coldfusionJedi

As I (slowly) try to recover from yesterday, I thought I'd send out a quick reminder to folks that the latest betas of both AIR 2.0 and Flash 10.1 are available.

AIR 2.0 should be an amazing release. I highly recommend catching up on Christian Cantrell's blog as he has quite a few entries on the new release.

Flash 10.1 is also now at beta 2. I've not followed the news much on this but from what I can see this will be an important update for mobile devices.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but, I'll say it again. For my readers who only know ColdFusion, now is the time to expand your skills and pick up AIR. Even if you don't want to learn Flex (which I recommend as well), you can simply build upon your existing HTML and JavaScript knowledge by adding the power of AIR.

Today Liz Frederick released the latest list of community members added to the Adobe Community Professionals roster. Gone is the day of the Adobe Community Expert (or ACE, which was frowned upon because it interfered with another Adobe group) and so with a new year comes not only a new name, but an updated group as well. I'm very honored to be asked back, especially considering some of the new faces that were added. (Although I want to know who let that Boyzoid guy in - watch out for him and lock up your beer!)

I've been part of this group, in it's various incarnations, for many years. In fact, I think my only 'break' was when I was actually hired by Allaire. The original group was known as Team Allaire, and while my jogging shorts finally bit the bullet last year, the watch has survived:

This is pretty cool - Adobe will be starting a multi-city tour this month offering free training in Flex and Flash Builder 4. This training is specifically targeted to experienced ColdFusion developers. Did I mention it was free? Yep - 100% free. The tour begins on November 13 in Texas and ends on the 20th in San Francisco. You can find a complete list, and more details, here: http://www.ce1.com/adobe/2009/flextrainingforcfdevelopers/. It looks like registration is required and limited, so get to it!

Adobe recently released their updated Cookbooks site, including the new ColdFusion Cookbook. To help get the cookbook filled with content even quicker, Ed Sullivan has announced that if you are one of the first 100 people to make a submission, you will be entered into a raffle to win a free copy of ColdFusion 9!

p.s. In case folks are curious about the old ColdFusion Cookbook content, data is still being copied over by hand. I know that my entries aren't migrated yet but will soon be. (Or I'll start throwing down a hissy fit - I've been trained by my 8 year old daughter on the proper way to do that.)

I've been home for a few hours now from MAX09 and - let me just say - as much as I loved it, nothing beats being tackled by my little mini-army of children running to give me a hug. To be home with them, with my wife, and in my big ass comfy chair is just about as close to heaven as it gets. Before I talk more about my experience with MAX, I need to say thank you.

• Thank you Adobe for allowing me to run the Unconference again this year. It was an honor, and I truly hope I lived up to it and provided value to the conference. Thank you for allowing me to bring in additional help and support (without them having to buy their own tickets!)
• Thank you Ezra Parker and Charlie Griefer. Guys - together I think we pulled off the best Unconference yet.
• Thank you to my speakers: Dan Wilson, Scott Stroz, Mike Brunt, Terry Ryan, Kevin Schmidt, Laura Arguello, Kurt Wiersma, Josh Adams, Luis Majano. Also thank you to Adobe again. I asked if a "few" of them could show up and I got a small army. Nice
• Thank you to Ted Patrick. Because of him I got to meet Mark Hamill. I will never forget that.
• Thank you to Chris Hayes, Kevin Schmidt, Andy Allan (Fuzzy Orange), and Mark Phillips (Verabase) for sponsoring the Unconference and allowing us to feed the hungry geeks.
• And finally, thanks to everyone who came up to me and said they read my blog. It's nice to know people actually do that. ;)

And if I forgot anyone, I blame American Airlines for keeping me waiting in Dallas an extra hour or so. Ok, so what about the conference itself? I've blogged about MAX the last few days so I'll just keep this at a high level.

• Facility: The convention center was a good location. Huge - but the layout worked well. I could get from the Unconference to my session within a minute or two. I do wish the hotels had been closer, but Adobe had buses running very regularly.
• Keynotes: Probably the best yet. The Omniture portion was a bit... awkward at times, but I feel like I finally got a good idea about why bothered to buy them. Also, there was no "Hey everyone, Mobile is really huge and it's going to be huge here any day now" rah rah portion, and that made me very happy. Oh - and seeing Kevin Lynch look down on John Mayer in the AR demo was incredibly creepy... in a good way.
• Food: I'll probably be in the minority here, but I loved the box lunches. I much prefer simple food for lunch, and hot meals/fancy junk at night.
• Special Event: I hated it. Completely. Ok, I lie. I'm just ticked that my bowling score was so darn low. I think it was pretty cool that we had so many different venues to choose from.
• Speaker Support: Adobe does a great job supporting their speakers. They paid for the hotel, flight, and the ticket of course. They made the submission process (slides, notes, etc) nicely automated and efficient.

Ok - so didn't I forget one of the more important aspects - sessions? Well, I can't really comment on that. When I wasn't giving my session I spent as much of time in the Unconference as possible. I'd love to know what other attendees thought.

That's it. I hope to see everyone again, back in LA, for MAX 2009.

As has been Twittered around this morning, the MAX sessions are now coming online. Even if you didn't actually buy a ticket for MAX, you can watch all the sessions (just sessions, no labs) online for free at Adobe TV.

