My CFWheels Presentation at CFObjective ANZ

Had a great time at CFObjective ANZ down in Melbourne.

I presented on CFWheels, a beautiful ColdFusion framework, inspired by Ruby on Rails.

Mine was the first presentation on day one, and in a way it worked nicely as I could then enjoy others with full attention. This is what I covered in the presenation.

CFWheels is a new-ish ColdFusion (CF) framework inspired by Ruby on Rails.

With its emphasis on convention over configuration, simple code organizing principles, a beautiful Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, and a pretty neat Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework, CFWheels brings agility into applications written in CF.

In this talk, Indy takes you through the building blocks of a CFWheels application. He then shares his experience of learning and developing with CFWheels — an experience he thinks every CF developer should go through.

Come, have a listen, and see how CFWheels brings agility into CF development. And how you end up writing beautiful code, while having loads of fun as you develop.

I’ve added the presentation to Slideshare. Have a look.

Testing for Success — My presentation at Web on the Piste 2008

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at the RIA conference Web on the Piste 2008 on the topic of “Testing for Success”.

Over the past few years, I’ve worked with many ColdFusion and Flex development teams. It has been interesting to see that there is more interest in test-driven development. However, a lot of times team leaders/company executives overlook the bigger picture and focus on just the details. And the lack of this larger context can lead to less effective/failed testing practices. My presentation this year was focused on presenting this bigger picture with focus on ColdFusion and Flex.

You can download the presentation here or view it at Slideshare.

By the way, for those of you who have not heard about Web on the Piste, it is a conference on Rich Internet Technologies that takes place every year in the beautiful Queenstown in New Zealand.

RIA conference announced — Web on the Piste, August 2008, New Zealand

Web on the Piste — the Conference on Rich Internet Technologies has been announced for this year.

It will be held on 20-21 August 2008 in the pretty Queenstown, in the South Island of New Zealand.

The theme for this year’s conference is usability and user experience in RIAs.

The cost for registering for the conference is AUD 500.

So if you are interested in either attending or speaking or sponsoring, head over to the Web on the Piste website and register your interest.

Last year’s conference was quite successful for a new event. The conference was completely booked out. There were about 120 participants. And there were some really nice speakers from the US, Australia and New Zealand (including me 😉 ).

In case you don’t quite know what the word “piste” means: “a piste is the name given to a marked ski-run or path down a mountain for the purposes of skiing, snowboarding, or other mountain sports” (from Wikipedia).

Queenstown is known for its beautiful surroundings and great skiing duing the southern hemispehere winters. So the big idea behind Web on the Piste is that you come down under, get to interact from peers, learn a few things about RIAs and ski/snowboard/bungee!

Here are links to some pictures from last year. Some pictures are on Flickr, and some are on Facebook.

(BTW, I work for Straker Interactive — the organizers of Web on the Piste).

Working with Web APIs — Presentation at Web on the Piste

Just finished my session on Working with Web APIs at Web on the Piste, Queenstown, New Zealand. The presentation was about:

  • What are Web APIs
  • How do they work
  • How to use them
  • Creating a ColdFusion and Flex front-end using Flickr API

As with my presentation yesterday on “Introduction to Flex”, I had a lot of content, and lots to talk about. The presentation is attached with this blog. It was a light presentation. My session was one of the last few sessions for today and I just wanted to try and keep it simple and fun.

Originally I had intended to create an app that used Flickr API. However, lack of time forced me to use the finished application.

Download the presentation and code.

Unzip the attached file in your webroot. That would extract the PDF in the webroot, and create two other folders — one contains CFCs and the other the code to use CFCs. The latter one also contains an mxml file that you can compile in Flex Builder to talk to the CFCs. I’d love to hear from you on what you think about the presentation, code and using APIs.