Stake Five

I’ve been away on holiday the last week, after an intense few days at CFUNITED 2006. This was my first brush with the CF community, and I have to say that it was most rewarding - from the sessions to the informal hallway chats to those who came up to talk to us at the booth, it was an amazing experience.

So what did I learn?

Being on the ColdFusion engineering team, I mostly write Java all day long, and just fragments of CFML when I have to write unit tests for new tags and functions, or bits of the CF Administrator. CFUNITED definitely gave me a much stronger sense of how the community thinks about code and design. Though superficially similar to the way a Java developer approaches a problem, there are distinct differences in the way a CF developer might think, and I’m beginning to get a stronger sense of what it means for CFML to be a dynamic language.

Design in the Flex era was the subject of several interesting conversations that I had. Many CF developers I spoke to are used to thinking in Model-View-Controller terms, which is how most web application frameworks function. While this is perfect for the average web application with a HTML interface, different thinking is required when programming to rich client interfaces such as those exposed by Flex or AJAX applications. Since the demo of the Flex 2 ColdFusion wizards at CFUNITED, many of the conversations I had were around how to design CF applications that talk to Flex user interfaces. What portion of the application should be on the server? How much logic should be moved over to the client? How should client and server interfaces be designed to create optimal applications? I’ll be writing more on this topic in the weeks to come.

But most important of all, I got a strong sense of the passion around ColdFusion. I can safely say that I’ve never encountered this kind of energy around any technology before - it’s a privilege to be a part of the ColdFusion community.