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Las Vegas, NV | ||||||
Fusebox Conference 2003 Compiled by James Husum and Mike Brunt
The conference commenced with a reception and registration on Saturday night including the now legendary Fusebox Fuseball contest. Conference packets were distributed that contained handouts for the presentations, a demo copy of Adalon 2.6 from Synthis, a sheet for the CF tag game, and a really cool FB beer glass (sadly there were no free samples to test the glasses!). Steve Nelson, from SecretAgents.com, was showing off two tools he has developed - the improved Prototype Toolkit and the Fusedoc Validator. The evening also hosted the annual Fuseball tournament (full report further on). Day 1: Fusebox 4.0
Jeff Peters' session on Fusedocs covered the XML-based documentation standard for Fusebox. Jeff went over the benefits of using Fusedocs, such as having an easy way of knowing what the fuse is meant to do and what variables it handles. He also showed how Fusedocs provide a good way of documenting what your thought process was in case you have to revisit your code six months later for maintenance. Steve Nelson has already used Fusedocs very effectively for his ongoing Fusecoder project. Michael Smith came back for a presentation on Real World FLiP (Fusebox Lifecycle Process.) In the session he went over some of the problems developers encounter while using FLiP. He then departed from the usual format and broke the audience up to form teams. Each team took one of the problems and brainstormed possible solutions. At the end, each team presented their solutions for peer review. Picasso would have been proud of some of the drawings!
Day 2: Mach-IIThe second day focused entirely on the Mach-II framework, which is based on object-oriented principles and uses ColdFusion Components as an integral part of its design. Mach-II was developed by Ben Edwards and Hal Helms. Helms explained that 'mach' represents breaking the procedural barrier, and 'II' stands for the implicit invocation architecture, on which the framework is based. Sean Corfield is likely to be a major contributor to the Mach-II effort, and mentioned he was already working on some enhancements. In fact, since the conference, he has built a whole section of his blog to cover Mach-II topics: http://www.corfield.org/index.php?fuseaction=machii.main.The first presentation focused on object-oriented principles and how they apply to coding web applications. Helms listed the three essential aspects of object-oriented (OO) programming as Polymorphism, Inheritance and Encapsulation. He stressed the long-term need for us all to start grasping OO principles. We have a golden opportunity to do so, thanks to ColdFusion MX. Head First Java by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, published by O'Reilly, was recommended as a good reference for ColdFusion developers wanting to get up to speed on Java and OO. The next segment went into more of the architecture and configuration of a Mach-II app. Configuration of the app is done using XML. The system is event-based. A component of the system broadcasts an event. Other procedures in the system are set to listen for the broadcasted event. When they 'hear' the event their own methods are invoked and run. There are sample apps along with the Mach-II framework available from the Mach-II web site (http://www.mach-ii.com).
The last segment provided further detail on the workings of Mach-II, such as how events are defined and examples of how to create listeners and event filters. View from Starship Fuseballprise! Where's Stan Cox? Just
before the drawings for the door prizes started there was an appearance
by TV personality ALF, standing in for the legendary Stan Cox. It seems
that Stan is now living on ALF's home world (Melmac) and enjoying
having every fantasy fulfilled, courtesy of Mach-II! (It couldn't have
happened to a more deserving guy than Stan.)
Finally, the winners of this year's Fuseball tournament were Devin Holloway and John Vachalek. On their way to glory they had a really hard-fought, tight game against Rey Muradaz and Steve Nelson. For their efforts, they won nicely laminated posters proclaiming them Fuseball Champions for 2003. Congratulations, guys, and better luck to everyone else next year. We talked with many attendees after the conference. Overall,
most attendees had a positive experience with the conference and
thought it was worthwhile. Kathryn Butterly said, "I liked it very
much. FB4 has a lot of things we need, such as layouts and security."
But the whole conference was probably best summed up by Chris Phillips,
who said, "It was just so awesome!"
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This year's Fusebox conference was held at the Rio Hotel and Casino on
Sunday, August 31st and Monday, September 1st in beautiful and very
warm Las Vegas; temperatures topped 100 degrees every day. Ninety-three
people from all over the globe attended, including folks from Britain
and Australia. There were eleven ladies signed up for the conference.
According to Sandra Clark, a speaker at the conference, this is the
highest ratio of women attending ever in the history of Fusebox. Other
notable firsts at the 2003 conference were the launch of Fusebox 4.0
for procedural programming and Mach-II for 'OO' development. Charlie
Areheart, CTO of New Atlanta, also announced the impending launch of
NewAtlanta's Blue Dragon server 3.1 for running CFML pages.
To end the first day, Michael Smith, Sandy Clark, Steve Nelson and Sean
Corfield sat on the Fusebox Panel and fielded questions from the
audience. One nice piece of information came from Corfield. He said
that while Macromedia was optimizing the CF 6.1 code, several Fusebox
apps were used to help optimize and tweak performance. This involved
testing Fusebox 3.0, Fusebox 4.0 and Mach-II (formerly Fusebox MX)
applications to ensure that the new XML-driven FB apps also ran faster
under ColdFusion MX 6.1! He also mentioned that Macromedia was using
Mach-II to build some internal web applications and shared some amazing
metrics for the number of hits the MM web sites get in a typical day.
