ColdFusion/Flex Tour Tomorrow!

It's almost time! Tomorrow night at 7:00 we are hosting a special event: Adobe's 2009 user group tour promoting the next versions of ColdFusion and Flex, as well as the first version of Bolt, Adobe's new IDE for developing ColdFusion applications:

Continuing a long tradition of innovation, Adobe is pushing the boundaries of the Adobe Flash Platform with exciting new releases for Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion designers, developers, and administrators. Join us as Adobe’s Josh Adams presents the future of ColdFusion, Flex, and more! On the ColdFusion side, Josh will talk about the upcoming releases of ColdFusion (currently known by the code name Centaur) and the highly anticipated first ColdFusion IDE from Adobe (currently known by the code name Bolt). You’ll learn about exciting new features and discover how Centaur and Bolt will accelerate your ColdFusion application development. On the Flex side, Josh will talk about the next release of Flex (currently known by the code name Gumbo). You’ll see product feature demos and learn how Gumbo breaks new ground for not only developers but also designers as it powers the design, development, and testing of rich Internet applications and content. And of course, Josh will explain and demonstrate the power of ColdFusion and the power of Flex working together!

We're pulling out all the stops for this event, so there will be plenty of food and drink, swag to give away, and also a raffle for a software license, where the lucky winner can choose from a number of valuable products, including the Creative Suite 4 Premium bundles, Flex Builder 3 Professional and ColdFusion 8 Standard.

Please note that this event will be held in a different room than our usual location for our meetings. This time out we will be in room P2-7 of building 98 (the C/L/A building), the meeting room for Cal Poly's Academic Senate (item #20 on the second page linked below):

Map showing building location on Cal Poly campus

Map indicating room location in C/L/A building

As school is not in session this week, no parking passes should be required to park in student lots -- just avoid anything that is labeled as faculty or staff parking.

We hope to see you all there!

Steve Bryant on DataMgr Starting Soon!

If you can't make it down to Cal Poly tonight, you can catch the meeting via Connect at:

http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/r31081269/

ColdFusion/Flex User Group Tour

We have exciting news! Adobe is embarking upon a world-wide tour of user groups to publicize the next versions of ColdFusion and Flex, as well as the first releases of Bolt and Flash Catalyst, two new tools for developing ColdFusion and Flex applications. We have been selected as a stop on the tour, and our event will be held on Tuesday, June 16th at 7:00 PM in room P2-7 of the C/L/A building at Cal Poly Pomona. We are fortunate to have Josh Adams from Adobe as our presenter for the evening:

Josh Adams is Senior System Engineer & ColdFusion Specialist at Adobe Systems Incorporated. In this role, Josh supports the ColdFusion sales team throughout North America. Josh is passionate about ColdFusion and the ColdFusion community: he presents regularly to User Groups and conferences throughout North America and is a longtime member, past President, and current Director of the Atlanta ColdFusion User Group.

Josh will be speaking about what's coming up in both the ColdFusion and Flex realms, so this promises to be a jam-packed session:

The Adobe ColdFusion team is hitting the road to discuss Centaur, the next version of ColdFusion, and Bolt -- code name for the highly anticipated first ColdFusion IDE from Adobe. Learn about exciting new features and discover how Centaur and Bolt will accelerate your ColdFusion application development.

Come learn about the newest features in the Flex 4 framework, Flex Builder 4 and the newest Adobe product -- Flash Catalyst. See product feature demos, and learn how the new Flex framework powers both Flash Catalyst and Flex Builder to speed the development and testing of rich Internet applications and content.

We're going to have plenty of food and drink, as well as some great giveaways, including Adobe software. This promises to be a fantastic evening that you won't want to miss!

May Meeting: Steve Bryant on DataMgr

Due to scheduling issues, our meeting this month has been moved to Thursday, May 28th. Our presenter this time will be Steve Bryant, who will be speaking on DataMgr, his database abstraction ColdFusion component. Although we will be holding the meeting at the regular time and place (7:00 pm at Cal Poly Pomona -- see our meetings page for further details), Steve is located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so he will be presenting via Adobe Connect. As usual, pizza and soft drinks will be provided, so bring your appetite!

Steve Bryant is the proprietor and lead programmer of Bryant Web Consulting. He is a ColdFusion MX Certified Developer who has been programming in ColdFusion since 1999. He is the founder and current manager of the Tulsa ColdFusion User's Group.

He is the author of a number of ColdFusion tools, including Custom Tags, CFCs and a few programs.

Steve teaches occassional classes on ColdFusion and web development at Breakaway Interactive. He has written articles for ColdFusion Developer's Journal and maintains a (fairly) regular blog.

What is DataMgr?

DataMgr is a database abstraction tool to simplify common interactions with the database. This encompasses three major types of functionality:

• CRUD: Database reads/writes including those of the type performed by cfinsert/cfupdate
• ActiveSchema: The ability for your code to define your database structure. DataMgr can introspect the database structure or it can define it.
• Prototyping: The ability to use simulated data for prototyping (much like QuerySim, but more powerful and less work).

Additionally, DataMgr provides some advanced functionality that allows you to define special behaviors and relation fields that can dramatically assist development. Taken together, these features can effectively create interactions with the database that fit the way we develop web applications.

DataMgr could be viewed as a competitor to an ORM approach - though it doesn't require the same types of interactions. While ORM solutions effectively change the perspective of development from database to object, DataMgr maintains the database perspective, but makes common database interaction code more concise and powerful.

DataMgr currently supports the following databases (others are generally easy to add):

• Apache Derby
• MS Access
• MS SQL Server
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL

DataMgr currently supports (and has been show to work in) the following CFML engines:

• ColdFusion MX 6.1
• ColdFusion MX 7
• ColdFusion 8
• OpenBD 1.0
• Railo 3.0.1

April Meeting -- Sava CMS

Next Thursday, April 9th, is the date of our next meeting, and the topic this time around will be an overview of the Sava content management system.

Sava is a free, open source CMS for ColdFusion created and supported by Blue River Interactive Group, and we are fortunate to have two of the partners of Blue River, Sean Schroeder and Matt Levine, as our presenters this month:

Sean Schroeder

Chief User Experience Officer/Partner

After starting his own Internet services company six years ago (Studio Squared Inc.) with Blue River's Matt Levine, award-winning designer Sean Schroeder joined Blue River with a unique focus on solid design principles applied to the user experience. Having worked with a wide range of clients big and small, Sean's love for clean design and smart technical solutions delivers websites that not only look great but make sense to users.

In collaboration with Matt, Sean is the founder and developer of Sava CMS, Blue River's popular open source content management system.

Matt Levine

Chief Technology Officer/Partner

With more than 10 years of experience in database management and web application development, Matt is a seasoned programmer and application architect. Matt's expertise lies in best-practice, object-oriented programming, with certifications from Microsoft, Sun and Adobe. Leading the technology team at Blue River, he blends a pragmatic approach with robust, scalable frameworks to create top solutions for Blue River clients.

Matt is also the architect of and lead developer for Blue River's Sava application suite, which includes content management, e-mail marketing, group collaboration and project management functionality.

Important: please respond to the mailing list thread at our Google Group to RSVP, as we need to submit a list of parking exemptions to the Cal Poly Parking Department.