Bob's Blog

I was very pleased that my CF Dev Week presentation was so well attended and received. I am attaching a PDF of the presentation materials to this post. Once the recording is available, you'll be able to find it at www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/events.html.

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 am pleased and honoured to announce that I'll be presenting at cf.Objective(), billed as the Only Enterprise ColdFusion Conference, which runs from April 22-24 in Minneapolis, MN. It's going to be quite the experience for me. Not only am I speaking on two topics (details to follow in a separate post):

• Easy and Flexible Validations for Objects
• What Your Mother Never Told You About CF9 ORM

I'm also organizing a Pecha Kucha Birds of a Feather session (BoF), during which people will be giving mini-presentations in which they show 20 slides for 20 seconds each. I've written about this BoF on my blog previously, but I'll mention again that anyone interested in presenting should leave me a comment on my blog or email me directly at bob dot silverberg at gmail dot com.

As if that's not enough, Mark Mandel and I will be delivering a comprehensive hands-on two-day pre-conference workshop on Developing Applications with ColdFusion 9 Object Relational Mapping. A separate post with the details of that workshop will follow, but in a nutshell it is designed to give you all of the information you need to get up and running with ColdFusion 9's ORM features in your next project. You'll write a ton of code, learning the basics as well as best practices and things to watch out for. I think it's going to be a lot of fun (in addition to a great learning experience).

Registration is now open, both for the conference and for the CF9 ORM workshop (you can sign up for it during the conference registration). There is a discounted rate for both the conference and the training available until January 29th, so you might want to register sooner rather than later.

I hope to see many of you there in April.

I'm delighted to announce (quite late, I might add) that one of my topics has been chosen to be presented at CFUnited 2010 in July. I'll be speaking on Automagic Validations for ColdFusion Objects, which I summarized to the committee as:

Are you confused about where to put the validation logic in your object oriented application? Are you tired of writing one set of validations for the server side and another set for the client side? Are you looking for a way to encapsulate your validation logic, so your business objects do not have to change each time your validation rules change? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then this is the session for you. In this session you will learn about an open source project that delivers all of the above, and is easy to integrate into any project. You define your business rules in a simple XML file and the framework will automagically perform all of your server side validations and generate all of your client side validations. What's more, the framework is flexible and extensible enough to allow you to define an unlimited number of custom validation types and messages, all without touching any of the framework's or your own code. You'll leave the session with an understanding of what the framework can do for you, as well as how to implement it into a new or existing application. This framework is meant to be used in an application that makes use of objects. This would include ones that use Transfer, Reactor, hand-coded beans/DAOs, and, of course, ColdFusion 9's ORM.

If you're thinking about attending, you might want to register this week, as the Early Bird pricing ends this Friday.

I look forward to catching up with friends and colleagues at the conference, and hope to meet some new folks as well. Perhaps I'll see you there?

Just a quick note to announce that I'm going to be presenting my session, Getting Started with ColdFusion 9's ORM Integration from the CFinNC Conference to the Online ColdFusion Meetup next Thursday, November 19th, at 6:00pm EDT. Details can be found at the Meetup site. You can attend the presentation via Connect on Thursday, but if you can't make it the session will also be recorded and made available.

Here's a description of the session:

We've all heard the buzz about CF9's ORM integration, but exactly what is it, and how can I use it? This session will demystify the idea of ORM by introducing the concepts that you need to know to get started using it right away. Not an object oriented developer? No problem! As long as you know what an object is, and a little bit about cfcs, this session will help you get past the buzzwords and be productive with ORM on your next project.

Hope to see some of you there.

The slides, which include all of the sample code from my CFinNC presentation, Advanced Techniques with ColdFusion 9 ORM Integration, are now available. Click on the link below to download them. I developed these slides using Keynote, and attempted to save them as a PowerPoint presentation, but ended up with slides that looked like crap, so I saved them as a PDF for the download. The slides look good, but the file is big. Sorry about that.

If anyone is interested in having me deliver this presentation to a ColdFusion User Group via connect please feel free to leave me a comment, or send me an email.

Attachments:

• Advanced Techniques with ColdFusion 9 ORM Integration Slide Deck - in PDF Format (11 MB)

Here is the description of the presentation:

The ColdFusion engineering team have made it very easy to make use of Hibernate's ORM features out of the box, but what if you want to do something a bit more complicated? In this session we'll cover items that will be of interest to those wanting to take CF and Hibernate to the next level. Topics will include Hibernate session management, Working with detached objects, Concurrency, Event handling, and Creating a base persistent object.