Apr 23 2011 ColdFusion in 2011 & Upcoming CFUG Topics

As the new Seattle CFUG co-manager I thought I'd give everyone a heads up about how 2011 has been going so far and some of the ideas we have for the rest of the year.

In case you've been living under a rock, 2011 is shaping up to be the most exciting year yet as a CFML developer. With two strongly-supported open-source CFML engines (Railo & Open BD</a>), a plethora of exciting and growing development frameworks, the upcoming release of CFBuilder 2, and news of the next version of Adobe ColdFusion</a> (with jQuery integration, ActionScript support, transition to Tomcat, and more features yet to be announced) it's exciting to see our tools and this community continue to excel and grow.

Here in 2011 our Seattle ColdFusion Users Group is also hoping to invest in and grow the community to be an inspiring and beneficial group for all involved. It's been exciting to see an increase of people willing to present and lead discussions in the past few months - sharing their knowledge and experiences with everyone. A BIG "thank you" goes out to Greg Stallings and Ken Gladden who spoke at the last two meetings on the features and benefits of jQuery and ColdFusion/Javascript Debugging. This next week we're also really excited to have Matt Woodward in house to share his experiences in open-source development and help us understand how to effectively run CFML on Tomcat (something we'll all probably be doing here soon!). It's obvious to me that this community will continue to thrive as people step out from behind their laptops and continue to share their experiences, struggles, and knowledge with the rest of us.

Also one of the ways we hope to improve group is to also make it meaningful and accessible to less-experienced developers (ColdFusion or otherwise) as I know some of the topics and conversations can get advanced very quickly. I know when I first started coming to the CFUG meetings many years ago that much of the regular discussion was either over my head or dealt with topics I had no experience with. While we hope to keep the quality of discussion and topics high, we do hope to spend more time in the coming months focused on more basic topics – allowing rookie developers the chance to feel comfortable and ask questions. I sincerely hope that moving forward everyone can feel comfortable to ask "stupid questions" as I know I still have many I need to ask myself.

So where do we go from here? We did a poll last month and came up with some topic ideas for the rest of the year. Here is what we currently have:

• April: CFML & Tomcat (Matt)</li>
• May: What Is Object Oriented Programming & How Can It Help Me? (Chris)</li>
• June: Group Project!!! - Come and help the group build an application in 2 hours! (or watch & learn how other devs work)</li>
• July: SQL Best Practices</li>
• August: CF Topic TBD</li>
• September: Intro To HTML 5</li>
• October: Mura – A Kick-Ass ColdFusion CMS</li>
• November: Review of Adobe MAX 2011</li>
• December: Holiday Hangout </li>>

  So…what do you think? What are you excited for? Any topics that you think we should add to the list? You'll notice that while we are a "ColdFusion" user group, we know that most all devs work with other technologies as well – so the plan for the rest of this year is to mix both "CF" and "Non-CF" topics to keep things interesting. Please feel free to email us and let us know what you think (seattlecfug [at] gmail com).

  I hope that gives you a good look at where we're at and where we're going. Sorry for the long post but I wanted to make sure to catch you up on all that's going on. