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.

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.

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.

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.

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• Presentation

• 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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The implementation of a well-planned caching strategy can make the difference between a scalable enterprise-wide application and an application that crushes under the weight of 3 or 4 simultaneous users. A good caching strategy should incorporate many facets of caching as they apply to ColdFusion application design and development. Whether caching simple rendered content/output or caching complex data objects and variables, the key to gaining maximum benefit is properly identifying caching candidates and the proper caching solutions. This session will focus on methods used for identifying application bottlenecks, further identifying cache candidates, and designing caching solutions based on those findings.

About Tyson Vanek

Tyson Vanek has been building Internet applications for 12 years with an emphasis on the use of Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe solutions. Tyson has a long history of implementing enterprise ColdFusion solutions for countless clients, big and small. Specializing in ColdFusion architecture and application development, he typically serves as a technical team lead and mentor. With experience dating back to the initial release of ColdFusion v1.0 in 1995, Tyson has worked with ColdFusion on every single web project and application he has been involved in during his 12-year career. In addition to his former role as a Senior Field Consultant working for Allaire and Macromedia, Tyson has worked with a number of large clients including such companies as Footlocker, Eastbay, Lockheed Martin, Abbott Laboratories, University of Virginia, Adelphia, Williams-Sonoma, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the International Broadcasting Bureau, and Discovery Communications.

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Adding RSS Feeds to your web sites and web applications is becoming more important every day. We will start from the ground up and explain what RSS is, and why it is important. Then you will learn how to build a RSS feed from scratch using your data. Along the way pick up several battle hardened tips and tricks for implementing standards compliant RSS feeds.

About Pete Frietag

Pete Freitag, President and Owner of Foundeo, Inc., has been a web developer specializing in ColdFusion since the mid '90s. Prior to starting his own company, Pete co-authored The ColdFusion MX Developer's Cookbook in 2003 and worked as CTO at ActivSoftware. At Foundeo, Pete provides consulting services, constructs web sites, develops products for web developers, and writes for his blog at www.petefreitag.com.

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Only the first half of the session was recorded...sorry about that!

Description

Many of the materials currently available for learning object-oriented programming in ColdFusion do an excellent job of explaining the basic concepts, but leave a bit to be desired in terms of teaching developers how to truly architect an enterprise application in ColdFusion using object-oriented principles and processes. This session will bridge this knowledge gap by outlining an object-oriented architecture in ColdFusion from back (your database) to front (your presentation layer) and everything in-between. Come to this session to learn how to better architect your OO ColdFusion applications.

About Matthew Woodward

Matt Woodward is Principal Information Technology Specialist at the Office of the Sergeant at Arms of the United States Senate in Washington, D.C. He is a Certified ColdFusion developer, has been working with ColdFusion since 1996, and blogs frequently about OO development and software architecture (http://www.mattwoodward.com/blog). In addition to his ColdFusion work, Matt also develops in Flex, Java, and C#. Matt is the release coordinator and a contributing developer for the Mach-II framework, he is on the editorial board of the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and he also co-hosts the ColdFusion Weekly Podcast.

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• Code Samples / Other Files

In this practical introduction to object orientation with ColdFusion components, well-known trainer Hal Helms will lead you through the architecting and coding of a project using CFCs. Along the way, we'll cover UML class diagramming, Model-View-Controller applications, and best practices for working with CFCs. If you're unsure of how to use CFCs in your applications -- or simply want to better integrate them into your applications -- this long session will help you.

Speaker Bio

Hal Helms is a well-known speaker/writer/strategist on software development issues. Hal has a monthly column in "ColdFusion Developer's Journal" and has written and contributed to several books. His latest book is "Discovering CFCs" available at www.techspedition.com. Hal holds training sessions on Java, ColdFusion, and software development processes. He is the author of the popular "Occasional Newsletter" series. For more information, contact him at hal@techspedition.com or see his website, www.halhelms.com.

Recording Date

June 27, 2007 4:30PM EDT

Presentation Materials

• Presentation

This presentation will provide an introduction to the Flex framework with a primary emphasis on object oriented design principles and code extensibility and reusability. Andrew will explain the basics of OOP in Flex, will demonstrate how to extend the Flex framework to build custom, reusable components, and will discuss building and maintaining a reusable code library of your own.

Speaker Bio

Andrew Trice is an Enterprise Applications Consultant for Cynergy Systems, based in Washington, DC. He specializes in data visualization, client-server architectures, Object-Oriented principles, and rich application development. He has been developing for the web for over 10 years, with over seven years development for the Flash platform. Andrew has developed with Flex since version 1.5, and he thrives off the creativity and flexibility that the Flex/Flash platform enables. Andrew possesses over six years experience with ColdFusion, is a Microsoft Certified Application Developer, and has a wide range of knowledge regarding relational databases, AJAX/Javascript, .NET, and Java web applications. An avid blogger, you can view some of Trice's latest work at: http://www.cynergysystems.com/blogs/page/andrewtrice.

Recording Date

June 27, 2007, 3:15PM EDT

Presentation Materials

Presentation

About Andrew Powell (Universal Mind)

Andrew Powell is a Senior Consultant with Universal Mind. He has been developing web applications for over 10 years, using ASP, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion.

Recording Date

June 27, 2007, 2:00PM EDT

Adam Lehman is the ColdFusion Specialist at Adobe Systems Incorporated based out of Washington, DC. Prior to joining Adobe, Adam was the Senior Web Engineer for the U.S. Department of State where he managed a team of developers and architected enterprise ColdFusion-based applications. Adam also founded and managed the Department of State Adobe Developer User Group for over two years. His background also includes several years designing and programming e-learning applications for Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Adam has been developing web applications specializing in ColdFusion for over a decade. His work has been featured in Macromedia's DRK (Developer Resource Kit) and his other areas of expertise include application security and Oracle database development.

About Patrick Quinn (Webapper Services, LLC)

As an employee at Allaire/Macromedia, Patrick served as a technical consultant on some of world's largest Web application projects at leading companies such as Bridgestone-Firestone, Clear Channel Communications, Cable & Wireless, Intuit and The United States Postal Service, among others. Upon leaving Macromedia in 2001, Patrick embarked upon forming his own software company, starting as an independent consultant for companies such as Napster and ProductionPoint Global Network, and later partnering with a group of former Macromedia consultants to form Webapper Services LLC. As a Founder and Lead Web Architect at Webapper, Patrick has lead his company in specializing in all aspects of Web application development, from programming and user-interface design, to architecture design and review, application debugging and deployment, and also including business strategies for the Web. Webapper has provided Web application expertise to premiere clients such as Ernst & Young, Sempra Energy, NASA, Visa and US Federal Government.

Recording Date

June 27, 2007, 2:00PM EDT

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For those of you new to CFUnited, here's a quick primer:

• CFUnited is the premier ColdFusion conference.
• ColdFusion is a web application server made by the nice people at Adobe Systems, Inc.
• CFML is also supported by alternative engines such as BlueDragon, Railo, and Smith.
• ColdFusion is the fastest, easiest way to build powerful web applications

Each year, CFUnited holds its main conference in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Over the course of the next year, we will be bringing you recordings of sessions from CFUnited, along with interviews with guests and speakers.

Enjoy the show!