Michael Smith got things started bright and early on Saturday morning welcoming everyone and introducing the speakers, followed by a keynote by Hal. In his keynote Hal spoke about how he is now re-enthused by ColdFusion (which is great to hear, I remember a few years back it was a much more doom and gloom approach and that we as CF developers must now look to new languages, Java, .NET etc) and how he believes Macromedia has conceeded to the Java and .NET platforms in the top spots but that with the release of Blackstone MM will have a product unlike any other app server, Flash forms etc. MM are strongly pushing the UI functionality along with ‘user experience’ in Blackstone, Flash Forms, Xforms, CFDOCUMENT etc where had it been a more developer focused release they might have concentrated on significant OO enhancements - constructors, interfaces etc. JohnQ finished off the keynote with a brief overview of the Fusebox4.1 updates, before the general sessions got underway.
Just before lunch I attended Barney Boisverts presentation on ‘Using CFCs with Fusebox’ - a sort of misnamed presentation but nevertheless a great presentation. Barney spoke about problems with FB (no? Really? It’s perfect 
) mainly related to issues in 4.0 but which have been addressed in 4.1 (and future releases) and how CFCs address the key concepts of Encapsulation and Abstraction. Taking an MVC application, be it HTML, Flash, Webservices CFCs are able to provide the Model layer in all applications so increasing code reuse. So why use Fusebox? Because CFCs are excellent in the model layer, ie handling business logic but Fusebox is awesome when it comes to managing layouts etc and is a proven framework to plug it all together with.
I lunched with Sean, BrianK and Mike Ritchie at a pizza place over the road, after lunch attending Jeffs ‘XML and FB configuration files’ presentation then Sandys ‘Layouts in FB4 presentation’. Sandy’s presentation was a rerun of her Vegas presentation (last years conference?) but i’d never seen it before so it was a good reminder just how flexible FB4 is when it comes to layouts. A ‘Fuse Panel’ chaired by Jeff Peters closed the day off before everyone retired to ‘Polly Esthers’ for the Fuseball tournament and beer!
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