Adventures in Web Application Develompent by Phil Duba - CFUnited

CFUnited: Refactoring to Object Oreinted Programming

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0400

My final session at CFUnited was Dan Wilson's talk on Refactoring to Object Oriented Programming. While this session doesn't have as extensive notes as the other ones, it was very worthwhile to go to. Dan first talked about how to approach refactoring an application. His message was don't try and do everything at once because of a number of factors: cost, time, management buy in, etc. Instead, take a look at how you can change certain things in various areas of an application. To that end, he walked through a number of design patters and showed before and after code using the Kalendar application that he helped work on. If he could post those before and after, I think that would help folks trying to transition from procedural to OO-like as great examples of how and where to apply these principles.

CFUnited: Continuous Integration with SVN, ANT, CFUnit & Selenium

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:53:00 -0400

Next up on Saturday was Qasim Rasheed's presentation on integrating SVN, ANT, CFUnit & Selenium. Some of the beginning stuff was covered in other sessions, but one thing I did notice is that everyone does their things slightly differently even if they are using the same products. Also, Qasim indicated if he had more time, he'd probably have looked at MXUnit as opposed to CFUnit, but reiterated what others said and that any of the xUnit frameworks should be used. His overview of Selenium was very good and I'll add that to my ever growing list of things to try out after the conference and bring into the workplace for use. Here are my notes and conclusions from this session:

[More]

CFUnited: Prototyping for Smarties

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:44:00 -0400

In the afternoon on Saturday, I attended the Prototyping for Smarties session by Hal Helms and Clark Valberg. Tangent:Prior to their first session, I believe, I was having a discussion with a bunch of people who were trying to figure out what the "Smarties" candy was. I described it as looking like pills, aspirin, others said different kind of pills, but nevertheless, you can find out exactly what they are by going here.End Tangent. Anyways, as has come to be expected, Hal and Clark's presentation didn't disappoint and Ben Nadel played the hyper-worrying/frazzled developer (like nervous guy, Doug, on Scrubs) to a T (almost too good, you might say, :). What also was good, was having attended a number of Hal's sessions over the years, as well as his Fusebox training back in 2001 or 2002 (can't remember), is that he has reevaluated some of his positions on certain topics, like prototyping and the depth needed to move forward on a project (he now advocates the medium fidelity model). Lots of good points came out of the topic and combining it with the Changing the Game presentation, one can definitely begin to see how to approach clients in a different manner. Here are my notes from the presentation:

[More]

CFUnited: All about CFThread

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:26:00 -0400

Another session I attended Saturday was Rupesh Kumar's presentation on CFThread. I'll admit, since I don't have CF8 at work, I haven't really played with CFThread all that much and really don't know much more than what folks have mentioned in the blogsphere. Anyways, as is the theme that seemed to come out of this conference, it is definitely a tool worth looking into, especially considering all the emailing our applications do (and the logging they should be doing) that we could separate out and have them run under their own process. Here are my notes on the presentation:

[More]

CFUnited: Event Driven Programming

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:20:00 -0400

I'm going to try and finish up all my posts/reviews from CFUnited today and tomorrow. Essentially, I have the Saturday sessions to wrap up and then probably a final wrap-up from my experiences at the conference as a whole. Anyways, I got up early on Saturday to attend Sean Corfield's Event Driven Programming session. Essentially, Sean delved into a topic that is somewhat foreign to CFML developers, but is heavily used in the RIA space (Flex primarily but also in AJAX). CFML, by its nature (even if you use OO concepts) is procedural in nature. While Sean did show is new framework, Edmund, much of his talk centered on the types of thinking needed to institute and design for an event driven architecture. I have mentioned this a few times both here and to others, I didn't really understand the event aspect of Flex until I developed a few ASP.NET applications. For some reason, and it may have been the code-behind inherit in ASP.NET and VisualStudio, but I finally "got it" after doing those projects. It did help me to understand how I needed to think about "events" within a page and its response. I look forward to seeing more of Sean's Edmund framework. Here are my notes from the presentation:

[More]

CFUnited: Integrated ColdFusion Development Environment

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:49:00 -0400

The last session I attended on Friday was Phill Nacelli's presentation on the an integrated ColdFusion development environment. There wasn't much different in here that what has been shown with the ACME guide and the articles in the recently released Fusion Authority, but, like I said before, some of what I attended at CFUnited was to bring back ideas to work as we rethink our entire infrastructure. Phill used Apache instead of SVNServe so that was nice to see how all of that was setup. Here are my notes from the presentation and it has been recorded (hopefully so was Saturday's):

