Day one of CFUNITED is winding down (aside from what I suspect will be a long evening of hanging out at the bar). Michael Smith and crew have outdone themselves once again, with over 900 attendees (over a 1000 including staff and exhibitors).
This morning's keynote went very well. I presented ColdFusion powered Flex, demonstrating the Flex Builder ColdFusion wizards and a Flex Data Services example. I also reviewed pricing and deployment options, and the assembled were ecstatic when they heard what the final pricing is. Next came Jason Delmore, ColdFusion's new Product Manager, who talked a bit about "Scorpio", and demonstrated examples of ColdFusion integration with PDF forms and ColdFusion generated Breeze content. And then we introduced ColdFusion's new Product Marketing Manager, our very own Tim Buntel, dragged back in from semi-retirement-kind-of.
The rest of the day has been a blur of customer chats and meetings. Flex 2 is definitely a big deal, as is the relief at seeing Adobe still committed to ColdFusion. (I am not going to say "I told you so", but ...).
And now it's time to head downstairs to that bar ...
Another question:
Will hooking up a Coldfusion gateway to Express, be considered the one app?
Day one was a great day for CF/Flex. The return of Tim coupled with the big announcement was awesome. I attended two 3 hour sessions yesterday. Intro to CFCs with Ray Camden was awesome.
I was fairly disappointed with the Flex Coding Kitchen. It seemed that team was unprepared and the presentation was fragmented. I think it would be helpful to us CF veterans who wanted to learn a bit about FLEX to have a group or perhaps an individual present the FLEX tool in a more systematic method. The main speaker seemed to quickly go through the screens expecting everyone to keep up. It was very telling at the end when they asked, "So who else was able to get a working example?" and no one replied in the affirmative. Not to get on a soap box, but if CF users are going to embrace this we are going to need more examples of "how to"s. Perhaps something to bring up to the team for future Breeze presentations.
I saw your keynote, and I actually spoke to you a bit about our nightmarish experience with Flash Forms (you told me, "Nobody told you to do that!", and you are correct sir!). I - like everyone else - am very excited about the capabilities of Flex, and I love the slick UI that the MXML builds.
That being said, I would like to know some real-world uses of Flex. A dashboard, I suppose, but I can't really think of anything else. The examples are cool, the mail clients, and the Flickr apps, but these are really just toys: "look what I can do". The load time is prohibitive to real-world, corporate site development - at least in my humble opinion.
I don't mean to knock the product; I have NOT played with the final release of Flex 2, or even seen it load in Flash Player 9 (which I hear has VASTLY improved performance). I just know that after our horrible experience with Flash Forms, and as badly as we got burned with them (which was our own damn fault, I agree), selling the Flex package to our management team would be a hell of a task - and I have to think that there are a LOT of other developers/teams in the same position.
If I sound like a naysayer, I apologize. I would just be VERY interested to see some examples of real-world applications (OTHER than dashboards!) built in Flex - or even a list of real-world apps that SHOULD be built in Flex.
Thanks,
nb