CFCamp 2014 hindsight

G'day:
So CFCamp 2014 is over. First things first: Mike, you're a star. Everyone who attended thinks this. Thanks so much for organising yet another excellent CFCamp, and dealing with all the various... erm... "idiosyncracies" that sponsors and speakers and others threw at you.

I'm not flying out until tomorrow afternoon, and I don't fancy going into Munich for a night out, so I'm just hanging @ the Stadthalle in Germering. As I just said on Twitter: I seem to have the place to myself, other than the four people working on the bar here. I'll probably go over to visit my favourite wolpertinger later on for dinner, but it's too early for that. So beer and blogging it is. I've just started my third pint (well: 400ml rather than a pint, anyhow).

This is my wash-up of the conference.

A quick look at DI/1

G'day:
I'm at CFCamp at the moment, and one of the better presentations yesterday (out of a lot of good presentations, I might add) was Chris' presentation, "Dependency Injection with DI/1". It looked sufficiently interesting I thought I'd have a quick look-see at it. I have downloaded it in the past, but that's about as far as I had got.

I've been using ColdSpring at work for the last few years, but DI has come a long way since ColdSpring's heyday. So I'm familiar with the concepts of dependency injection, but only ColdSpring's implementation of it.

If you don't know what DI is, go read up on it first otherwise none of this will be very meaningful. I'm not able to get an internet connection at the moment, so I can't find a decent link for you, but I'll try to remember to update this later on. Or, hey, you probably know how Google works.

CFCamp: a Crocodile Dundee moment for me

G'day:

That's not a shot glass. This is a shotglass.

It was a bit of a messy night last night. Well, indeed, we basically sat around all afternoon @ the Stadthalle at Germering drinking Tegernseer Hell, so it was getting messy even before the evening.

Am currently sitting in Luis' CommandBox presentation. CommandBox continues to look impressive.

Quite a content-lite article this. I just liked the size of that shotglass, basically.

I'll try to write something more useful later on. But I'm also doing Twitter updates tagged with "#CFCamp" as things occur to me. That might be a better way to find out about what's going on @ CFCamp.

--
Adam

CFCamp: what I'll be having a look at

G'day:
Blimey. It occurred to me on the train this morning than this time next week I'll be in the keynote of CFCamp 2014. That kinda snuck up on me. I guess I've been a bit distracted with PHP and stuff like that.

OK, so what am I gonna go see?

OK, so CFCamp 2014 after all

G'day:
As you may or may not know, I'm almost certainly going to be leaving the CFML world shortly. I should have clarity on that in a few weeks, and will give you the details then.

Last year Mike Hnat - organiser of CFCamp - very kindly covered my costs to go to CFCamp 2013, and I had a really excellent time (see various articles on the topic here: "CFCamp"), and promised myself and him I'd be back in 2014. And planned to do it on my own dime this time.

CFCamp: Exeunt Omnes

G'day:
Richard Herbert and I are sitting in the departure lounge of Munich Airport, awaiting our EasyJet flight back to the UK. I have a beer in hand. Predictably.

CFCamp: Quick unicode regex code snippet

G'day:
A question just came up in Kai's "Regular Expression Clinic" at CFCamp about unicode support in regular expressions. This is important in countries like Germany where they have a lot of non-ASCII characters in regular use in everyday words, eg: letters with umlauts above them ("ö"), or double-S characters ("ß"), etc. I didn't quite know the answer, so I had a look and came up with some code...

CFCamp: inappropriate imagery in Germering

G'day:
No, not the other photo that's doing the rounds. But this one...

CFCamp: Rakshith's Adobe ColdFusion Keynote: notes of my own

G'day:
I fired most of this stuff out on Twitter as it happened, but here's an aggregation of some things that crossed my mind during Rakshith's Adobe / ColdFusion keynote at CFCamp.

First things first... I was very relieved that there was a big chunk of this presentation showed actual code. This is a huge improvement over cf.Objective() and Scotch on the Rocks wherein the main Adobe presentations were aimed at IT Managers rather than developers, and was just promotional material with very little substance. Rakshith's presentation today was really good. This is not just my opinion, everyone else I talked to said the same thing.

CFCamp: freebies

G'day:
Just doing a bit of multi-tasking whilst listening to Rakshith discuss the new web dev training curriculum (which also apparently includes some ColdFusion stuff). But this article is nothing to do with that.

CFCamp: <cfprocessingdirective> and how not to use it

G'day:
This is gonna be a quick one. The topic of <cfprocessingdirective> came up today, in the context of I18n, and character encoding.

