I’ve got to echo the sentiments of everyone else: cf.Objective was a top notch conference.

I can’t think of a session that didn’t offer something new or challenging to think about. The smaller crowd allowed for some great interaction with community gurus and other developers. And the double-stuffed pillow topped beds, fresh carved pork lunches and artisan pastries were certainly nice touches too.

Overall, I came away with the challenge to improve my coding practices increase the planning that I put into projects.

At one point Terry and I were lobbying Mark Drew, lead developer of the CFEclipse project, to include more remote development features in CFEclipse. Remote development is how most of the developers in our shop work, but it definitely isn’t the industry standard.

Mark questioned why he should divert time away from other enhancements to build in support for bad practices. He used the analogy that if everyone had a six inch pointed spike fixed to their car’s steering wheel, we’d all be much better drivers.

Avoid cutting corners in any software development, plain and simple. There may not be a sharpened spike staring me in the face when I write code, but bad practices usually have a way of catching up.

I think it’s time to overcome my aversion to frameworks. I’ve always been worried about a hit to application performance and keeping up to date with framework code changes. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to turn away from the industry tested patterns and practices that frameworks enforce. That’s not to mention all the repetitive busy work that frameworks automate so that I can focus on building better apps.

I’ve been using Ray Camden’s and Adam Podolnick’s ColdFire Firebug extension for a little while now. For those who haven’t tried it yet, the Firefox extension displays ColdFusion debugging info in a separate panel instead of appending it directly to the bottom of each page. It’s powerful stuff if you’ve ever had a page layout mangled by the vanilla debug dump.

Part of the setup for using ColdFire is deploying a customized debugging cfm template to your server. I never knew this — but ColdFusion actually uses a cfm template to parse and format the debugging output that ends up on each page. You can actually edit this file to customize the output on your system.

I wanted to get ColdFire working on our shared development server at work. But I knew not all of the developers would be on board to start. Luckily, the debugging cfm executes within each application. So the session and application variable scopes are available inside it.

The server debug template can alternate between the default debugging dump and ColdFire formatted output by checking for the existence of a session variable. By default, the server will append the default debug information. But each developer can set a session variable inside an application event or on individual templates to fire the ColdFire formatted output.

This is what your debug template looks like:

Day two of cf.Objective and my brain is approaching maximum capacity. But, there’s only one more day of sessions to go.
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Yesterday was the first day of sessions, and it was packed with great information. I learned some new stuff in every one of the sessions. Lots of other people are covering the details, but here’s what stuck with me.
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Not much to report yet. I flew into Minneapolis this afternoon, shuttled to hotel and checked in.

The welcome reception was very friendly, a good chance to mingle and put some faces to the names in the ColdFusion community. I also got to meet a few new faces — I’m always happy to dish about CF.

After a few drinks, I fear I may have disparaged Asp.NET a bit too much. I’ll try to keep it positive the rest of the conference

Desktop and dashboard gadgets are particularly useful when they pull in dynamic information from the web. ColdFusion can make it really easy to supply your gadgets with dynamic data.

No matter what platform you choose — gadgets generally rely on HTML and scripting code just like any web page. You might be sneaky and squeeze some Flash or Silverlight into the mix, but the same concepts still apply.

Without the traditional back/forward/refresh functionality that web browsers provide for web pages, you’ll need to rely on AJAX methodologies to access and process data within your gadgets.

Where does ColdFusion fit in?

Since gadget files reside and render on the user’s machine, you’re stuck using vanilla DHTML for the front-end. But the front-end needs to retrieve dynamic data from somewhere. That’s where ColdFusion comes into play.

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There’s lots of ways right now to extend the web outside of a traditional web browser. Whether you call them gadgets or widgets, web-enabled desktop mini-apps can be a powerful way to bridge the divide between your users’ machines and your Internet applications.

With all the gadget platforms out there, it can be tough to sift through the options. But in reality, most of the gadget engines are nothing more than glorified web page renderers. If you know HTML and you’re comfortable with JavaScript, you’re already well on your way to churning out your own custom gadgets.

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Thanks, YouTube.

It’s been a crazy week following all the buzz around Adobe’s CS3 announcements. As a Macromedia Studio user, I’ve been waiting to see how Adobe melds their products together with the Macromedia line. Everything I’ve seen has been pretty amazing, especially the cross-app functionality between Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

And as a recent convert to an Intel Macbook, I’m eager to get my hands on native versions of all these apps for my Mac. Parallels is cool — but running Fireworks directly on my desktop would be a lot easier.

I finally had some time to sit down and look through the pricing details. The fine print is disappointing:

Can I switch platforms when I upgrade my software to an Adobe Creative Suite 3 version?
No, you are only eligible to upgrade to a version that runs on the same platform. For example, if you own Adobe Creative Suite 2 for Windows®, you are only eligible to upgrade to a Windows version of Adobe Creative Suite 3.

So my Macromedia Studio license does qualify me for a CS3 Web Edition upgrade — but only for the Windows version. Mac converts need not apply. I can upgrade to CS3 apps in XP using Parallels, but to run it directly on the Mac I’ll have to shell out the full price.

People will pay whatever Adobe wants to charge for these apps. That’s a given. It just seems a little silly to put an extra charge on people who have switched operating systems.

Twitter has been all the rage amongst web geeks for a few months now. But as the service starts to catch on with the general public, keeping up on all the Tweet messages can get a little crazy. It only gets crazier as you start following tweets from your coworkers, ColdFusion gurus, the Mac community, and, oh yeah, Jack Bauer. With a little help from Yahoo Pipes, you can organize and separate tweets into different RSS feeds.

Twitter exposes most of its service functionality through an extensive API system. The API is powerful and insanely simple. On top of that, most of the tweet lists are available in both RSS and JSON form. Using just a few lines of scripting code, you can bring all the elements of Twitter to your own web site or desktop gadget/widget.

Take this a step farther, and you can pull the RSS feeds for individual tweet streams into a single Yahoo Pipe. Pull the pipe through a sort operator on the publication date and the various Twitter streams intermingle into one timeline. The pipe has its own RSS feed that you can follow in your feed reader of choice or pull into your own applications.

I just threw together two quick examples, a ColdFusion Tweet pipe and a Flex Tweet pipe. Neither is exhaustive but there’s enough there to get the basic idea.

This is some very cool stuff, a perfect example of opening up your applications so your users can decide how to consume them.