Okay, this is seriously cool.
The WebDU team have come up with a Trading card game for the conference to help encourage conference attendees to talk to each other.
Each card has its own unique rules, and I'm willing to guess there are some pretty rare cards amongst the set.
At the end of the conference, you hand in the cards that you have managed to collect, steal, beg, borrow, buy, haggle, receive, or negotiate for, they add up all the points on your cards. If you have a high score, you win a prize.
Honestly, this is one of the most innovative things I've seen a web conference do, to promote interaction between its attendees.
My only concern is, after the conference, what if I want to keep all my cards? It becomes a toss up between cards, and prizes.... oooh.. tough call.
Although I may be willing to trade
Transfer stickers for WebDU cards :oD Anyone wanna trade?
Announcing two new developments for the Professional Open Source Software side of
Transfer.
Compound Theory is now offering the following new programs:
Transfer Support Contracts
The basic yearly support package provides you with 20 hours of support, covering:
- Installation
- Usage
- Performance
- Bug Fixes
Contact through several different channels, including:
- Email
- Skype
- Instant Messenger
Extra support hours can be purchased at any time, and rolled over into subsequent years if required.
Sponsored Feature Development
If there is a feature that has yet to be developed for Transfer that your project could really use, either from the
extensive enhancement ticket list, or something that you have thought of, it is possible to sponsor its development.
Full
or partial sponsorship is available, and will give the feature you
desire priority in its development, and/or the ability to specify the
schedule it needs to be developed in.
If you are interested in either of these programs, or want more details, please feel free to contact me for more details
through the contact form, mark [at] compoundtheory [dot] com, or through Skype through the account mark_mandel.
There have been several bug fixes and performance and memory usage
improvements since the initial Release Candidate, so here I present to
you Release Candidate 2!
Transfer 1.0 Final is slated for the 8th of June, just a few days before webDU is going to start!
In case people haven't realised yet, but there will be a
full day's training for Transfer at webDU, in which we're going to do a lot of hands on coding, so you can get a really good understanding of the Transfer framework.
The Transfer support contracts I
blogged previously should be ready this week, we're just finalising some final details, so please
contact me, if you have any interest in this area.
Also, just a quick reminder that Transfer based consulting services are also available right now, so feel free to
contact me if you have any needs.
The Transfer 1.0 Release Candidate 2 can be download from
here.
Release notes can be found here .
Not a huge amount to report. This release simply re-orders some of the class loading, so it is child first.
This
is important in case you load up a newer (or older) version of a
library that ColdFusion already has access to, and you want to make
sure you get the library you want, not the library loaded by ColdFusion.
That and I fixed a bug in the JavaProxy.cfc that was sent to me a loooong time ago, that will fix an issue with resolving overloaded Java Methods.
JavaLoader can be downloaded from
here.
All,
Another CFUG on the way!
(Apologies for the delay in getting this out, I was in the US!)
Location:
NGA.net, Level 2, 17 Raglan St, South Melbourne
Map:
http://link.toolbot.com/google.com/73016
When:
15th of May, Meeting starts at 7:00, so get there before hand (doors open at 6:30).
Agenda:
Richard Herbert, CTO of
NGA.NET, Australia's leading e-recruitment company, has been working with ColdFusion since 1997 and version 2.0. With a background in the legal and training industries Richard has developed applications for retail, point of sale, aviation, training, manufacturing, government and of course the HR industry. Also Telstra (but who hasn't?)...
Since 2000 Richard has been building
NGA.NET's e-recruitment product and delivering solutions to Top 500 companies and federal government, where
NGA.NET have 100% market share. The application has gone through many evolutionary steps, with a brand new version built on mach-ii/ColdSpring/Transfer architecture in beta for 2008.
NGA.NET is in the BRW Fast 100 for 2008 - a list of Australia's top 100 fastest growing companies.
And the presentation...
...will be titled 'Usability for Developers - The Ugly Truth'. I will be seeking to provide the audience with an understanding of what the field of usability covers, how to apply usability methods during the development cycle and the surprising results you can achieve.
Depending on time, Mark Mandel will also take us through some of the CF9 discussion that occurred at the cf.Objective() conference, and give us some insight into what could possibly be coming in CF9.
If you are going to attend, please RSVP to mark -dot- mandel -at- gmail -dot- com.
Only those that RSVP are eligible for the door prizes, so make sure you apply!
See the CFUG Melbourne Calendar at:
http://www.cfcentral.com.au/Events/index.cfm
Or add to your Google Calendar - search for 'CFUG Melbourne'.
As per usual, we'll grab pizza during the evening, so we have something to scoff down!
Look forward to seeing you all there.
Okay, forgive me one Australia joke ;o).
cf.Objective()
was an absolutley fanstastic conference all around, and I had an
incredible time. Not only were the presentations top notch, but it's
always an incredible pleasure to meet up with the people that I only
tend to see once a year, and I always get a huge burst of inspriation
just being around clever people and sharing various ideas over a drink
or two.
