Peter Freitag @NYCFUG

I can't really mention Rob's talk last night without also posting about last months NCFUG meeting. Peter Freitag came down from the frozen north of the state to talk about image manipulation in ColdFusion. Pete is one of those people who I've been looking forwards to meeting for a while now and it was great both to learn from his presentation and then to catch up with him after the meeting . . .

Pete started the talk by introducing cfimage and some of the mechanisms for loading an image into CF. He showed the captcha functionality of cfimage including a complete worked application for creating captchas with a sample implementation for creating and passing the encrypted captcha text to show how you could actually build a complete captcha based solution.

He then spent some time going through the metadata features of cfimage before going through some of the other key cfimage features and then explaining some of the common business use cases like manipulating watermarking images or adding prices or discount images to product thumbnails (perhaps like Amazon where the URL for an image can be used to return different sized images with or without additional "decoration" like a discount image.

I've been coding in ColdFusion for more than ten years now, but I still always seem to learn enough extra bits and pieces from user group presentations to make it a good investment of an evening. It was also great to meet Pete and to catch up with the usual suspects!