Sunday, May 20, 2012

Post-cf.Objective() Thoughts

Just got back home from cf.Objective().  During the plane trip home, I wrote down a few paragraphs about the sessions I attended that I'll share now before kicking back for the rest of the day:

  • Marc Esher's session on threads and concurrency was excellent.  If you implement or plan to implement concurrent code execution in your CFML applications, you need to look at the CFConcurrent library he developed (available on RIAForge and GitHub).  The library utilizes the Java Concurrency Framework (JCF) and makes it possible to return results/data from with a thread (something you can't do with <cfthread>), schedule/defer threaded actions, and set up "threading within threading."

  • Nathan Strutz provided so much information and so many examples of using LESS to manage and generate CSS that I missed a few things trying to take notes.  No worries, though: he put up everything from his presentation on GitHub, including a number of examples and demos that show you some best practices on how to add LESS compilation into your development and production workflow.  And not long after the session, Matt Gifford made his own contribution to the LESS toolset:  a CF Builder extension that lets you do the compiling within the IDE.

  • Curt Gratz's session on mocking covered the reasons why you should mock data and objects when you unit testing, then showed attendees how MockBox makes it easy to mock function calls and their results on the fly.  As someone still finding his way regarding unit testing, I found his one walkthrough on how to make sure you're always testing a single function, and not a parent or dependent function, very helpful.  And even though MockBox is part of the ColdBox family of projects, it can be run as a standalone product, so you can make it part of your unit testing strategy regardless of what framework you use.

  • Billy Cravens also did an excellent job with his session on authenticating users via social networks.  Adding Google, Facebook, and Twitter-based authentication to your site is really now just a matter of getting an API and private key for your site from those services and making use of the available.  His demo code, available on GitHub, shows examples for all three service providers within a simple application built with the FW/1 framework.

  • I attended Denard Springle's multi-factor authentication workflow session mostly out of curiosity, as it's not something I can really implement with my particular user base.  But he showed us his technique of securing URL and form variables submissions, which involves hashing the variable names and encypting the variable values.  That's something I've never seen anyone else do.  Slides from his demo that illustrate that technique are available from his collection of presentation slide decks (look for the "Multi-Factor Authentication" one).

  • A room for conducting ad-hoc discussions or coding sessions was provided, and I ended up hosting a half-hour session on CFML applications in higher education.  The seven or so of us described some of the applications we've worked on, and as I suspected there was quite a diversity of applications, mostly built in support of the administrative processes at our schools rather than the educational process itself.  But I did learn that a few of us use (or are in the process of implementing) the Jasig CAS single sign-on tool, and that there would be interest in having some kind of robust form/survey tool (possibly with plugins like one to handle online payments) that we could set up such that non-programmers could create what they needed from it.  The question was raised as to whether it would make sense to augment Mura CMS to create such a thing.  We didn't discuss or make any further plans beyond that, so whether the discussion will continue in some form (move further forward) online remains to be seen.

As my conclusion, I will say that the conference was excellent as always (hardly a unique opinion, I know).  I've been to cf.Objective() before (in 2008), but this was my first time attending at the current venue, which is the Nicolett Mall area of Minneapolis.  It's a very pedestrian-friendly area of the city, and with the near-perfect weather we had it was quite lively.  It gave us a lot of options for dining and socializing after the sessions, and being able to hang out with other members of the community is one of the great benefits of the conference.

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