Presentations
I'm not going to go into all of the presentations, but as per usual,
they were all of an incredibly high calibre, and I came out of all of
them learning something new.
Highlights of the conference for me were:
Model-Glue 3: Back to its Roots - Joe Rinehart
This was a really interesting presentation, to see what MG3, code named
Gesture,
had in store for its users. I really like the innovative approach Joe
has taken to enable to framework to generate itself as you develop with
it.
Selling Professional Development at a Hostile Shop - Terrence Ryan
I
now refer to Terrence as 'the master manipulator' ;o). He outlined a
series of personality types that can often occur when working in an
organisation that tends to lean against the utilisation of software
development practices such as frameworks, unit testing, or version
control, and how to encourage them to accept, and even appreciate,
these practices when previously they had shunned them.
His
use of images to illustrate each of his points was also particularly
clever, I never knew that a photo of Bea Arthur wrestling a velociraptor could ever have any sort of context!
Workshop: ColdSpring 1337 - Chris Scott
Honestly,
this was probably my favourite session at cf.Objective(). Chris went
through some really interesting way you can use AbstractFactories and
AOP to really push what is possible to do within ColdSpring. He used a
Flex / ColdSpring / Transfer/ Yahoo Maps mash-up to show this off,
incorporating some nice Transfer powered Flex Remoting, implemented
with some very nice ColdSpring Remote Proxy AOP work (Before people
ask, yes, this will be finished off and released at some point)
Finally, Chris showed off his new Flex framework,
Swiz,
and while I don't even do much (any?) Flex development, I looked at and
just went 'Well, that is a pretty sweet framework'. I'm looking to do
some Flex work in the near future, and I can see me really getting into
Swiz.
Workshop: Advanced Techniques with the ColdBox Framework - Luis Majano
While
I didn't attend most of this presentation (I think I was balled up on a
couch somewhere trying not to drop off to sleep), I dropped in at the
end, so that Luis and I could do a quick announcement of the CodexWiki
Open Source Wiki, which is currently powering
docs.transfer-orm.com. We are opening a private beta for Codex, before we do a full release. If you are interested in being involved, feel free to
drop me an email.
Transfer
One of my favourite things about the conference was running around
giving lots of people Transfer stickers. It gave me a wonderful
opportunity to talk to lots of people about Transfer, and I think I
actually managed to get it so that about one in every third person had
a Transfer sticker on their laptops (Statistics based on no real
analysis)! I passed on a stack of stickers to a few people, so if you
weren't fortunate to get any at cf.Objective(), or couldn't attend, you
may find some people around who still have some to hand out.
I also did two presentations on Transfer, one of of which was a repeat. While the first time I presented
Introduction to Build Applications with Transfer ORM,
didn't quite go according to plan (technical difficulties), people
still seemed to get a lot out of it, which I was very happy about. The
Transfer ORM Caching Mechanics and the repeat of the
Introduction talk went far more smoothly, and got good reviews from the
people that I talked to, which is very pleasing.
ColdFusion 9
The ColdFusion 9 keynote, and BOF was another highlight of the
conference for me, although, I must admit, I didn't hear any feature
requests that really surprised me.
Adobe is further opening up the ColdFusion development process, promising us a Open Bug Tracker, and setting up an Advisory Committee, which is fantastic.
We
got a hinting at a ECMAScript (style?) syntax for ColdFusion
components, which I know is something that people, myself included,
have wanted to a long time. From that, there seemed to be a big push
to be able to write AS3 on the server side. Considering that a lot of
new CF developers seem to be coming from Flex, I think this would be a
really smart move on Adobe's part. Not only does it streamline the
training process for Adobe based Rich Internet Applications, it
provides a solid, single language for Adobe products, which can then
only be expanded.
That being said, it
would be very important that the CFML language also be kept intact,
both for backward compatibility, and for the fact that a tag based
syntax just makes so much sense on the view layer. (Oh, and let's not
forget, some people just like writing CFML ;o) )
People
One of the biggest draw cards for cf.Objective() is the people you get
to hang out with. For me personally, it's the only chance I get per
year for me to actually see a lot of the people that I speak to day in,
day out on-line.
It also gave me a chance to meet and talk to some of the people I've worked remotely with as well, specifically, the
Dinowitzs, who run the great
Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, and the really cool
Alagad crew.
Let's also not forget that I won the Wii,
which was a big surprise! It was very amusing watching multiple people
try and convince me how it wouldn't work in Australia, and that I
should just give it to them, because really 'I didn't need it' ;o).
Let it be known, that a new power cable is on its way in the post, and
soon theWii will be up and running smoothly.
Oh yeah.. and I don't care what you lot say, it's cay-shing, not caaashing. ;o) See you all next year!
