CFUnited 2008 Day 1 recap

I have three pages of notes, I'm so proud of myself! Granted, the notes are in 4x6 notepad, but still, go me.

From Ben Forta and Adam Lehman's opening Adobe keynote, the most exciting bit of news is that Hibernate will be built into ColdFusion 9.

(which may or may not be called version 9 and may or may not be called ColdFusion) Hibernate is an object relational mapper very similar to Transfer. Adam Lehman showed a working example of a CFC that was just the opening and closing tags. The name of the CFC was the same as a table in the database and all the base CRUD operations were automagically taken care of, no need for a single line of SQL or a . They also announced the creation of a CFML Advisory Committee, which will help define future changes to the CFML language. Over the 12 years of ColdFusion, lots of tags and attributes have gotten odd names and usages. Their goal is to standardize things going forward. There were representatives from Adobe, Railo, and other companies on the board and Ben veeeeeery careful said what I understood to mean, "New Atlanta isn't on this committee because they're doing more to harm the CF community, than help it." I might have totally misunderstood that though. New Atlanta or Blue Dragon were never said by name, but I felt they were implied.

Some other tidbits from other sessions...

From Peter Bell's session on RAD OO... Break rules one at a time. Either you'll end up with something really cool, or you'll understand why that rule was created.

From Mark Drew's session on ColdSpring configuration... "Imagine me dressed as a woman," while explaining the difference between proxy and regular beans. If you're seen Mark Drew, imagining him as a woman is extra funny, yet a little frightening. A lot frightening.

From Dave Powell's session on Flex skinning... Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Flash all have ways of creating and exporting a Flex skin. Illustrator is the best option if you have no pictures in the skin, since it will export a single swf file and keeps all the graphics as vectors, making them scalable and the file size smaller. Photoshop's method is a bit of a hack, as it loops over the layers in the file and exports them one at a time. So Photoshop is only good if you have some photos in your skin, which I can't imagine being the case. Flash would be good if you need movement in the skin, but you have to edit the components one at a time, unlike Illustrator and Fireworks, where you can see all components at once. Flash creates a single swc file, which is good for portability. Then Fireworks is okay, but creates a crapload of png files.

Then finally Selene Bainum's session on T-SQL and reporting... Cross apply! I'd never heard of it before, and the syntax looks unnecessarily complex, but it allows you to lump together repeating values into a comma delimited list. So if you joined a Computer table with an InstalledSoftware table, you could get single row per computer, with a column with a CDL of installed software. Pretty snazzy. Good for reporting and display, bad for everything else.