You can find my ORM session (not quite sure if they have both the Monday and Tuesday one - I think Monday went a bit better) here: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-develop/introduction-to-coldfusion-orm/

You can download the code and slides themselves from the version I uploaded to SlideSix. I'd normally just embed that version below, but I'm having issues getting SlideSix to remember the recorded URL for my presentation.

If anyone has any questions about the code, please let me know. I'm going to do a blog entry that looks over the deeper examples from the presentation that I didn't have time to cover. Also - and I'd like some feedback on this - I was considering updating my long Transfer series. I think it could be cool to a 'entry to entry' update with ColdFusion 9.

Why is it that 2 days of MAX feels more like 20? Maybe I'm just getting old. Anyway, here are some thoughts about the second day of MAX. Starting in reverse order, let me talk about the sneaks first. I twittered about this a bit but 140 characters really can't do justice to what was demoed. I didn't always get the "official" name for sneaks, so please forgive any mistakes.

• Photoshop is God: Ok, not the real name, but you had to see it to believe. The basic concept is something called "intelligent filling" I believe. In the first example, he had a picture with a wire across it. He selected the wire and was able to replace it with the building behind it. Ok, so that by itself is nice, but the big demo blew that away. Imagine a picture, outside, with trees in front a slightly cloudy sky. He selected a tree on the left side of the picture. Did the replacement... and holy crap. Photoshop removed the tree and recognized that the sky behind it should have a cloud layer. It then drew clouds - completely virtual - where the tree used to be.
• Edit/Developement: This was pretty cool. Imagine a running Flex application that has a bug. Then imagine being able to pause it, edit the code, and then continue. I love this. This is especially useful when the area that has the bug is 2-5 clicks in. (Like an application that requires a login.)
• Megha/Server Side Actionscript: Basically the idea is - imagine a Flex app that combines both the client side code and server side altogether. It reminded me a bit of old school ASP pages with the runat="server" block (and I know old school ASP has bad connotations, and I don't have such a negative view of this sneak, but it's the best corollary I can think of). All in all - interesting - but I think I'd rather keep my Flex code to the client side and keep ColdFusion on the server. (Not that I'm biased... ;)
• Rome: This one is hard to describe. It's a AIR app (20,000 lines of ActionScript) that appears to be a mix of Photoshop and the Flash IDE. Seems pretty powerful and a real good example of what AIR can do.
• Dreamweaver/Canvas: This was kind of cool - it showed support for pasting in vector graphics as a canvas item into Dreamweaver.
• Flash/Physics: The demonstrator drew some basic shapes and was able to apply physics to it. The IDE was then able to create a movie based on the gravitational effects of those objects in a real world. So imagine a lever over a triangle base with some blocks on top. When the physics was applied and the movie ran, the objects fell properly and impacted the lever correctly.

All in a all, a good round of sneaks, and yes, there were no ColdFusion sneaks. But let's be honest - they just released 9 a day or so ago. I think they get a pass. ;)

The MAX Awards were well done. Nice and quick, and Mark Hamill was a pretty good host. I don't think I had heard of any of the sites nominated so it was good to see them quickly demonstrated beforehand.

The keynote was also a good example of Adobe technologies. Fedex demonstrated a real time monitoring system that was near omniscient in terms of what they could track (estimated delivery time, temperature, change in speed).

The USPS augmented reality demo was probably the best. I'm not sure of the URL for this (and the network here is still pretty crappy), but the idea was that you could place your object to ship in front of your web cam and the application would visually display package around it. You could then figure out exactly what size box you needed to ship. The best example of AR I've seen to date. Practical and simple. John Mayer's demo was artsy, but frankly the old, boring US Postal Service here really deserves credit for what they are doing with the technology. (Although John Mayer was much funnier than I had imagined he would be.)

There were more demos during the keynote - but I don't have much to add over what I said on Twitter. I enjoyed the second day keynote much more I think - just because it was interesting to see so many examples of Adobe technologies.

The Unconference had a great day (and thanks again to Charlie and Ezra and my speakers). The high point being the great lunch discussion we had in regards to OO and the ColdFusion community.

I'd love to be able to speak to the MAX sessions themselves, but unfortunately, outside of my own, I've not been to any session outside of the Unconference.

Many weeks ago I spoke about how I was going to work with Adobe to migrate content off of the ColdFusion Cookbook. Today the new cookbooks at Adobe have officially launched. The ColdFusion content is still "in progress", but a big thank you goes to Adobe for doing the grunt work. The new cookbook site may be found here:

http://cookbooks.adobe.com/home

As you can see, it's got a sexy new UI as well:

Best of all, the site was built in ColdFusion! You can find RSS feeds for content as well as a feed for requests. While it's empty now, here is the RSS for ColdFusion recipe requests: http://cookbooks.adobe.com/rss/recent/requests?technology=coldfusion.

As I said - the ColdFusion Cookbook content is being migrated over (both by Adobe and some individual authors) so it's going to grow pretty quickly.

Lots of updates from the Adobe folks lately. Last night was the release of the third cumulative hot fix for ColdFusion 8.0.1. Looks to be quite a lot of updates so if your server is a bit behind, it is a great time to catch up.

I meant to get this out before vacation, but alas, time went by a bit quicker than I expected. This should not be considered a "How To" when it comes to Adobe Wave and ColdFusion. Considering that Wave is still in beta, most likely the API/process will change significantly over time (assuming Wave leaves beta). Also note that I - probably like most people - did not adequately read the docs, so some of what follows may not be exactly kosher with the docs. Please keep that in mind when reading. With that in mind, here are some quick tips and code examples.

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