Sandra Clark spoke about her first day at CFUnited 2007, what she is looking forward to in ColdFusion 8 and on her work on the new Fusebox website.

I sat down with Mark Drew on the first day of CFUnited to talk about what projects he was up to at the time and what he would be speaking about at CFUnited.

He wouldn't tell me anything.

About Mark Drew

Mark has been programming Coldfusion since 1996, and even though he has had forays into Perl, ASP and PHP he is still loving every line of code he has crafted with ColdFusion, so much so that he decided to be part of the CFEclipse team and build an even better editor to write CF with. As a day job he is Product Manager at Design UK, a London based agency providing ecommerce, content managament, CRM and creative marketing solutions to some of the rather more well known high street stores. Apart from this Mark still has time to develop CFEclipse and blog about coldfusion and related subjects over at http://www.markdrew.co.uk/blog/. Mark is also co-manager of the UKCFUG and has spoken on a number of subjects including ORMs, Frameworks and CFEclipse.

I sat down with Kevin Roche to talk about his work with the Fusebox framework and his work on the upcoming CFUnited Europe.

Well, we're not sure what happened, but it seems that the .mp3 file of Simon Horwith's talk, "Success from the trenches - building better applications" got a little messed up so we're publishing it here again.

Take 2:

What is it that makes some applications successful while others fail? What causes server performance and stability issues and how do you avoid and troubleshoot them? Can ColdFusion applications really scale? In this session, Simon will explain the traits that make some applications a success and others fail. He will explore the things that developers can do to ensure that their applications will scale. He will walk you through the thought process when architecting and/or code reviewing a ColdFusion application. Simon's 11+ years of experience developing, designing, reviewing, and troubleshooting ColdFusion applications has exposed him to some of the largest enterprise CF applications and most rigorous demands on the planet, and he has seen first-hand what does and doesn't work in the real world. In this session, Simon will divulge many of the tricks of the trade that will lead to success for attendees.

About Simon Horwith

Simon Horwith runs the Washington, DC office for effectiveUI, an award winning software development company that specializes in creating the best in user experience. Simon has been designing web-enabled enterprise applications for over a decade. As a hands-on IT Executive and journalist, he observes, predicts, and offers commentary on trends in technology. As a developer, he enjoys facing the challenges associated with creating tomorrow's software today. Simon is an Adobe Certified Master Instructor, is a Member of the Adobe Community Expert Program for Flex, and served as Editor-in-Chief of ColdFusion Developer's Journal for several years. In addition to presenting at user groups and conferences around the world, Simon has also been a contributing author of several books and technical papers. You can read his blog at www.horwith.com.

What is it that makes some applications successful while others fail? What causes server performance and stability issues and how do you avoid and troubleshoot them? Can ColdFusion applications really scale? In this session, Simon will explain the traits that make some applications a success and others fail. He will explore the things that developers can do to ensure that their applications will scale. He will walk you through the thought process when architecting and/or code reviewing a ColdFusion application. Simon's 11+ years of experience developing, designing, reviewing, and troubleshooting ColdFusion applications has exposed him to some of the largest enterprise CF applications and most rigorous demands on the planet, and he has seen first-hand what does and doesn't work in the real world. In this session, Simon will divulge many of the tricks of the trade that will lead to success for attendees.

About Simon Horwith

Simon Horwith runs the Washington, DC office for effectiveUI, an award winning software development company that specializes in creating the best in user experience. Simon has been designing web-enabled enterprise applications for over a decade. As a hands-on IT Executive and journalist, he observes, predicts, and offers commentary on trends in technology. As a developer, he enjoys facing the challenges associated with creating tomorrow's software today. Simon is an Adobe Certified Master Instructor, is a Member of the Adobe Community Expert Program for Flex, and served as Editor-in-Chief of ColdFusion Developer's Journal for several years. In addition to presenting at user groups and conferences around the world, Simon has also been a contributing author of several books and technical papers. You can read his blog at www.horwith.com.

NOTE: The conference recording ended about 15 minutes before the talk did. As a result, the recording cuts off in the middle of the presentation. Sorry about that!

Description

With more people jumping on the CSS bandwagon and with Internet Explorer 7 finally released, its always good to review the basics. This session will cover semantic and structural HTML with an eye toward how to use the DOM to create simple HTML and put the complexity of selectors into the Cascading Style Sheet. It will cover all selectors that are now available in all browsers and how to use them effectively.

