Some random post CFUnited thoughts

Now that CFUnited's over (at least for me) and I've had some time to rest and mull over things, I wanted to post a few random thoughts and opinions:

• The entire L'Enfant Plaza Metro station (columns, walls, even some of the Metro railcars that passed through) was one big ad for Adobe LifeCycle. The message: LifeCycle can help the government manage and distribute PDF forms. Unusual? I don't get down into DC too often, but I'd never seen any one company take over an entire station like that before. I want to see more of this high-visibility marketing from Adobe, especially for ColdFusion.

• Sean Corfield's new asynchronous event-driven framework, Edmund, looks very cool. Being able to fire off events and have them bubble up through the framework much like what you can do in Flex is a very appealing idea.

• Twitter once again proved to be a useful tool. I found it a lot easy to "tweet" what was going on instead of writing it up on the blog, and thanks to Nafisa Sabu and Elliot Sprehn of TeraTech, anyone who visited the CFUnited website could read the tweets of the conference-goers who had "friended" the CFUnited Twitter account. Hopefully a few folks found my tweets to be useful.

• While the proposed integration of Hibernate in ColdFusion 9 sounds neat, I think Transfer is still going to be the ORM of choice for many developers, both now and in the future, for some of the reasons Mark listed in his blog and because Transfer works/will work on a larger number of CFML platforms (CF7, CF8, and probably OpenBD and Railo).

• The discussion about whether or not ColdFusion and ColdFusion development is becoming too Java-like isn't over yet. I met a developer who made the point that it seemed strange (and stupid) to him that we're trying to entice Java developers to use CFML because it makes development faster and easier while we seem to be gravitating towards adding complexity to our development process and our code.

  I made the usual argument that regardless of the focus on OOP in the ColdFusion blogging community, no one was advocating removing those aspects of ColdFusion that make CFML easy to learn and use, and that even OO-style programmers will admit that there are some situations where using an OO application framework is overkill, but he wasn't entirely convinced.

  It made me wonder: if Adobe does develop a teaching curriculum as part of their effort to get ColdFusion adopted in schools, will that curriculum take advantage of CFML's traditional low learning curve, or will they emphasize an OO-style of programming from the get-go?

• Some promising ideas came out of Brian Meloche's session on promoting ColdFusion/CFML outside of the community. The existence/promise of OpenBD and Railo and Adobe's decision to make ColdFusion free for educational use has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. You should be hearing about these ideas soon, either via the CFConversations podcast or some other channel.

• Which reminds me, you should check out the CFConversations podcast if you haven't done so already. And I would say that even if I wasn't involved with the project. :)