Rob's tech blog...

 

Scotch on the Rocks 2011 – Day 2 – Expand your mind with noSQL and then relax on the CouchDB - Mark Drew

 Final day, final session and the gods of tech had intervened by killing Mark’s laptop first thing Friday morning which meant I was able to go and see his presentation* in place of the EHCache session I was due to see. NoSQL and I have a love hate relationship – I’d love to be able to use it and hate that I can’t. That said, Mark’s preso covered the basic issues surrounding relational databases in the modern world and how poorly a lot of data fits into the table / join concept as well as pointing out the differences in some of the common NoSQL alternatives. After a global overview (which given the amount of data and the number of platforms was pretty impressive in itself) Mark moved onto the specifics of CouchDB and the ease with which a quick Key Value data store can be setup. I was already aware of the RESTful nature of the platform but didn’t realise that this protocol was used by everything (client tools, replication, the works). It was quite impressive to see the JSON being returned live with the listener requests and the act of inserting data, attachments etc. was demonstrated very quickly and cleanly. One thing I thought about later was, considering the issues surround ColdFusion and the inconsistencies in serializing / deserializing data to and from JSON had any one actually tried this against a CF server? The replication demo was fantastic (fully replicated servers in ~ 10 seconds) and certainly raised some eyebrows amongst those (myself included) who’d setup MySQL replication. The big issues surrounding alternate data stores  will be present for some time yet but Mark gave us a 60 minute, whirlwind around what the future should look like for a lot of apps and did it all (well most of it) with a pint in his hand! Scores (out of 10) Direct Professional Value: 9 Ongoing General Value: 9 Contention / Debate: 8 Style: 10 Overall: 9 *Rumours that I was seen lurking around Mark Drew’s laptop with a magnet on a fishing rod are total fabrications and it’s just a happy coincidence (for me at least) that I managed to see his fantastic preso.
Filed under: Development Sys admin couchdb database mysql nosql performance railo replication simples sotr2011
 

Scotch on the Rocks 2011 – Day 2 – AJAX Longpolling with ColdFusion 9 and BlazeDS – Stephen Moretti

 Cor blimey day 2 was technical! And Steve’s session was easily the most in depth of any I saw over the two days. Long polling is pretty well established as a technique and the use of BlazeDS to handle the connection is something that everyone talks about doing but very few actually implement. In a great preso, Steve ran through the basic of the concept and quickly jumped into code to setup the BlazeDS configuration, the Event Gateway to wire it all together and the basic AJAX / jQuery client to send the messages. I’ll be frank and say that a lot of the configuration was lost on me – it’s the kind of thing I’ll always have to look up in the docs as I’m never going to be doing it regularly but the actual concepts were neatly outlined. Some of the gotchas were also well worth hearing about: the blocking IO model in BlazeDS, the need to separate out onto a different server to prevent long polled requests exhausting your app server thread pool. I was also really impressed to see a very technical demo, running on Ubuntu and pretty much live coded (a fair whack of copy and paste but built up over the hour) – all of this from a guy who could barely stand for the 2 days of the conference! Scores (out of 10) Direct Professional Value: 6 Ongoing General Value: 8 Contention / Debate: 5 Style: 8 Overall: 6.75
Filed under: BlazeDS Development adobe ajax chat coldfusion linux long polling sotr2011
 

Scotch on the Rocks 2011 – Day 2 – Building a Video Platform: ColdFusion, HTTP Dynamic Streaming and OSMF – David Collie

 Another very relevant session and one which I was a little worried about given my lack of ActionScript experience. I need not have worried. David and Andy Wallace*... the other guy (terribly sorry but I missed the intro’s as the session started on time ... come on, this is SOTR! You’re not meant to start on time!) ran through the OSMF and the Dynamic Streaming Module by way of a demo video portal built in flex. The software demo’d was really impressive when you consider that Flash Media Server would have been needed to do a lot of this in the past. Basically the “Packager” (a command line tool) takes Flash video(s) and chunks them for dynamic streaming. The OSMF player SDK allows you to build a video player which supports all of the features of the chunked video including manifests (playlists), enforceable “no scrub” vids for advertisements etc. as well as supporting auto bandwidth switching based on available network capacity - assuming you’ve encoded multiple band width versions of the video. Considering the breadth of the topic the session was concise and the demo’s intuitive. It was more of an introductory overview of the different apps and products but, to someone who’s looking seriously at video and the best way to process it from within the Adobe tool set, is was well worth the hour spent. Scores (out of 10) Direct Professional Value: 9 Ongoing General Value: 10 Contention / Debate: 4 Style: 7 Overall: 7.5 (weighted to 8.5) * apologies to Andy Wallace for not a) remembering your name or b) actually looking it up and thanks to both David and Andy for a great presentation!
Filed under: Development flash flex osmf sotr2011 video
 

Scotch on the Rocks 2011 – Day 2 – Easy Validation with ValidateThis – John Whish

