Brian Kotek: Inversion of Control - Conferences

CFUnited Clean Code and Swiz Presentations Now Online

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:33:00 -0700

Just a quick note that, as promised, my presentations from CFUnited are now online! Clean Code The Swiz Framework for Flex and ActionScript Thanks to all who attended!

Swiz 1.0RC Released! So here's an updated example, custom ViewMediator, and more

Wed, 19 May 2010 09:56:00 -0700

There's a lot of good news from the Swiz world today. First, we just released the Swiz 1.0 Release Candidate, which fixes a number of small bugs in the beta and adds numerous new features. This version should be pretty much feature-complete, so at this point we'll be focused on fixing any issues that come up. A final 1.0 should be out in the next few weeks. I did my best to help out with this release by working hard on updated documentation. You can see the fruits of this labor on the new Swiz documentation wiki we've created through JIRA Studio. You can also sign up to enter feature requests or bugs, vote on issues, and all the other good stuff that JIRA provides. If you have any feedback on the documentation, feel free to leave a wiki comment and we'll do our best to address it. I've also created a Swiz 1.0RC version of my example application. If you like, you can view or download the source code. Since 1.0RC removes the option for "view injection" into a bean, folks have asked about ways to handle providing a view to a Swiz bean. I created a MediateView custom metadata extension that should handle most of these needs. I'll do my best to keep it up to date as I get feedback about it. And finally, in the "better late than never" department, I've uploaded the Swiz presentation I gave at cf.Objective() 2010 to SlideSix. I'll also be speaking on Swiz at this year's CFUnited conference. If you're planning on going, I'm happy to talk about Swiz into the wee hours of the morning!

Speaking at CF.Objective() and CFUnited

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:01:00 -0700

Hi folks, I just wanted to drop a note that I'll be speaking at the cf.Objective() and CFUnited conferences again in 2010. Both of these are fantastic conferences, so if you can attend, I highly recommend going! At cf.Objective(), my first session is "Don't Let OO Drag You Down: A Pragmatic Approach to OO Design and Development". My goal here will be to focus on some specific elements of OO development that I feel offer the most "bang for the buck". These are the ideas that I can't live without, even on a small project. The second session is "The Swiz Framework", where I'll talk about, what else, the Swiz framework for Flex and AS3. We'll look at how it works and what is being added for the 1.0 release. Meanwhile, at CFUnited, my session is "Clean Code: Why It Matters and How It's Done". Here, I'd like to look at a range of concepts that affect code clarity, including layout, comments, method and class names, file organization, and more. I'll also touch on some "code smells", or indicators that something may be amiss. For now, that is my only confirmed topic, but I believe one more will be added as further topics are announced. I hope to see you there! You'll find me speaking, listening in the sessions, and enjoying beers in the bar with my fellow code junkies. :-)

My CFinNC Presentations at SlideSix

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:02:00 -0700

I've uploaded my CFinNC presentations to SlideSix for anyone who's interested: Object-Oriented Design Principles Introduction to Swiz Overall, CFinNC was great. I actually had to work for a large chunk of the weekend so aside from presenting and mingling with folks later in the evening, I didn't get to attend many other sessions. That said, everything looked top-notch while I was there. The conference unfolded very smoothly and all of the attendees seemed very engaged. Hats off to Dan Wilson and the entire volunteer team for pulling this off! This conference definitely held its own against the other CF conferences I've attended. It was very difficult to tell that it was completely free. Hopefully we can do it again next year!

I'm Speaking at the CFinNC Conference...See You There?

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:00:00 -0700

Just a quick note that I'll be speaking at the CFinNC conference on October 17-18th here in Raleigh, NC. My topics are Object-oriented Design Principles and The Swiz Framework for Flex. The conference is FREE and the lineup is very impressive, so if you can attend, please register! And if you register, please actually show up! The danger with a free conference is that it's easy for folks to back out at the last minute, since they lose nothing. But for the organizers, it makes estimating actual attendance difficult. So if you sign up, please do your best to make it. :-) I'm looking forward to seeing some folks that I normally have to wait until MAX or next year's CFObjective or CFUnited conferences to see. And I hope to meet a lot of new people as well. See you in Raleigh!

Final Prep for CFUnited!