CFCamp: Loop labels in Railo

G'day:
Here's another one that I already knew about, but hadn't looked at it before. Gert brought it up in his keynote today, so I thought I'd have a look. Railo has added labels to <cfloop> and <cfbreak> / <cfcontinue>. But the implementation is either incomplete or non-intuitve (at least to me).

CFCamp: new (to me) function in Railo/CFML: serialize()

G'day:
Gert gave typically bloody interesting keynote presentation this morning on what's been happening in Railo over the last year or so, where it's at now, and where it's headed for its next version. I might write up that part of it at some stage, but that sort of thing takes a while to write up and requires more concentration than I feel like dedicating at the moment, so I'm just gonna focus on some of the code stuff he showed us.

First thing... take note, Rakshith: Gert showed us code. Not smoke and mirrors and marketing spiel, but code.

There was a bunch of stuff that was new to me, and I'll write that up separately, but here's a quick examination of Railo's serialize() function. The docs are here: serialize(), but there's not really any useful information there. What serialize() does is to... serialise data, which can later be evaluated (using, yes, evaluate()) back to CFML data again. Here's an example using an array:

rainbow                    = ["Whero","Karaka","Kowhai","Kakariki","Kikorangi","Tawatawa","Mawhero"];
serialisedViaFunction    = serialize(rainbow);
deserialised            = evaluate(serialisedViaFunction);

writeDump([rainbow,serialisedViaFunction,deserialised]);  

Here we get the output:

Wolpertinger

G'day:
This was in the display case just inside the door at the restaurant last night:

To which our reaction was "what the f*** is going on in this place?"

But apparently it's a Wolpertinger. Of course it is.

I love Bavaria.

--
Adam

CFCamp: PresideCMS goes open source

Guten Tag
(and that's the end of the German... I'm over-extending myself even with that much!)

Alex Dom and I flew from Gatwick to Munich late yesterday afternoon, touching down mid-evening. An hour or so later we were wandering around Germering in the middle of the night with Alex going "I think it's down here... just a bit more... further... still... I think..." (where "it" was their hotel... I was staying at a different one). But after a km or so stroll, we found their hotel, dropped their bags off, and went back to downtown Germering for a meal. Most things were closed (10pm, sure... but it was Saturday night?!), but we found a very traditional-seeming restaurant - Zum Griabig'n - which was still open and serving various renditions of flesh and potatoes, so we settled in. The food was hearty and the beer was perhaps one more than I needed (two at Gatwick, two on the plane, one over dinner), but all was good. I slunk back to my hotel a coupla km down the road, and collapsed in a heap.

CFML: CFCamp seems real now

G'day:
This is a bit of a time filler because the Central Line is screwed so I can't get home in time for my Skype with my boy, so need to stick around the office and do it from here. Damn you, TFL! Not to worry.

CFCamp is all of a sudden seeming very real. Mike touched base with me a coupla days ago and has organised my hotel, and EasyJet reminded me today (third time) I had to actually check-in if I wanted to fly with them on Sat. I'm still really really flattered that the CFCamp peeps are comping me to the thing.


There's been a couple of programme changes since I last mentioned what I was gonna look at.

CFCamp: what am I seeing on Day 2?

G'day:
I'm sitting in the pub in Portumna, having completely my paternal input for the day, and just killing time until it occurs to me what else to do. And drinking Guinness (end of pint one). It will distress my mate Brian - with whom I was discussing this at the pub in London on Thurs - that I truly cannot detect a difference in a pint of Guinness served in London, and one served in Ireland. That said, they're both good.

I've not been doing any interesting coding in the last couple of days, and I am still digesting my last Ruby tutorial, and don't even have anything to complain about (well, OK, I could come up with something, I'm sure, but I'm in a happy mood so will leave that for next week ;-).  What I am is jealous of all the chatter from people reporting on the first day of NCDevCon, and the ongoing chatter about StrangeLoop over in the States. But of course we (in Europe) have our own conference coming up: CFCamp. As I wrote earlier I'm off to it, and I've given you my thoughts on which sessions I'll be attending (probably) on Sunday/Monday.

And now for Day Two...

CFCamp: what am I gonna go check out (on Sunday/Monday)

G'day:
So I'm off to CFCamp, thanks to Mike Hnat and the other sponsors who pitched in to get me over there (I've said it already, but I'll say it again, and I'm gonna keep saying it: you guys rock). But what am I gonna go see whilst I'm there?

CFCamp 2013

G'day:
Yesterday Michael Hnat, organiser of CFCamp dropped me a line, and made me an offer I could not refuse...