Working backwards…

I already blogged the Adobe keynote at Scotch on the Rocks but wanted to cover some of the sessions and the overall feel of the conference.

As I said before, it had a nice, relaxed feel to it and Andy Allan, Big Mad Kev and Stephen Moretti did a great job creating a conference that felt like a bunch of developers simply sharing their experiences and their wisdom. It was a really enjoyable three days with some fascinating sessions in an incredible location.

Neil Webb “Cairngorm for Beginners”. I like Neil’s analogies and presentation style. He was very frank about some of the things people don’t like about Cairngorm but showed how code is organized and did a good job of making it approachable.

Nicholas Lierman “Web Analytics for Developers”. This was a hard hitting presentation (most of what you think you know about analytics is wrong) with a lot of good, real-world advice and some real insight into using tools properly to filter and segment and analyze data to identify behavior.

Neil Middleton “jQuery in a Nutshell”. An excellent introduction to the power of jQuery. I’m only just starting to get into jQuery so I learned quite a few things from this session.

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Scotch has a nice, relaxed feel to it (some people might call it disorganized but I rather like it). The keynote was Ben Forta and Adam Lehman tag-teaming the state of the ColdFusion world (CF8 doing very well, working hard on Centaur).

Big news for European CFers - there is now a dedicated EMEA ColdFusion specialist, Claude Englebert, so that there is a direct contact for all sales-related issues. This was the hottest issue brought up at MAX Barcelona so it’s good to see the U.S. model being rolled out in Europe.

Ben emphasized that CFers should be using CFCs to write better structured code and separating presentation code (CFM pages) from business logic (CFCs). He then went on to talk about LiveCycle Data Services and Adam ran thru some simple demos of what is possible with very little MXML code and almost no CFML code.

Ben closed by talking a little (very little!) about possible Centaur plans around AIR.

It seems all the big information about Centaur is being held back for MAX 2008 (in San Francisco, Milan and Tokyo).

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