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:07:00 -0700

It's been a while since I've blogged, as you might guess I've been really busy. I do plan to dive back into blogging again after the conference, both here and at the Alagad blog. But right now my focus is on wrapping up some tasks so that my time at CFUnited is used to it's full potential! I'm presenting on Friday on Introduction to Object-Oriented Modeling and Design. I've tweaked the presentation a bit since I gave it last, based partly on the podcast that Hal, Ben Nadel and I did a few weeks ago. If you're interested in what helps make "good" OO design, I hope the presentation will be helpful. Again, let me point out that the presentation isn't an introduction to OO, I'm assuming attendees already understand what a class is, what an object is, etc. This presentation is talking about OO at a more general level, in terms of how sets of objects actually work together. My tentative schedule for the conference is attached to this entry, so if you'd like to chat about OO, CF, Flex, Groovy, or just about anything else, feel free to catch up with me. I'll also most likely be a regular at any evening gatherings at the hotel bar. ;-) Anyway, I hope to see you this week in DC! Until then!

A Slightly Late CF.Objective() Review

Wed, 20 May 2009 22:25:00 -0700

I'm a bit late with this, but better late than never! In my defense, the last few weeks have been pretty crazy with the conference arriving and joining Alagad. I'll be posting to the Alagad Team Blog going forward as well, but I'll do my best to keep that focused on interesting things learned on work projects, and keep my personal blog for covering my own thoughts, personal code experiments, and updates to my RIAForge projects. With that said, let's talk CF.Objective(). Overall, the conference was excellent, which wasn't really surprising all! :-) The networking and hallway/dinner/bar discussions were always insightful. I got to see a number of friends whom I unfortunately only catch up with at conferences, like Chris Scott, Peter Bell, Barney Boisvert, and Mark Mandel. It's one thing to have email and IM chats, but quite another to be able to bounce ideas around over beers for 3 hours! I attended several good sessions, like the Mate Framework (even though I'm a Swiz fan, Mate is pretty sweet), ColdBox, and Test Driven Development. Unfortunately, I missed the opening keynote in place of sleeping in, since my flight was delayed and I didn't get in until about 3 am and I was speaking at 10 am. Speaking of...speaking, I did give two presentations, one on OO Modeling and Design, and one on Open-Source Enterprise Java and CF. I thought both went pretty well, though I had more time to prepare for the OO talk. I finished a bit early on the Java talk, but the Q&A session was full of interesting discussion, so all in all I think it was good. If you did see me speak, PLEASE fill out the session survey forms: OO Modeling and Design and Open-Source Enterprise Java and CF. I really do read what people have to say and try to use it to improve my future presentations! Anyway, next stop should be CFUnited! Hopefully I'll see many of the same folks there, as well as some friends who couldn't make it to Minneapolis, and any new folks who'd like to talk (if it's geeky, just about anything goes!)

I'm Representing Alagad at CF.Objective()!

Wed, 13 May 2009 07:52:00 -0700

I'm packing up for my flight up to Minneapolis and am looking forward to seeing everyone and delivering my presentations on OO Design and Open Source Enterprise Java with CF! I also wanted to mention that I'm joining Alagad full time next week, so I'll be representing them and wearing some of their swag at the conference. I will still be contracting at Broadchoice to help them with the Workspace product, but won't be an official employee any longer. After the conference, I'll find more time to blog, now that the move is over (both to Alagad and into a new house!) It's been a crazy few weeks!

Very Short ColdFusion OOP Survey

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:42:00 -0700

Last week I posted a quick entry about my presentation at cf.Objective() 2009 on Object-Oriented Design and Modeling. Whether you're planning to attend the conference or not, please spend a minute or two and answer my very short survey on how CF developers view and use OOP: ColdFusion Developer OOP Survey Feel free to forward the link around, I'd really like to try and get a wide cross section of people to take it. My hope is to use the results to tailor my presentation, but I'll also post the results online in a week or two for anyone who's interested. Thanks in advance for your help!

Speaking at cf.Objective() on OO Design and Modeling

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:50:00 -0700

I'm a few days late with this, but I just wanted to mention that I'll be speaking at this year's cf.Objective() conference. The topic is "OO Modeling and Design", and if the schedule stays as it is, I'll be giving it at 10:15 am on May 14th. I'm still thinking about exactly what I want to discuss and how I want to go about it, but here is the general idea that I used for my topic's abstract: Object-oriented programming is quickly becoming the norm among ColdFusion developers. Unfortunately, OO can be hard to wrap one's head around, and confusion is rampant. Join Brian Kotek as he explores OO modeling and design. Topics will include:

The basics of UML and class diagrams
Thinking about the model
Design principles
Indicators of design quality
Theory meets real life

OO is widely understood to deliver the biggest benefit for complex applications that leverage large, behavior-rich domain models. One area that Brian wants to consider is the role of OO techniques applied to "normal" ColdFusion applications. Since many CF apps are "data-centric", what advantages (if any) are gained from adopting OOP for that kind of application? Come to this session to gain a foundation in OO modeling and add your voice to the discussion.

