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Centaur, Bolt and Gumbo at the Boston CFUG

Posted on Feb 12, 2009

If you are in the Boston area and you missed last night's Boston CFUG meeting, I hate to tell you that you really missed out. We were lucky not only to have newly minted ColdFusion Product Manager, Adam Lehman, but also Flex Builder Product Manager, Tim Buntel, Director of Engineering for ColdFusion, Hemant Khandelwal, lead engineer on Bolt, Ram Kulkarni, and ColdFusion Product Marketing Manager, Allison Huselid.

Adam first discussed some of the upcoming changes in Centaur including items like the server,.cfc Hibernate integration and full cfscript support. Some of the Centaur highlights for me included the import and new keyswords which will greatly simplify creating objects in my mind and the implicit getters/setters which will save a lot of code. Adam then showed some of the features of Bolt including full component insight on any component in the request (even one instantiated in Application.cfc for example) and lots of tools for generating code based upon database metadata. The nice part of this is that not only are the actual menu items for the code generation tools customizable but the code they generate is as well. In fact, with some minor changes this could definitely be made to hook up to Illudium allowing you to generate against your existing Illudium templates within Bolt. I am sure we'll hear more about this to come.

Next Tim Buntel got up to show off some of the data-centric features they are adding to Flex Builder. He showed the ways in which they are trying to make Flex more accessible to people just getting into it by adding tools to tie in ColdFusion (or PHP or WebService) services which can then easily be bound to any UI element on the page. In his example, he quickly bound a ColdFusion service method's results to a DataGrid and then even added a handler for sending updates using Flex's new "client-side data management" features. Most of this was done with very little hand-coding. He insisted that if you have a particular methodology you will be able to integrate some of these features into that. For what its worth, most of our audience was either new or completely unfamiliar with Flex coding and many expressed the opinion that this would help them get started making the transition.

All in all, I think I speak for everyone in attendance when I say that we were very grateful to get Adam, Tim, Ram, Hemant and Allison together at a single event. I don't think I have seen any presentations of that sort outside of MAX. So, if you haven't signed up for the Boston CFUG mailing list, this is a good time! (or find us at Adobe Groups :)

Comments

I can't help but think that you posted this just to rub salt in my wound ;-) Sorry I couldn't be there. Thanks for the writeup and pic though. So are you saying some of the preso materials be posted?

Posted By Bernie Dolan / Posted on 02/12/2009 at 1:14 PM

Wow - sounds like and amazing group and presentation!

Posted By Peter Bell / Posted on 02/13/2009 at 6:59 AM

In the Bolt demo, did the File Browser finally have sortable columns for file name, size, last mod date and file type?

Any discussion of when the Bolt beta starts?

Sorry I missed it. Now if Flex Camp Miami was one day earlier, I would be there:)

Posted By Tom K / Posted on 02/14/2009 at 12:55 PM