 The first session of the day and the first that had direct business relevance (as in “we’re going to be using this in about 2 weeks” relevant). After missing the Railo Keynote due to the pressures of breakfast and an extra 10 minutes in bed I was in place for John’s session nice and early and I’m very glad I made the effort. Validate This is one of the technologies that I’d looked at but not really got on board with, mostly because of the (incorrect) perception that it required you develop in OO ColdFusion to work. Following a brief introduction to the Framework (jQuery) and the engines it supports (Adobe ColdFusion, Railo & Groovy) John proved my first assumption wrong – Validate This can be used to validate outside of objects using the FORM scope or even JSON calls as the basis for rule application. Oh and it supports jQuery 1.4 & 1.5. John moved quickly onto the guts of the framework showing how a singleton instance of ValidateThis can be passed rules in XML or JSON via a parameter to the constructor of the base class. For those using it in an OO environment, Validate This also supports annotations in the objects to be validated. On the client side, standard validation messages are supplied which can be overridden as needed. The messages can be output in different locations by adding a <cfoutput /> to the code on the server-side. A couple of other notes: Validate This currently uses isValidEmail() for email validation which is less than ideal as it’s a pretty basic ruleset but it can be easily overridden to employ your own regular expression. One great feature that I wasn’t aware of is the support for “Contexts” in forms which allow you to use the same rule sets but apply some of them depending on the context of the data you’re validating. The example of “User Registration” vs “Login” form is a great way to promote a feature that really embodies the kind of DRY techniques that make this kind of framework worth using. Other little tidbits? Of course JS is case-sensitive but having it raised as a gotcha was handy. As was the highlight of the “ignore” class which allows an item to be validated purely on the server-side (great for hidden fields). Finally John pointed out that the validation instance can be injected back into the business object to provide access to validation from within the object itself … which is very cool indeed! I’ll be working more with validate this over the next few weeks but this session was a great into. (Note: John’s presentation is now online at http://www.aliaspooryorik.com/blog/index.cfm/e/posts.details/post/305 ) Scores (out of 10) Direct Professional Value: 10 Ongoing General Value: 9 Contention / Debate (inv): 9 Style: 9 Overall: 9.25
Filed under: Development bo coldfusion form jquery railo sotr2011 validation
 

Scotch on the Rocks 2011 – Day 1 – FW/1 – The Invisible Framework – Sean Corfield

 This fairly well attended session focused on some of the basic features and driving requirements behind the framework running through the controllers, views, layouts and the flexibility inherent in FW/1. The more advanced information came as results of questions from the floor which Mr. Corfield dealt with in a brisk and technically expert manner (would we expect anything else?) Some items were new to me (caching for example and how this can be disabled if needed) and some were known (the layout cascade and the overrides available) but in terms of a good 1 hour grounding in the framework the session did exactly what it said on the tin. In all honestly the real value of this session was in the debate and discussions afterwards (both sensibly at lunch and less sensibly at dinner and after) where I got to chat on the subject of Frameworks with my fellow attendees and got some great feedback on full stack vs lightweight frameworks and the fit for various projects / phases. That said I will continue to follow FW/1 with interest and will use it where appropriate. I’m especially pleased to see FW/1’s adoption by Mura is bringing new power to a pure ColdFusion CMS – which can only be a good thing! Scores (out of 10) Direct Professional Value: 5 Ongoing General Value: 6 Contention / Debate: 9 Style: 8 Overall: 7
Filed under: Development Thoughts coldfusion framework fw/1 railo software sotr2011
 

Scotch on the Rocks 2011 – Day 1 - Requirements and Estimating – Peter Bell

 Peter’s session resulted in 6 pages of notes, which I won’t go into in masses of detail (yet). Suffice to say there was a massive amount of technique rammed into 1 hour starting with Intent Driven Design as a mechanism for requirements gathering. The basis of this technique is the derivation of Business Intent (the Why of a project) which can determine the driver behind development. Generally speaking, one should avoid projects that introduce more than 5 Intent items as a greater number would denote the need for breaking down a project into further phases or units. The next concept introduced was that of Audiences (the Who of a project) which is fairly easy to understand. These audiences or roles are the functional groups in a project, the user types, the interested parties. Drilling down into the project Peter explained the use of User Stories to identify specific requirements. Effectively User Stories can identify areas of Shared Need within a project. As User Stories are well known and well documented online I’ll skip the next couple of pages of notes highlighting only that Peter recommends the batching of 0 point tasks into a single story with a value for use in estimating. The use of Stories and IDD in terms of production of estimates and trackable units was of great interest to me as was Peter’s focus on the functionality side of a project. The basic concept of build something you can use to fulfil the requirements and worry about making it look good or work more easily sounds commonsensical but is so often over looked! The only downside to Peter’s otherwise brilliant preso was the assumption (or hope?) that we all live in a world where we can afford to say to our clients “Pay me to estimate” all too often good estimating techniques fall by the wayside due to pitch / profit issues. Anyway back to the session, Peter introduced the concept of planning Poker (a bit gimmicky?) and the more useful (for me anyway) Magic Estimating technique which I will definitely be introducing at our larger project kick offs. The tongue in cheek mention of APIs (muted groans from around the room) as the feature that always takes at least twice as long to build as expected was part of Peter’s section on feature types which, whilst a little cynical was pretty much bang on for 99% of the features in any project I’ve ever worked on. A final wrap up of the Iron triangle and the introduction of buffers and the first session of the day came to a whirlwind stop. Scores (out of 10) Direct Professional Value: 8 Ongoing General Value: 9 Contention / Debate: 5 Style: 10 Overall: 8  
Filed under: Development Thoughts estimating planning soft skills sotr2011
 

