• Keynote – Terry Ryan
• Coldfusion Application Framework – Ben Nadel
• HTML5 & CSS3 – Chris Mills
• The art of emotional of design – Aral Balkan *
• Extending ColdFusion Builder – Raymond Camden
• Two CFBuilder Extensions – Raymond Camden
• Getting ready for the mobile revolution – Serge Jespers
• Cloudy with a chance of Clustering – Mark Drew
• Productive work environment / practices – Peter Bell **
• Pomodorro Technique
• Advanced ORM – Terry Ryan
• SQL to HQL – John Whish
• Applying Twitter’s API “Best Practices” In A ColdFusion Application – Ben Nadel

As you can see, this list is far from complete (only sessions i went to) but i’ll keep it updated when presentations go up! (Feel free to drop in a comment and i’ll add any other sessions’ presentations or add new links when the become available).

* Video is actually from the Future of Web Design conference… but its the same presentation..
** Video is actually from the WebDU conference

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!

Adobe Keynote – Terry Ryan

The keynote for me was very interesting, Terry Ryan gave a brief overview of new bits and pieces of ColdFusion 9 including ORM which i think i definately need to look into and learn. He also mentioned things about ColdFusion 9.0.1, such things as fuller cfscript support and also mentioned a ‘top secret’ development, Amazon S3 support, which could be extremely handy!

Mastering the ColdFusion Application Framework – Ben Nadel

Ben Nadel never ceases to amaze me. His blog always comes up with a solution when i google for some help and he delivers yet again. Ben went through many of the common issues of the application.cfc file usage, as well as pointing out solutions to application.cfc issues. Cant wait to read his blog posts / get hold of his examples!

A whistlestop tour of HTML5 and CSS3 – Chris Mills

Chris Mills from Opera gave a really great presentation of the upcoming changes in the web development world in regard to HTML5 and CSS3. He expanded on what i already new about the new canvas / video / audio tags as well as explained the changes to the semantics of the html4 documents such as the new header, footer, nav tags etc.

How Catalyst Will Transform The ColdFusion Developer – Terry Ryan

Again Terry Ryan gave a great presentation on the the Adobe Catalyst product, sadly i dont think this is something that will ever affect me but was interesting to see the work flows between design, catalyst, flex/flash builder etc. As well as his ‘Apptastic’ ColdFusion Builder extension, which makes generating a skeleton app from just a datasource!

The Art of Emotional Design: A story of pleasure, joy, and delight – Aral Balkan

Aral Balkan has presentations down to a pat. What a great presentation it was as well! He started off by talking about his infamous ‘ColdFusion is dead‘ blog post and explaining his reasons for it. I’m sure this was well received within the community. He then went on to explain the reasonings for user friendly design, putting the user first and lots of other ‘delighters’.

Supercharge your ColdFusionBuilder – Ray Camden

Again, Ray Camdens blog has also been of great help to myself during my learning, and even Ray himself has been kind enough to point me in the right direction on a few occasions! His presentation was mainly to do with Snippets and Extensions within ColdFusionBuilder. It was great being shown examples of extensions, being told the pitfalls that CFBuilder has, oddities, features, what to do, what not to do etc. Great! Must use ColdFusion builder more!

Monday

• Mastering the ColdFusion Application Framework – Ben Nadel
• A whistlestop tour of HTML5 and CSS3 – Chris Mills
• How Catalyst Will Transform The ColdFusion Developer – Terry Ryan
• The Art of Emotional Design: A story of pleasure, joy, and delight – Arai Balkan
• Supercharge your ColdFusionBuilder – Ray Camden

Tuesday

• Get ready for the mobile revolution – Serge Jespers
• AJAX is the answer to everything and we never need to worry again and life is full of unicorns! – Ray Camden
• SQL to HQL – John Whish
• Cloudy with a chance of Caching and Clustering – Mark Drew
• Productive Work Environment / Practices – Peter Bell
• Applying Twitter’s API “Best Practices” In A ColdFusion Application – Ben Nadel

I’ve only been working with ColdFusion for the past 2 years or so and its quite easily changed my life. I was incredibly lucky to get a job at Frontmedia in 2008 and they started me down the right track. Since then i’ve changed jobs and work for Learning Assistant, its a gream team here and they’ve introduced me to the likes of jQuery, ajax, flex and greatly extending my SQL and ColdFusion knowledge!

Since joining Learning Assistant, i’ve been getting involved with the ColdFusion Community a lot more on Twitter and i must say, the community is brilliant! Whenever i’ve had issues with ColdFusion, i’ve done some Google’ing and usually found a solution of one of the commnuity members’ blogs, especially my personal favourite, Ray Camdens blog. If i havent been able to find a solution, tweet it and i have suggestions it minutes. Its great to know such a friendly bunch of guys (and girls!).

Scotch on the Rocks for me is a chance for me to finally meet the guys i’ve been tweeting, my ColdFusion heroes (yes it may be corny but a fair few developers out there have inspired me to want to be a better developer!) and to have fun and learn a lot more about the technologies and aspects of ColdFusion that i have no clue about!

The cowdog rally is a poor mans version of the Gumball Rally. Its a small trip around Europe with friends in beat up cars. The trip includes a visit to Oktoberfest (the world famous german beer festival), a stay in Munich, Bottrop Alpine Centre (indoor ski centre), Amsterdamn, Bruges and a few other stops.

The cars are modified in amusing ways and are bound to attract attention.

The site was built with a quick installation of WordPress and some customisations of an existing theme.

Check out the website!

I’m still wondering whether i should create a simple CFC for just listing / getting information, another for adding and sending campaigns or just bundle it all together in one big set? Any ideas?

The more and more i use the WordPress platform, the more and more i love it! I’ve used it on this site as well as a blog for the Essex Blades AFC and a blog for the company i work for, Learning Assistant.

Anyways, enough of my endless “I love WordPress” rant… Time to do some more development!