Bob's Blog

The Topic Suggestion Survey and the Call for Speakers for next year's cf.Objective() are both now officially open. For more details please check out the announcement at the cf.Objective() site, or if you're keen to get started, visit the Engage app right now to suggest and vote on topics or to propose to speak.

cf.Objective() 2011 has come and gone, and by all accounts it was an awesome conference. I presented an Introduction to Browser Automation and Testing with Selenium, and I'm making my slides available via this blog post. You can download the PDF here.

The real meat of the session consisted of demos of Selenium-IDE, Selenium-RC and CFSelenium, so I'm not sure that you'll get much from the slides alone. If you're interested in using Selenium via ColdFusion, please visit the CFSelenium project and look over the readme file. It should give you all you need to get started writing your own functional tests with ColdFusion and Selenium.

Just a quick note to let you know that the Call for Pecha Kucha Speakers and BoF Survey for cf.Objective() are now open. The details can be found at the cf.Objective() web site.

I had previously been making announcements about cf.Objective() via my blog, but now that we have a news section available at the official site all announcements will be published there. If you're interested in keeping on top of cf.Objective() news I suggest you add the news page to your RSS readers.

Thanks to the magic of our very own Steve Withington we now have speaker and session details available on the cf.Objective() website. Check them out to find out more about just what kind of awesome cf.Objective() is bringing this year. I think you'll find that the site this year far surpasses that of years previous, mainly thanks to Steve and our use of Mura CMS.

The New Kids on the Block

I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome cf.Objective()'s newest speakers. Although we're very pleased to be bringing you many of the presenters that you've come to know and love from past conferences, we're even more excited to bring you some new faces, and we know that they're excited to be speaking for you. Here they are:

• Adam Crump will be presenting Web Single Sign-On and Coldfusion, which covers everything you need to know to build your own Single Sign-On solution for Web Applications (Web SSO) using ColdFusion and Shibboleth, an open-source application for federated authentication and authorization based on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).
• Adam Tuttle will be presenting No nonsense RESTful ColdFusion Web Services, with Taffy, in which he'll discuss Taffy, a framework for building REST in ColdFusion, of which he is the author.
• Adrian Pomilio will be presenting Building HTML5 Applications, a 120-minute deep-dive into building applications with JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3.
• Bucky Schwarz will be presenting Animation with JavaScript and HTML5, during which he'll discuss using the canvas element to create animations and how to structure your JavaScript in an object-oriented manner.
• Daria Norris will be presenting Simple MVC with FW/1, starting with an overview of MVC itself and then looking at how to create an MVC app with the FW/1 framework.
• Dave Ferguson will be presenting Application Intrusion, Detection and Tracking, in which he'll show you how to protect your web sites and applications from an attack.
• David Shepherd will be presenting Time Management for Developers, presenting techniques for eliminating friction and chaos from your workspace.
• Elliott Sprehn will be contributing two talks to our Front-End Development track: Intro to AngularJS, JavaScript Done Right and Test Driven Development in JavaScript with JsTD and Jasmine.
• Jeff Gladnick will be presenting Using oAuth to integrate CF with Facebook/Twitter, covering, you guessed it, integrating Facebook and Twitter with ColdFusion via oAuth.
• Jim Priest will be contributing two talks to our Integration and Tools track: Digging Into The Developer Toolbox and Working with PDFs in ColdFusion.
• Jonathan Arp will be presenting Adventures in Code Generation, in which he'll discuss the whys and hows of using code to write code, and promises to go beyond simple CRUD.
• Matt Quackenbush will be spanning two tracks with his talks on Forms That Don't Suck (Quick, Easy, & Clean Forms and Data) (Frameworks and OSS Tools track) and (Abstraction + CF9 ORM) == "Modeled in Minutes" (Architecture & Design in Software track).
• Nathan Strutz will be presenting Holistic Program Quality and Technical Debt, a very important topic that all developers owe it to themselves to become familiar with.
• Sandra Clark will also be contributing two talks to our Front-End Development track, both of which address accessibility: Accessibility for RIA's using WAI-ARIA and HTML 5 Accessibility Features and Gotchas.
• Steve Bryant will be presenting Don't Forget About Custom Tags, during which he'll remind us about just how useful custom tags can be, even for folks who love writing CFCs.
• Ted Steinmann & Tim Meyer will be presenting Designing for Scalability in ColdFusion, another of our 2-hour deep-dives, this time looking at building scalable applications.
• Tim Cunningham will be presenting A Git's guide to GITting along, looking at Git from the team perspective.
• Vicky Ryder will be presenting MediaSlurp and the Adobe Stack, discussing an application that she and a team built using myriad technologies including AIR, airORM, Flex, BlazeDS, ColdFusion 9 ORM, ColdSpring and Swiz.

Looking down that list I notice that we have 19 new speakers this year. That's a lot of new faces and a lot of new ideas! Just one more reason that this year's cf.Objective() is going to rock hard.

Why Not Register Now?

Registration is now open, so why not take a few minutes and register now? Oh, and the first person to leave a comment explaining what the title of this post references (and how you know that) will get a free beer from me at the conference. No Googling please!

Jim Priest has been kind enough to produce some new badges and a banner for this year's cf.Objective(), so whether you're presenting, sponsoring or just attending you can decorate your blog and celebrate the awesomeness that is cf.Objective() 2011. The bling can be found on the Promotional Badges page of the website, and you can also see it in all its glory below:

That's right folks, the moment you've been waiting for. The schedule for cf.Objective() 2011 is now available for your perusal. We plan to have full session descriptions and speaker bios on the site next week, but the topic titles should give you a pretty good idea of just what kind of awesome we're going to be bringing you this year. There are a couple of things I want to highlight about this year's conference.

Deep Dives

We managed to squeeze three deep dives into the schedule for you this year. These sessions will be allocated two consecutive time slots to be able to cover their topics in greater detail then was possible with a single 60-minute slot. The three deep-dives this year are:

• Designing for Scalability in ColdFusion - Ted Steinmann & Tim Meyer
• Building HTML5 Applications - Adrian Pomillio
• End-to-End Application Design, Featuring ColdSpring/AOP, FW/1, MXUnit, ORM and ValidateThis - Jamie Krug

We consider this a pilot project, which is why we chose three topics, so we'll be particularly keen to hear your feedback on them. Of course you won't be able to judge until after you've attended the sessions, but what do you think of the idea? Are you as psyched about it as we are? Leave a comment and let us know.

The Topics You Asked For

Remember the cf.Objective() Topic Suggestion Survey that you all used to suggest and vote on topics? We looked at the results of the survey carefully and are pleased to let you know that we were able to include topics that matched 10 of the top 13 suggested topics. These include:

• A Git's guide to GITting along - Tim Cunningham
• Replace Your Iron with a Cloud - Barney Boisvert
• NoSQL? No Problem - Peter Bell
• Forms That Don't Suck (Quick, Easy, & Clean Forms and Data) - Matt Quackenbush
• Using oAuth to integrate CF with Facebook/Twitter - Jeff Gladnick
• From HTML to Flex, how to create ColdFusion powered mobile Applications - Simon Free
• Everything you wanted to know about REST and more - Simon Free
• Continuous Integration with Hudson, ANT, and MXUnit - Marc Esher
• Using jQuery Mobile for your Next Web Application - Andy Matthews
• Just Mock It! : Leveraging Mock Objects - Luis Majano

Stay tuned for more details of the topics in the schedule, and for future announcements in which we'll fill in some of the TBA slots. I hope you'll all agree that this looks to be the best cf.Objective() yet. See you there!