About Sandy Clark

Sandra Clark, an advanced Macromedia Certified ColdFusion developer, is a Senior Software Developer with the Constella Group in Bethesda, Maryland. She has contributed material to the ColdFusion 5.0 Certified Developer Study Guide published by Syngress Media/Osborne McGraw Hill and to the ColdFusion Developers Journal. She has also spoken at various CFUGS and ColdFusion User Conferences around the country. Sandra is an active proponent of applying accepted and proven web standards to development as a way of improving accessibility as well as making life easier on developers. She can be reached at sclark@constellagroup.com. Sandra also maintains a website and blog where she shares information on CSS, Accessibility, Fusebox, Coldfusion and also offers training classes.

Downloads

• Presentation

Test-driven development is very popular in the Java and Ruby worlds and becoming moreso in the ColdFusion world. This session covers the tools that are available to test ColdFusion applications and discusses how to implement them into your existing workflow. We'll specifically cover:

• CFCUnit/CFUnit for testing ColdFusion code
• Selenium for testing web pages
• DBUnit for managing the database during testing
• Grinder (and similar) load-testing tools

Together, these tools can provide unit, functional, regression, and load tests for your applications. Finally, we'll touch on automating these tests so you can ensure that you are delivering higher-quality, well-tested code.

About John Paul Ashenfelter

John Paul Ashenfelter is CTO of TransitionPoint.com, where he builds web-based business applications using a mix of open source tools, ColdFusion, and Java. He has been the technical lead on a number of ColdFusion projects for startups as well as regularly serving as an architect for existing ColdFusion sites converting to Fusebox. A ColdFusion developer since version 2.0, John Paul has written several books covering ColdFusion, contributed articles to CFDJ, and spoken at several ColdFusion conferences.

Downloads

• Presentation

This week we begin the first of our preview interviews with speakers at CFUnited Europe. Our first guest is Peter Bell.

About Peter Bell

Peter Bell is a passionate advocate of Application Generation and meta-programming in ColdFusion and is author of Application Generation, blog dedicated to best practices in application development and how to get our projects done quicker and easier. He has lectured both locally and nationally on using ColdFusion for application generation and to create software product lines and runs Systems Forge a company that generates custom applications quickly and cost effectively.

Peter discusses his upcoming talks at CFUnited Europe, Prectical Code Generation, RAD OO, and Using The Iterating Business Object.

About CFUnited Europe

CFUnited Europe will be held March 12-13 2008 at the Novotel London West, UK. Learn more at europe.cfunited.com.

We want to hear from you!

If you have any feedback on the podcast, please feel free to drop me a line at chris@christianready.com or info@cfunited.com.

At CFUnited 2007, I spoke with some of the speakers and attendees alike to talk about how they were enjoying the conference, what they found exciting in ColdFusion 8, and what they got out of CFUnited.

In this interview, I sit down with Ben Forta from Adobe Systems on Wednesday morning just after his keynote address. Ben talks about the then-upcoming release of ColdFusion 8, its impact on the community, and the future of ColdFusion.

Using Flex 2.0, you can now deploy Flex applications using any number of backend technologies without the addition of a Flex server product. However, with the new ColdFusion-Flex connectivity features, ColdFusion will have a significant advantage over all other backend technologies; providing the most efficient data exchange, the easiest programming model, and specialized tooling that make it the fastest, easiest way to build Flex apps – with or without the purchase of a Flex server. This session will provide information on RemoteObject and the CF-Flex connectivity features including the use of value objects to exchange data between ColdFusion and Flex. Previous experience with CF/Flex applications is highly suggested

About Jeff Tapper

Before co-founding Tapper, Nimer & Associates with Mike Nimer in 2006, Jeff was the founder and chief technologist for Tapper.net Consulting, which focused on the development of RIAs and empowering clients through mentoring. Jeff has been developing internet-based applications since 1995, for a myriad of clients including Harley Davidson, Toys R Us, IBM, Dow Jones, American Express and Morgan Stanley. As an Instructor, he is certified to teach all of Adobe's courses on Flex, ColdFusion and Flash development. He has been working with Flex since the earliest alphas of Flex 1, and started his ColdFusion development on CF 1.5. Jeff has worked as author and technical editor for several books, including "Flex 2: Training from the Source," "Object Oriented Programming with ActionScript 2.0," and "Dynamic Publishing with ColdFusion MX." Jeff is thrilled to be back speaking at CFUnited again. He has been a speaker each here year since CFUN-03. He is currently a founding partner of Tapper, Nimer and Associates, Inc, a company he formed with Mike Nimer shortly after CFUnited 2006.

Downloads

• Presentation