[More]

CFUnited: ColdBox Framework 101

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:36:00 -0400

Friday afternoon started off by me attending Luis Majano's Coldbox Framework 101 presentation. I must admit, I have never really looked at the framework before and wanted to see how it differs from the other frameworks. Luis gave a good overview of his framework and covered topics to be released in the next version (2.6 I believe). Anyways, here are my notes for this presentation:

[More]

CFUnited: Design Principles for Developers

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:28:00 -0400

I attended Dave Powell's Design Principles for Developers presentation on Friday morning (a nice way to start off a birthday). Design is something I really need to get into, especially if I ever decide to take on secondary work (well, I want to, but it's a matter of finding time). I struggle with layouts and understanding the relationships, but Dave did a good job of slowly introducing those subjects to us developers and has given me some things to think about when I mark up Fireworks comps or prototypes. He showed good and bad designs, although I'm not sure on some of the good designs, but the web community (Webby Awards) seemed to think so. Here are my notes from his presentation:

[More]

CFUnited: Automating the build & deployment process with ANT

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:20:00 -0400

Marc Esher gave a good overview of ANT on Thursday. When first working with ANT, I found it daunting, I didn't really understand it and the setup and it's real power. After attending Marc's presentation (as well as seeing its use in others), I'm not as "scared" of it as I was. Hopefully I can bring some things back to work and show my group how we can use it to minimize some of our more repetitive tasks that could really be done using build tools like ANT. Here are my notes from this presentation: [More]

CFUnited - Changing the Game

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:11:00 -0400

So I'm a little late in posting these reviews. I'll spread them out over the next few days (you would not believe how many people came up to me and asked why I wasn't posting reviews anymore). Hal Helms and Clark Valberg did a presentation on how to change the game when dealing with clients. This was a really good presentation and focused generally on how to make you stand out from others when obtaining work. My suggestion, as a I put on the review sheets, is to make this presentation into a podcast. I think it would benefit the community as a whole and the conversational style they used fits into a podcast nicely. It started out rather funny with Clark and the "outsourced" Hal and then everyone in the audience essentially revolting and saying "We Want Hal". The overall them was to show value to the customer by focusing on their needs first, being open to them, and including/working with them on processes that benefit both during the development of the application/project. Below are my notes from the presenation: [More]

CFUnited: Google Webmaster Tools

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:34:00 -0400

The first session of the afternoon I attended was Michael Dinowitz's Google Web Master Tools Step by Step. Michael went through each of the links on the left side of the Tools and provided some things to look at. He at least brought up things that people may not know when trying to figure out why a site isn't being shown and/or certain pages aren't being indexed. Below are my notes on the presentation. [More]

CFUnited - DB Design: Avoiding performance and maintenance headaches

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:37:00 -0400

My second session this morning at CFUnited was DB Design - Avoiding maintenance and performance headaches by Nate Nelson. I attended this because at work, we're going through a rearchitecting of our infrastructure and better defining the way we do applications. Working in a medical facility, we're dealing with tons of data and there is always potential for performance issues as a result so I attended the session to get an idea on what we can do moving forward regarding database design and what we might be able to do with existing databases to lessen this possible risk. Overall, I took away quite a bit of ideas to apply to a few concepts here to an application that has had some performance issues due to some, shall we say, interesting design decisions. Here are my notes from the presentation:
[More]

CFUnited: jQuery/CF Integration

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:19:00 -0400

This morning I attended John Farrar's jQuery/CF Integration presented by John Farrar. I was a little late, but thank goodness for technical difficulties I didn't miss much. That was a double edge sword also, as John tried to make up time during his presentation. Overall, it was a good introduction and I have realized I really need to get into jQuery to make a little more usable/rich applications. Here are my notes from the presentation:
[More]

CFUnited - OO Best Practices

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:40:00 -0400

I attended Hal Helm's Object Oriented Best Practices presentation this afternoon. I always enjoy listening to Hal give a presentation. His knowledge on OO subjects is extraordinary within the CF community and he always has great quotes he uses within his presentations. This presentation was no exception. Here are my notes from his presentation:
[More]

CFUnited - Test Patterns in CF

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:30:00 -0400

For the first afternoon session today, I attended Bill Shelton's Patterns for CF Test Automation. Below are my notes from the session:
[More]