Bob's Blog

As promised, the slide deck from my presentation at CFUnited about ValidateThis, a validation framework for ColdFusion, is now available. Download it in PDF format here. Here's a description of the session:

Automagic Validations for ColdFusion Objects

This session will provide an overview of, as well as a detailed how-to about a Validation framework for ColdFusion. The title is a slight misnomer, as, although the framework was originally written to work inside an object-oriented application, and remains an ideal solution for that, it has recently been enhanced to work with simple ColdFusion structures as well. This means that anyone who is looking for a better way of addressing their validation requirements, both on the client side and on the server side, can now benefit from the framework, even if they are not using objects.

The main benefit of the framework is that it will automatically generate all of your client-side and server-side validations for you, from a simple set of metadata. This frees you from the drudgery of writing similar validation code over and over again, and also eliminates the possibility of adding bugs into your application via your validation code. The framework, called ValidateThis, is being actively developed by myself and a number of other contributors, so not only is it extremely functional and flexible right now, but new features are being added continually. If you are interested in finding out more about it, including exactly how to implement it in a new or existing application (and it's dead easy), I encourage you to take a look at the material.

I just finished updating my CFUnited schedule for next week's conference, now that all of the Saturday sessions are available. If you are going to be attending this year's conference, the organizers are requesting that you enter your schedule into the online scheduling app to help them determine room sizes for each session.

I must say I am very impressed with this year's lineup. I had no trouble finding sessions that were of great interest to me in practically every time slot, and the repeat sessions that take place on Satrurday are going to enable me to see virtually every session that I want. If you're interested to know which sessions I've chosen, see the table below, which was generated by the CFUnited scheduler app:

[More]

As I'm sure many of you are aware, the final CFUnited will be starting in a little over a week. Although I did attend a couple of CFUN's in the past (when they were a one-day event), this will be my first CFUnited, so I'm pretty excited about it. It will be great to meet even more people than I usually do at other conferences, such as cf.Objective() and NCDevCon, and I wanted to give a final plug to my sessions, as I think they will be of interest to a lot of developers. As well, I've made some last minute changes to both sessions to cover some new material.

What Your Mother Never Told You About CF9 ORM

The ColdFusion team at Adobe have done an outstanding job with ColdFusion ORM, which now provides ColdFusion developers with access to Hibernate, an enterprise-ready, open source, industry-standard Java ORM. The documentation on how to use CF ORM in the ColdFusion docs is also quite good, providing most of what you need to know to make use of the features. The problem, however, is that Hibernate is a pretty complex tool, and in order to use CF ORM successfully you really need to understand certain things about Hibernate. This session is designed to teach you some of those things - it will cover material that is not included in the ColdFusion documentation, but that is essential to understand when working with the ORM.

Topics covered will include Hibernate Session Management, Understanding Object States, Working with Detached Objects, Concurrency and Using a Base Persistent Object. We'll also be looking at the new Transaction Management model in the recently released ColdFusion 9.0.1. If you plan on working with CF ORM and are not already familiar with these concepts I think you'll really benefit from this session. It is, however, an advanced session, so if you are totally unfamiliar with CF ORM you may find it a bit confusing.

The session is scheduled for 5:30pm (ouch!) on Wednesday, July 28th.

Automagic Validations for ColdFusion Objects

This session will provide an overview of, as well as a detailed how-to about a Validation framework for ColdFusion. The title is a slight misnomer, as, although the framework was originally written to work inside an object-oriented application, and remains an ideal solution for that, it has recently been enhanced to work with simple ColdFusion structures as well. This means that anyone who is looking for a better way of addressing their validation requirements, both on the client side and on the server side, can now benefit from the framework, even if they are not using objects.

The main benefit of the framework is that it will automatically generate all of your client-side and server-side validations for you, from a simple set of metadata. This frees you from the drudgery of writing similar validation code over and over again, and also eliminates the possibility of adding bugs into your application via your validation code. The framework, called ValidateThis, is being actively developed by myself and a number of other contributors, so not only is it extremely functional and flexible right now, but new features are being added continually. If you are interested in finding out more about it, including exactly how to implement it in a new or existing application (and it's dead easy), I encourage you to attend my session. It will be held at 3:15pm on Friday, July 30th, and is being repeated at 2:45pm on Saturday, July 31st.

I hope to see you at one, or both, of my sessions. If we haven't met before please come by and say hi.

Update: The early-bird rate for the pre-conference training sessions, has been extended, as has the deadline for CFUnited voting!

Just wanted to post a quick reminder to folks of the following dates:

cf.Objective() Pre-Conference Early-Bird Extended!

The discounted early-bird rate for the cf.Objective() conference fee has expired, but the discounts on most of the pre-conference training sessions, has been extended. You can still save $200 off of Mark Mandel and my two-day hands-on workshop, Developing Applications with ColdFusion 9 Object Relational Mapping if you register soon. So what are you waiting for? Registration is done via the cf.Objective() web site.

And if ORM isn't your thing, there are a whole bunch of workshops from which to choose, most of which are offering discounts:

• Building Secure CFML Applications (April 21) - Jason Dean and Pete Freitag
• Coldbox:100 Training (April 21) - Luis Majano
• Developing Applications with ColdFusion 9 Object Relational Mapping (ORM) (April 20-21) - Bob Silverberg and Mark Mandel
• Getting Started with Flex and AIR Development with the Flex SDK (April 21) - John Mason
• Mach-II and OOP from the Ground Up (April 20-21) - Kurt Weirsma, Peter Farrell and Matt Woodward
• Rapid Development with Model-Glue 3 (April 20-21) - Dan Wilson and Ezra Parker

Voting for CFUnited Ends February 20th

The folks at CFUnited have given the ColdFusion community the opportunity to help choose which sessions will be included by voting on them. Unfortunately the window of opportunity is very small, with the vote closing on February 20th. So get out there and vote, and while you're there please consider voting for Marc Esher's sessions. He's an awesome speaker and no slouch in the brain department, and his proposed End-to-End Testing Roundtable will be a session not to miss.