Scotch on the Road and CFObjective Presentations

A few people have asked me to post my presentations, and I should have done so anyway straight after the conferences, but of course, since I did three presentations + a Mystery Theatre at cfobjective and four presentations at Scotch on the Road I have been falling behind normal work and blog postings.

So, here for your delectation are all the presentations for you to download... (apart from the Mystery Theatre 3000 since that has a naughty picture in it)

• Atomic Reactor: or how I stopped worrying and love the ORM
• ColdSpring: Better Living through configuration
• Which Framework? ColdBox, Mach-ii and Model Glue compared
• Whats Railo 3.1 Open Source?
• Railo in the Cloud
• ModelGlue and You

7 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 4:25 PM - Categories: cloud | railo | cfObjective | scotch on the rocks | model-glue | reactor | presentations

Live from A Wee Dram of Scotch

I just finished presenting my "Better living through configuration" presentation at A Wee Dram of Scotch in London. Its a great presentation so far with Adam Lehman and Claude from Adobe kicking off the proceedings and showing the (possible) Hibernate features in Centaur (or the "Eagerly Awaited next version of ColdFusion"). 

The rest of the day should be really interesting, and currently Peter Bell is telling us about RAD OO.

This is the smallest conference I have been to, and I think its great, there are only about 70 people in the same room and its only one day... a great way to really meet other developers (rather than the immense scale of other conferences)

If the wireless picks up, I shall try and post some more today, if not I shall give you a breakdown (after the hangover ) tomorrow!

In the meantime, here is my presentation and code for you to play with!

0 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 12:40 PM - Categories: scotch on the rocks | coldfusion | coldspring | presentations | CFConferences

Getting ready to sip a Wee Dram of Scotch in London

Coming up this Thursday 25th of September, the "a Wee Dram of Scotch" one day conference is taking place in London.

This is a great replacement to the cancelled CFDevCon that was meant to be happening over in Brighton, but alas didn't for various reasons. Which brings to mind whether we should have more conferences like this, one day, very cheap (at £10 for entry its surely the cheapest conference there is!) but with still some awesome speakers such as Sean Corfield, Peter Bell and Mike Brunt, not to mention Adam Lehman from Adobe doing the keynote!

So what do you think? Should there be more one day conferences? Would you like your CFUG to cover this instead? More cheap (or free) training in your locality?

Also, how would we expand the use of CF? Is this a good medium for this?

Would love to hear people's opinions on this.

1 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 12:13 PM - Categories: scotch on the rocks | frameworks | coldfusion | coldspring | CFConferences

Presentation: FreshAir @ Scotch on the Rocks 2008

For those of you who attended my FreshAir presentation at Scotch on the Rocks, firstly, an apology about the wireless. My presentation was going swimmingly until I hit a problem with the firewall that stopped "json" requests to twitter, which meant that you couldn't see the listing coming through! I have posted my code here for you to have a look at as well as the presentation itself so you can work your way through it. Let me know what you think! And I hope at least, problems notwithstanding, that you enjoyed the presentation and found it useful! Unzip the sample code and use Eclipse's/Aptana Studio's "Import... -> Existing Projects" feature to get it going. Attachments:

• FreshAir 2008 Presentation
• sotr_air sample code

1 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 12:08 PM - Categories: scotch on the rocks | presentations | AIR

ColdSpring: Better living through configuration presentation

As promised, I wanted to share my "ColdSpring: Better Living through Configuration" presentation materials. I am not including the source code, since its very simple and its covered in the presentation itself (and if you work through it, you will get a better understanding!) Attachment: ColdSpringScotch2008.pdf

0 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 11:56 AM - Categories: scotch on the rocks | coldfusion | coldspring | presentations

The Scotch is dead, Long live the Scotch!

Another year over at Scotch on the Rocks and what a hell of a conference it was! A great line up of speakers, and lots of kudos to Andy Allan for sorting out the travel and accommodation for us speakers. He even managed to pull in speakers all the way from the US, such as Scott Stroz, Joe Rinehart, Dough Hughes, Charlie Arehart, Sean "The Real one" Corfield and Matt Woodward. Not to mention speakers from afar a field as Australia! What a turn up! It has been a fantastic conference, with the great support of the Adobe ColdFusion team, and a bit thanks has to go to Kristen Schofield for upgrading the version of ColdFusion given away at the raffle from Standard to Enterprise! I could gush for hours about the Adobe team, and interestingly in the BOF a lot of feedback was given to the features that developers want in the "anticipated next version" of ColdFusion, this time, mainly about the language itself rather than other features of the server. Of course, I should not fail to mention the great time I had hanging out with Gert Franz from Railo. His fantastic teaming up with Luc (sorry, didnt catch the last name!) from Jboss.org to announce the Open Sourcing and teaming up of Railo and Red Hat. Now *THAT* is the way to open source a project! I think everyone at the conference will join me in thanking the organizers for such a wonderful event!

2 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 11:18 PM - Categories: scotch on the rocks | coldfusion | presentations

Hello from Bonnie Scotland!

I finally made it to Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh. Next time, I take the train. The problem is this, in the UK we dont have identity cards and have no need to carry any form of identification... except when flying. So guess who forgot his passport at home this morning? Well, I made it home and then to the airport, just in time to miss the flight. The problem being that the transport from one terminal (south) to the other (north) in Gatwick decided to stop working... so the precious last few minutes that I had were lost. BA were kind enough to move me to a later flight, but heart attacks and sweat from running from one side of London to another then back down to Gatwick not wistanding, I managed to make it to Edinburgh. So, just so you know I am at the George hotel, room 210 if you want to catch up. Let the Scotch begin!

1 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 9:32 PM - Categories: scotch on the rocks