CFUnited, CFHibernate, Railo, and Groovy

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:33:00 -0700

Better late than never, I wanted to post some quick thoughts on last week's CFUnited conference in Washington D.C. As always, TeraTech put on a great conference.
There were a few issues. The conference center was a good distance (15-20 minute walk) from the conference rooms themselves, which became a bit of a pain if one wanted to return to the hotel for some reason. The lunch food was a mixed bag, and there always seemed to be a shortage, especially if one chose to arrive a bit late to avoid the initial rush. But the rooms were generally large enough to hold the audiences, the projectors and microphones worked fine in every session I attended, and the presentations themselves were all very well done. Since I was the Frameworks Track Chairman, I was happy to hear from many folks that those sessions were particularly well received.
As often seems to be the case with conferences, an equal or greater amount of interesting information arose in the post-conference bar gatherings and at the evening networking events. It's always great to speak at length with folks like Hal Helms, Joe Rinehart, Sean Corfield, Peter Bell, and the members of the Adobe team (I had great conversations with Adam, Jason, and Ben).
I had the chance to meet Gert Franz, the CEO of Railo, and he was a stunningly nice guy. Railo seemed to be present in nearly every conversation, whether it was related to open source, or to ideas in Railo that could be adopted by Adobe, or to the underlying technical implementation of Raio itself. There are some really interesting things going on or coming soon in the Railo engine. The fact that Railo CFCs compile to a single Java class was very foresightful and something I think Adobe may want to look at carefully. Also, the ability to have a CFC extend a Java class seems to have a great deal of potential.
Adobe showed off some of their plans for ColdFusion "Centaur", and it looks very interesting. The integration with Hibernate is something I have lobbied for, and it has the potential to be a huge deal. However, there are some big potential issues with it and it remains to be seen how the Adobe engineers will overcome them. Because CFC creation can get quite slow, particularly in larger numbers, there seems to be a danger that using Hibernate will empower CF developers to generate large arrays of components (Hibernate typically returns arrays of Java objects). To be clear, whether CFHibernate will actually do this remains to be seen since the keynote demo only dealt with one object at a time. But since this is such a core element of Hibernate I would assume that it will be a target feature. But if this does happen, I do hope the wizards on the CF engineering team can address this issue.
Ben and Adam hinted about as vaguely as they could about a possible ColdFusion IDE that may (or may not) be demo'ed at Adobe Max later this year. The lack of a great IDE is another topic that came up in just about every conversation I had, so my fingers are crossed on this one.
Even with all the interesting stuff that Adobe was showing off, that is probably a year or more away from being released. In the meantime, some incredibly interesting stuff is going on right now with regard to things like Groovy. Barney Boisvert has a very cool Groovy scriptlets tag that will allow execution of blocks of Groovy code. Joe Rinehart is working with Hibernate, Railo, and Groovy together. I heard lots of talk about integration with Spring to provide more seamless usage of these underlying Java libraries, as well as leveraging things like Spring's built-in security model. The basic jist is, people are really starting to do some interesting things with the range of Java tools and APIs that we have at our disposal. I have made it a high priority to read up and experiment with Groovy because everything I heard about it at the conference sounded quite amazing.
In any event, hopefully people can see that a lot of very interesting stuff was going on at CFUnited, and not just in the sessions themselves. It's amazing what happens when a bunch of like-minded computer geeks get together and start spinning all their wheels at the same time!

cf.Objective() 2008 and the Future of ColdFusion

Tue, 06 May 2008 15:05:56 -0700

Well the conference has ended and I'm back in Raleigh trying to get back into the groove of work again. ;-) Overall the whole event was excellent, as expected.

I learned a lot at the conference sessions, but also as usual, I think I learned even more sitting at the bar talking for hours with heavy hitters like Chris Scott, Max Porges, Joe Rinehart, Peter Bell, Sean Corfield, Mark Mandel and many others. Some of these guys are just way too smart, but I wouldn't want it any other way.

I feel like my presentations went pretty well and that I'm finally comfortable with public speaking, which is good. I also had a chance to look at the new Swiz Flex framework that Chris created, and it looks really damn good. Hopefully we can move to Swiz from Cairngorm on our current Flex project during a future refactoring, since it is so much easier to deal with.

From talking to other folks in the community, it seems like CF is at something of a crossroads. One thing that kept coming up over and over again was how CF really starts to lose its glamor once you start using it as a back end for Flex. The benefits of CF really shine at the Controller and View layers, but for pure SOA architectures, we really have to jump through a lot of hoops to get true integration with Flex. This is mainly due to the limitations of CFC creation. The autotranslation of CFCs to ActionScript classes looks really sweet...until you have to send 1000 objects across the wire to Flex.

