Chris Mills (Opera)
I should have bumped into the speaker before now really, as he's from Manchester, but we'd never managed it :-)
Anyway, Chris started with a bit of history, namely that HTML4 is not dead. It can't do some things like video, which is why Flash got started in the first place. One great quote was 'bullshit will HTML5 kill Flash'.
This years Scotch on the Rocks was based in central London, a conveniently small walk from Trafalgar Square itself.
The venue was a perfectly well layed out Tiger Tiger, with large rooms for the talks and funky mezzanine chill out reception area.
According to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/08/web_app_security_survey/ the top 3 security issues in web applications are:
The following explains how ColdFusion can help protect you from each.
The Reactor ORM framework for ColdFusion recently gained a useful feature called 'filters'.
Filters stand midway between using the built in object-based query language and 'rolling your own' methods using CFQUERY.
Many awards - great media coverage too
talks up Gartner review saying that CF use should be expanded, was previously 'contain' and don't use for new projects.
Evans Data Corporation's developer poll - numbers flat in '04 and '05, up tick '06 to over 600k, steady increase till '07, then CF8 comes out in '08 and now over 778k developers. Tripling in 3 years ! ColdFusion is not dead :-)
Here are the presentation slides and the example files for my 'ColdSpring Introduction and Web Services' talk that I just gave at the 'Scotch on the Road' conference in Manchester.
You can get just the Aspect Orinated Programming CFC components from http://falkensweb.com/other.html.
For those who don't remember, Spectra was an Adobe application framework that provided a web based desktop and work flow capabilities on top of ColdFusion, that has since been retired and then open sourced.
But it turns out that the ghost lives on, because if you ask ColdFusion's document indexing service, Verity, for information about a collection, it lets you know that a ghost created it :-)
Today Adobe released two updates to ColdFusion resources which will really help out the community.
Firstly, ColdFusion is now listed on 'Community Search' which searches all the official Adobe documentation as well as selected blogs, web pages and other non-Adobe resources. As I often find a working example from a real user more useful than a dry API doc., this is great. You can restrict the results to 'just Adobe' if you are trying to seach for things on just the DevNet or real documentation.
If you've not seen this posting then you don't know that there is a fair chance that the UK's number one ColdFusion conference, Scotch On The Rocks, well be stopping off in Manchester during it's 2009 road trip.
If you are a ColdFusion developer and can get to Manchester for a day (and night ;-) ) you would hate to miss out, so let Andy know you could make it.
I've registered my interest directly along with a few other people, so maybe see you there if it comes off !
If you have ever thought 'why doesn't Reactor just...' now is the time to let the Reactor team know.
Mark Drew has listed a few ideas of what might go into Reactor v2 on the mailing list (note the new home on Google Groups by the way) but I'm sure there's lots of other new ideas or improvements to existing features lying around in your head too, right ? If so, drop the mailing list or Mark himself a note about them.