cf.Objective() Rocked

Joe launched Model Glue 3. In the Flex world, Nahuel and Laura introduced Mate, and Chris Scott launched Swiz which for me is the most exciting of all of the projects as I'm finally going to start to do some Flex work and I really wanted to have a DI engine available for both coding and testing. Having someone way smarter than me write it is a pretty big bonus and I can pretty much guarantee there won't be a FlexWire project :-> I think Maxim is hoping to contribute some AOP which would be perfect. Only thing I see missing in the Flex world right now is some kind of mocking framework, so I may give one of those a go just to learn a little bit about the intricacies of AS3 once I've figured out how to get a "hello world" compiling.

Luis presented an amazing two hour workshop on ColdBox 2.6 which for me is hands down the most thorough MVC project in the ColdFusion world. Unfortunately, nobody told him it was two hours rather than two days(!), so we didn't get a chance to cover everything he wanted, but the framework clearly has amazing potential and it'll really be interesting to see its growth over the next couple of years.

Mark taught us all about caching in Transfer (both how it works and the fact that non-Australians have been mispronouncing this word for years - who knew it should be "kay-shing" :->). Brian Kotek provided a practical introduction to code generation (from snippets on up), and Brian Rinaldi pointed out that with a little bit of Duck Dodgers, even regular programmers could learn to understand (if not to love) Cairngorm. John Mason also made it very clear why we're all in deep trouble if we're doing ANYTHING with credit cards without being PCI compliant.

Andy Powell also gave an amazing presentation on Enterprise ColdFusion and Java, showing how to work with Spring and Hibernate in CF (Joe also has some very nifty ideas about using Spring as a parent bean factory for ColdSpring - it really is amazing how much you can learn in the bar at cf.o()). I can tell I'm going to have to play around with Spring and Hibernate a bit in a test Java project to look at how I might be able to better integrate CF and Java (the subject of a separate talk by Jason Delmore which I thoroughly regret missing - twice).

There were many other excellent presentations (hey, if you want to know about all the presentations, sign up for next year!), but two I've got to comment on were Terry Ryan on selling professional development in a hostile shop and Maxim Porges on Flex without Frameworks.

Terry's presentation was a delight. Well delivered, illustrated and reasoned, he provided a simple set of patterns for introducing new development techniques (from source control to frameworks) by looking at patterns of resistance and some useful ways to deal with each type. I have at least a posting or two that are gestating after that talk (some based on related but different material at SPA), but with my current schedule it may be a little while until I post them.

Maxim did a great job with a presentation style influenced by a talk by Neal Ford at No Fluff Just Stuff (an excellent speaker and conference respectively - Neal Ford is another ThoughtWorker and has some great presentations on InfoQ about meta-programming). Maxim had a really engaging style, great visuals and make a compelling story for building just what you need rather that starting out with frameworks. Again, I'm working up a detailed posting, but my feeling is that what Maxim really proved was that an understanding of YAGNI, iterative development and excellent design skills mean that HE doesn't need a framework to build great applications. Nevertheless it was an excellent talk and will certainly help me to get up to speed with writing elegant code in Flex as I start to learn AS3 and MXML.

As always, Jared and Steven were extremely gracious hosts (was it just me that felt it was as inviting as a gathering of old and new friends at a buddies place?), and I can't believe that Jim (who helped to organize the conference) was a geek as well as a meeting planner! He helped to round out a great team. And then there was Sean who had the unenviable task of selecting and reviewing presentations. Well, at least he got to attend one conference without having to speak (although I'm not convinced such a waste will be allowed in the future :->).

As always, some of the best learning was outside of the sessions, it was great to see many old friends, and to meet some new ones (as well as putting faces to a number of names from the mailing lists). I can only suggest that whatever you do, come along next year. See you at cf.o() 2009!