Scotch on the Rocks 2011 – Day 1 - Keynote – Adobe

 Scotch on the Rocks 2011 – Day 1 - Keynote – Adobe Effectively the KeyNote was focussed on ColdFusion Builder 2 and ColdFusion X. The announced features for each are listed in short order: ColdFusion Builder 2
  • Call backs for extension functions
  • A new code beautification tool for one click source formatting
  • New keyboard shortcuts
  • Improved performance
  • Improved code completion and folding
  • Some other bits I didn’t catch
ColdFusion X (Link)
  • No more Verity for searching – it’s SOLR all the way from here on in
  • No more jRun as it has been replaced with TomCat as the application server (this is awesome news for all those who run CF in “out of the box” mode as it means Adobe have standardised on … the industry standard for J2EE provision)
  • New support for web services including WS-Security and other WSDL enhancements which will provide:
  • Exchange 2010 support via the .NET web services made available by Redmond.
  • New REST features for producing & consuming RESTful web services. Will be interesting to see how well this is implemented given the current browser constraints surround HTTP verbage
  • A fully rebuilt Scheduled Tasks engine introducing <cfjob /> for an enhanced programmatic interface and massively improved rule sets. The big news for me was the ability to persist your task store into different storage forms – DB, RAM etc. which should mean the system is more reliable than the current XML POS
  • New improvements to Java support including a native Java loader for dynamic loading of classes – this is pretty cool but I’ve never needed to use the current RIAForge project so I’m not sure this will be massively useful for me.
  • Closures … erm … yay?
More of interest was what wasn’t mentioned (or at least specified). I was expecting an announcement about <cfscript /> but it wasn’t forthcoming so I guess we will have to wait to see if Adobe are actually going to implement Action Script on the server. Likewise the generalisations about improved mobile support and improved HTML5 support were somewhat lacking in practical details. Finally CFX will be getting some jQuery love but I’m not certain if that will be alongside the current Ext/YUI engines or in place of. I have to say that the replacement option will cause massive issues for me in terms of backwards compatibility! Anyway, KeyNote done and it was time to move onto the first session – Requirements and Estimating with Peter Bell
Filed under: Thoughts adobe coldfusion coldfusion builder coldfusion x events sotr sotr2011
 

Scotch on the Rocks 2011

 The first official day of the conference was, for me specifically, a bit of a nightmare. Due to the remarkably pedestrian service at breakfast I was late down to the keynote and so didn’t get a seat and work intervened after lunch to mean I missed sessions 3, 4 & 5. That said, the two sessions I did manage to a) arrive at in time to get a seat and b) see where pretty darned awesome! In a new format for this year I’m writing up the sessions individually and linking to them from this post: Day 1 Day 2
Filed under: Thoughts coldfusion events railo sotr2011
 

Scotch on the Rocks 2011 - What I'm Going to See

 Less than a week to go before Scotch on the Rocks 2011 kicks open the doors for 2 days of fun fuelled ColdFusion and RIA goodness and I've mostly tied down my session list:
Day 1
Slot Session
10:15-11:15 Requirements and Estimating - Peter Bell
11:30-12:30 FW/1 - The Invisible Framework - Sean Corfield
13:30-14:30 The road to sanity - sorting out your legacy applications - David Stockton
14:45-15:45 What's coming in Railo 4 - Gert Franz
16:00-17:00 The Pen Is Mightier Than The Keyboard - Rob Rawlins

Day 2
Slot Session
10:15-11:15 Easy Validation with ValidateThis - John Whish
11:30-12:30 Building a Video Platform: ColdFusion, HTTP Dynamic Streaming and OSMF - David Collie
13:30-14:30 AJAX Longpolling with ColdFusion 9 and BlazeDS - Stephen Moretti
14:45-15:45 Caching in ColdFusion 9.0.1 with Ehcache: Beyond the Basics - Rob Brooks-Bilson
Of course, as per last year this is subject to change based on any of the sessions appealing to me easily distracted nature (hint - make it shiny and I'm there) and proximity to the coffee cart. So what are you all going to see and why?
Filed under: coldfusion events sotr sotr2011
 

SOTR 2011 Speakers - the wraps are off

 Almost on schedule and the immensely hard-working team behind Scotch on the Rocks have unveiled the speaker list for the 2011 conference in Edinburgh. Amongst the usual luminaries of the CF community it's good to see some UK community names in the list. The only problem? With that many speakers and 3 tracks I'm going to need to work double time on my self cloning technology to see all that I want to see!
Filed under: Thoughts coldfusion events people sotr sotr2011
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