SOTR2010 – Day 2

Posted by Jon on May 25, 2010 in ColdFusion, SOTR2010 | 3 comments

So, unfortunately, Scotch on the Rocks is over for 2010! I’ve had a great couple of days, met a few people from Twitter that i often tweet, met a couple of my idols and learnt a hell of a lot about things going on in the ColdFusion world!

So a brief rundown of the things i’ve learnt/enjoyed at the second and final day…

Get ready for the mobile revolution – Serge Jespers

This session really has inspired me to get into mobile application development and look into learning flash/actionscript and flex. His session went into the changes of Flash and the upcoming release of Flash 10.1 (Full mobile version of Flash!) Must try and convince my boss to get us an Android for “development purposes”, preferably the Nexus One! I love the idea of writing Adobe Air apps for phones, and could benefit the company i work for a lot.

AJAX is the answer to everything and we never need to worry again and life is full of unicorns! – Raymond Camden

Rays session was another eye opener. It was more of a questions and answers session but it worked extremely well. It brought common ajax issues to  my attention, what to look out for, some tips for security etc.

SQL to HQL – John Whish

Johns presentation was also very inspiring, not bad for his first presentation either! HQL/Hibernate looks like a very interesting solution and a real time saver. Definately something to look at when we migrate to ColdFusion 9.0.1 when thats released. Although i’m slightly worried about performance in regard to using it for our high usage e-portfolio system.

Cloudy with a chance of Caching and Clustering – Mark Drew

This was the first time i’ve ever given any real thought to Railo. After seeing the backend panel and the options it gives you, it makes me wonder why Adobe is taking a lot of leaves from Railo’s book! What i really like was the clustering solution and the way that the instances all synchronise! Also the way you can run Railo using only Amazon web services sounds very very cool. Only pay what you use for. Great idea!

Productive Work Environment / Practices – Peter Bell

This session wasnt of much interest too myself but i do see what he was saying. Things like Launchers, Multiple Clipboard and Macro tools could indeed speed up my day and a few of the techniques could help keep myself motivated, in the right frame of mind and reduce distraction. Quite sceptical about the ‘Pomodorro Technique’ though.

Advanced ORM – Terry Ryan

Terry’s speech was kind of an expansion of John Whish’s SQL to HQL session and provided a lot more incite to overall usage and limitations. Definitely a good idea to wait until 9.0.1 before i think about using it though. I do like how Adobe though of all of the common issues that could crop up and the easy work arounds for them!

All thats left to say really is a big thank you to all the Scotch on the Rocks team for putting on a great conference. Enjoyed it a lot and i’m glad it was my first conference. Hopefully see you all again next year!