Details are beginning to emerge regarding the 2008 edition of CFDevCon - our UK conference for ColdFusion.
I went to the last one and, to be honest, I was little underwhelmed. Forget about the venue, that was disappointing, yes, but it was the first year and on a shoestring budget it was the best they could get. Seriously, though, Brighton??!?!?!?! That's an awfully long non-commutable journey.
What disappointed me last year was that, at the end of the conference it was announced that the next one would be bigger and longer (yay!) but would include other technologies such as Flash, Flex and .Net.
It seems, looking at the 2008 list of speakers that this is the route they have in fact gone down. The Silverlight presentation sticks out as a cry to Microsoft to be involved because it somehow gives the conference more validity. Wouldn't it have been enough to just stick with the ColdFusion angle and, maybe, the rest of the Adobe line (just because of the integration) rather than try to be all things to all people?
I'm still waiting for the full programme to emerge before I decide whether or not to go. With two sessions on Fusebox, though, and not enough case-study based sessions around general concepts (what's wrong with a session on MVC in general, rather than the over-complicated IMHO Fusebox, specifically?) it's not looking good so far, unfortunately.
4 comments:
Hey, this yeah does indeed plan te be a lot more exciting. Myself and Richard have joined Russ in making this a great event. The tag line for this event is
"The ColdFusion centric web development conference" - so we're bring in other things along side CF - and we have some belters lined up.
Some of our confirmed non-CF speakers are:
Aral Balkan: Topic TBC
Nicholas Lierman: data visualization with Flex, web analytics for rich
internet apps or just any Adobe AIR topic.
Andrew Shorten: Flex/AIR
Simon Gladman: speaking on Blaze/LCDS
Mike Taulty: Microsoft An introduction to Silverlight. Windows communication
foundation platform and its SOAP and RESTful services.
Eric Nelson: Microsoft What's new in SQL Server 2008 Internet Information
Services 7 (IIS7)
Peter Elst: ActionScript 3.0.
Dean H. Saxe: Application security
As for the venue - what else can we offer - a world class hotel in one of the UKs technology hotspots!
This does promise to be a great event and i hope to see you their!
R,
Nick
I think, perhaps, my original point is missed.
A ColdFusion-centric conference is fantastic, but it's not particularly CF-centric. It appears there are far more sessions on technologies that might be integrated, or vaguely associated, with ColdFusion, but not much content about CF itself. This is particularly surprising considering that the new version of CF was launched between the last CFDevCon and this most recent CFDevCon. Perhaps the TBC speakers might add a bit more to it...
A lot of CFdevelopers fall into the trap of thinking that CF is the be all and end all and solves every problem, which is not the case. Since CF8 you can now integrate with .NET, so we thought it valid to introduce a bit of .NET into the lineup and let people see what you can do if you leverage the power of both technologies.
Also the inclusion of microsoft has a reason, most cfdevelopers use their products in one way or another, mostly SQL server and IIS becaus ethey run windows, thus why we have topics on both. A conference that covers ColdFusion, only ColdFusion and nothing but ColdFusion is not really that exciting to the majority as most people do use other technologies or at least want to learn about them.
I think I was perhaps hoping for some balance. There's quite a bit more that could be covered on CF8, for instance, especially as it's so new. There's a whole load of different frameworks and utilities that can be packaged into a session that developers might find useful. I'm sure Fusebox will be covered, it always is, but there are others.
I guess I just have this view that when developers attend a conference, they tend to be developing for somebody and they tend to have problems they need to solve. This programme seems instead to be a whole series of tangents to be drawn off into, rather than focus on core skill sets.
If the argument for Microsoft is because of how many people use their products, where's Oracle? Where's Eclipse? Where's a whole section on Java?
I don't know, maybe I see it differently - a conference should either be VERY focussed, or VERY broad. This is neither.
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