Are there any relevant ColdFusion sessions at RIA Unleashed this year?
Posted on Sep 15, 2010
Absolutely! While I think it's a great event for getting a range of topics across the Adobe spectrum, if your only interest is ColdFusion there is still an entire track purely dedicated to CF while Flex, Flash, AIR, Mobile and everything else split the remaining 3 tracks. This means that ColdFusion probably gets more dedicated sessions than any other product at the event. Given the recent demise of CFUnited, RIA Unleashed now becomes the only East coast event with ColdFusion content (and its in Boston...what could be better!). In response to a concern I heard expressed, I just wanted to give some context to some of the sessions since perhaps the session titles don't make it 100% clear the relevancy of the topics. So forgive the lengthy post but here are some details about about why I think these sessions are both relevant, important and useful to ColdFusion developers. Oh, and don't forget to register!
Sessions:
Marc Esher on MongoDB - this is a NoSQL database that is a great possibility for caching or saving user settings that you want to be hyper-fast and flexible but don't need be stored in a relational db. I attended a session on this topic (though not specific to MongoDB) at CFUnited and it was the single most eye-opening session of the event in my mind.
Ray Camden on Solr - The Solr search engine was included as of ColdFusion 9 and is replacing ColdFusion's Verity search which will no longer be supported in future versions. If you plan to do any document/text searches using features like cfsearch/cfindex anytime in the future, you will need to understand Solr. Making the transition from Verity to Solr can be more complex than it would seem depending on your setup, so this session should be a great help.
Bob Silverberg on Advanced ORM - getting started with ORM can seem very easy (and is for the most part) but as you start to build complex sites using ORM there are a lot of aspects of the underlying Hibernate engine that you need to understand to ensure your application works as you planned and holds up under increasing usage and load. This is also a great companion session to Bob's intro to ORM workshop.
Terry Ryan covers many screens, one server - Among other things this covers ColdFusion with HTML5 and ColdFusion as a back-end to mobile. These are fast-moving and increasingly important areas that I don't think any CF developer can afford not to understand.
Todd Sharp on the Adobe stack - this session shows how someone was able to utilize ColdFusion and the rest of the Adobe stack to launch a site with some rather complex technical requirements. Todd launched SlideSix on his own and has received coverage from sites such as TechCrunch for the unique features of his authoring. This should be a great session to get a great grasp on taking an idea from conception to launch (and forward) using ColdFusion.
Workshops:
Bob Silverberg on ORM - ORM is the single most important feature in ColdFusion 9 in my opinion. It has the ability to completely change the way you build applications and the potential to save you incredible amounts of time and code. However, it can be daunting to get started and Bob Silverberg is one of the most knowledgeable people on this topic.
Blue River on Mura CMS - As someone who has used Mura extensively, I can say it is extremely impressive. Mura can help you have a fully content managed site up and running in no time but also allows the flexibility to customize how the system functions through plugins and extensions. If you manage content on your site (and really, who doesn't?), this is a very worthwhile session.
Simon Free on ColdFusion Builder Extensions - If you are using the new ColdFusion IDE but not using or creating extensions, you are only getting half the experience as I see it. ColdFusion extensions offer you a way to simplify or automate many common or even complex tasks you often want to do within an IDE - and the only skill you need is your knowledge of CFML.
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