of very positive feedback on my session, "MVC With and Without a Framework".  The room was 80% full, and there were lots of questions after! My presentation isn't very advanced; it starts with an old "spaghetti" app and slowly goes thru how to use MVC, then how to do the same thing in a framework (this time I used Framework-1, but I've also used Model-Glue for this talk in the past).  There is obviously still a big percentage of the CF community doing things with older practices -- CFincludes, lots of procedural code with no modularity.  As much as I like the idea of the language moving forward, clearly there is a big demographic of "beginner CF'ers" that still need some help along the way.  Hopefully Adobe (and others) notice this, continue to include relevant content at the conference, in training materials, and so on.  Personally I like giving presentations targeted to this audience -- seeing the "lightbulbs click on" is always a good feeling!

It was great to see everyone again! I'm already looking forward to next year's conference. Now to write and submit several new presentations ideas!

Other things of note --

Brian Ghidinelli's talk, "Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Applications" was great!  I'd love to see more talks like this in the future! Brian gave an in-depth look into how his company uses ColdFusion.  He discussed the frameworks used, how they handle redundancy, which databases they use (and why, along with which features in his app are made easier by functionality in the DB), how they handle time zones, currency, localization, and so on.  It was easily one of the highlights, and a great way to start off the conference!  (Brian's slide deck was very informative, I'd recommend downloading it.)

Kev McCabe gave a talk on ColdFusion Builder and the missing plugins.  He demo'd various features in CF Builder that make writing code easier.  Among the items discussed were "CFC Mappings", ctrl-clicking on a method call to see its definition, Fusion Debug, and the Saros plugin.  Very informative; this talk would have benefited from being recorded, so people can see where each of the menu items are that Kev was clicking on.  Kev, any plans to give this talk for Charlie's UGTV? :)

"Killing Shark-Riding Dinosaurs with ORM" by Luis Majano was equal parts informative and hilarious. :) Luis always does such a great job presenting.  This talk wasn't as ColdBox focused as I expected it to be, which is a GOOD thing.  I went hoping to learn something about *box features and while there is a bit of content related to an Ortus product, easily 80% of the info is about the ORM that's baked into ColdFusion -- meaning ANY ColdFusion developer can use it!

Brian Klaas gave a talk on using Amazon Web Services with ColdFusion.  He covers a huge amount of information in 1 hour (and by his own admission, talks really quickly as a means to do so).  This was a -tad- higher level than I had hoped initially, but after Brian got into the talk a bit, it because clear why doing any sort of real demos in a 1-hour session would have been difficult at best.  Brian's slides were great -- various useful code samples and other info, worth downloading and checking it out.

Thanks again to Adobe, Tim Cunningham, Jason Dean, Dan Wilson, Elishia Dvorak and everyone else that I'm forgetting -- the 2015 conference was a huge success!  See you all next year!

-nolan