In fact, the dichotomy between the majority of people using CF (the "5 tag crowd", meaning people who just use cfif, cfoutput, cfloop, cfquery, and cfset) and the people who are really pushing the OO envelope became really apparent at the CF9 brainstorm session. Some people were asking for more features, but the core group of "thought leaders" in the CF world are proposing some far more radical changes.

The most compelling to me is the idea of dropping development on CFCs and allowing us to write server-side ActionScript, as well as dropping CFML as it is now and switching to a fully XML compliant markup like MXML. This would allow us to leverage tools like FlexBuilder, which quite frankly are a joy to work in. ActionScript is strongly typed, so this would be a big change, but it has dynamic elements as well such as the ObjectProxy class. And CFML is already nearly XML compliant, so switching over to that kind of synatx would be relatively simple.

Basically, I love all the great and easy features that CF gives us (obviously), but am really starting to hate the verbose syntax needed for CFC development, as well as the lack of proper IDE and tooling support. The built-in services are the reason why I don't "just switch to Java" for the Model. What I want is to be able to leverage all the great stuff CF provides, but do it in a more productive way.

It seems to me that CF9 would be a perfect chance for Adobe to make a clean break and really revolutionize how people use CF, as well as drawing in many new developers who are put off by the current way CFCs are built. There are a large number of odd language idiosyncrasies (arrays passed by value, arrays starting at 1, ListAppend returning the value while ArrayAppend does not, the list goes on) that have built up over the last 8 versions. I'll be blunt and say I think it's time to finally start again.

There is also a massive pool (millions) of people programming in ActionScript and JavaScript, and having a server-side language providing all the great things that CF does would be an extremely compelling draw. I think a bold change could trigger a huge influx of developers.

I realize that a large number of existing CF developers would probably not embrace this, at least not initially. I would argue that for them, they can keep on using CF8 and keep on doing what they are comfortable with. Adobe could offer patches and updates that would port the new AS/MXML features to the old CFML syntax (since the new stuff would be running on Java as well). The question would be whether alienating some of these folks is outweighed by the benefits of such a change and the influx of existing AS/JS developers it would trigger. Being able to use the same language on the client and the server, using a killer IDE, and leveraging a huge array of easy-to-use services would be a ridiculously compelling platform.

I still love CF and I'm only saying this as frank and honest suggestions. Using FlexBuilder really brings home the power of a great IDE. Looking at things like Groovy (with its Spring and Hibernate stack) shows just how easy working in Java has become, and what a difference it makes to really be able to do full-blown OO development instead of worrying about how many CFC instances we're creating.

All that said, I know that the odds are probably close to zero that such a change would actually be made. Still, one never knows. Adobe was listening to us at the conference and I'd like to hope that all options are on the table as they go forward. The fact that they let us talk directly to them and listen to our crazy ideas is one of the things that makes the CF team great. I just want to see CF continue to grow and shine, and as you can probably tell by now, I think a radical idea like this could really shake things up and push ColdFusion to even greater heights.

Slides and Code from My Code Generation Presentation

Sat, 03 May 2008 14:48:00 -0700

As promised, here are the slides and code from my cf.Objective() 2008 presentation, "Leveraging Code Generation to Jumpstart Your Development". Check the bottom of this entry for the enclosure. So far the conference has been great. I've learned a lot at several sessions, including Andrew Powell's integration presentation on using Spring and Hibernate as the Java model for an app using CF for Controller and View. Chris Scott's ColdSpring presentation got my wheels turning with regard to custom Proxy Factories. And the announcement of the ColdFusion Open Initiative was most welcome, with a public bug base and more organized enhancement request system. I'll post more after the conference is over, but so far it's been as good as I expected it to be!

On the Bandwagon: My cf.Objective() 2008 Schedule

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:20:00 -0700

In case anyone wants to meet up in MN, here's my schedule showing where I'll be and when. Hopefully I'll see you there, in the sessions, or at the bar! Or both. ;-)

cf.Objective() 2008 Presenation on Code Generation

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 13:52:00 -0700

I've also been tapped to present at the 2008 cf.Objective() conference. My session is called "Leveraging Code Generation to Jumpstart Your Development". There are two kinds of coding: fun and boring. We all want to focus on the fun kind, but unfortunately the boring, repetitive kind also has to get done. Luckily, a lot of the boring coding can be generated for us! The underlying concepts of code generation will be discussed. This will include active and passive generation, along with the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. I'll also look at using code generation to help you get to the fun stuff more quickly. Topics will touch on the full range of available code generation techniques, including CFEclipse Snippets, ANT build files, scaffolding, ORM frameworks, the Illudium PU-36 generator from Brian Rinaldi, and my UML to CFC Stub Generator. I hope to see you there!