Sotch on the Road 2009 – London
I was one of the lucky ones who attended “Sotch on the Road 2009” in London. I really enjoyed it, learned a lot and came back home with a head buzzing full of ideas.
I thought I’d briefly cover the sessions I attended so keep reading.
Keynote
After a little introduction by Big Mad Kev and Andy Allan (including a warning about chuggers), Adobe stepped in and gave a overview of where we are and where we’re going with ColdFusion and it’s related technologies (Flex / Flash).
ColdFusion 9 looks like its got the right sort of attention it needed when it came to new features. ORM via Java’s Hibernate will make simple tasks with the database very easy and more maintainable. More PDF functionality is available with methods for extracting images and text plus optimising the file size.
CFScript is being brought up to CFML level with its support and functionality. I also thought that ColdFusion should had supported all functionality in both all along, glad it’s finally coming.
Oh and a multi-server management Adobe Air application. Very fancy looking and could be extremely useful.
Bolt had what you’d already come to expect from CfEclipse but with the surprise of custom extensions being written in CFML. Didn’t see that one coming and would certainly make it easier that having to learn Java.
Comparing Application Frameworks
Mark Drew took over from Sean Corfield who couldn’t attend. He gave a good overview of the main frameworks available for ColdFusion and suggestions as to why they’re can be useful and organise your code. Although he was a little lacking in knowledge about one of the frameworks listed, he did well to explain the others.
I came out of this talk with an urge to try out ColdBox as it has a great reputation for documentation and showed off some very interesting debug and cache information.
Advanced ORM in ColdFusion 9
Adobe delved deeper into the ORM that their packaging in CF9. Adam Lehman gave a great talk and had some very good examples of the usage and what to expect. A lot of it some looks too easy with very empty looking CFC’s that are automatically capable of covering the usual basic tasks of setting and getting data to and from the database.
He did, however, try and dodge several question about how stored procedures would work with this. I felt he was either lacking in knowledge about if they could function via the ORM or knew that they wouldn’t and didn’t want to be negative.
Open Source Railo
Railo (apparently pronounced Ri-lo not Rai-low) is an alternative CFML engine to Adobe’s which is open source. I’ve known about Railo for a while now but didn’t really feel it was near enough Adobe’s to be usable in my work place. Thankfully Gert Franz brainwashed enlightened me on that.
Railo looks fantastic. Everything that I need from a CFML engine is right there in the open source version and it’s compatiblity with the major CFML frameworks gives me a lot of confidence that it wouldn’t take much work to convert from Adobe CFML to Railo’s.
They showed off several small differences to Adobe’s offering that make life easier and squash those annoyances. I think that sometimes Adobe / Macromedia would concentrate on the big new features and forget about the little things / obsticals that hamper developers in our day-to-day work.
On top of that they casually annouce that they’ll also be supporting ORM via Hibernate. I thought that move was awesome, Adobe had done a great job of showing what ORM in CF9 is capable of. So instead of repeating everything they let Adobe show the power of Hibernate and then just state that it’s coming to Railo too. Genius 
Securing ColdFusion applications
This session didn’t rate as highly as all the others. The room was small, the display was wall mounted TV (not a huge one either) and the talk itself felt very dry. I know security is probably a difficult subject to make exciting but I felt David Stockton could have done a better job at it.
Initially there was too much focus on his company and the security standards they adhere to. Then some of the topics dragged on longer than they could have. I’d have enjoyed it far more if he’d delved deeper into the common security mistakes, securing CF installations as much as possible and threat detection.
Although it probably didn’t help that this session was right after lunch and I was sat on the floor for it 
Railo in the Cloud
Mark Drew strikes again. Although externally hosted cloud computing is not an option for the organisation I work for, I still found this a very interesting talk. If not for the fact that Mark gave away his password a few times due to plain text config files
I did come away with the impression that Railo is very capable at clustering and the extensions that are available make the job of keeping things in sync a lot easier.
Overall
Being the first conference I’ve ever attended, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. The talks were fantastic and I felt I’d learned several things to take back to my job and vote for. The seats were awful but I figured you’d rarely be able to get that many lazy boy chairs in time and for that price tag. Finally, the food was nice but terribly organised but this was probably more down to the venue than the organisers.
Name / Job / Org badges would have been nice, plus I was very disappointed in the raffle at the end. With that many developers hanging around, surely they could have knocked together some code to pick a name from the attendee list. I’m just moaning because I wanted the Guitar Hero prize so badly
I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to attend next years, but I’ll certainly try!
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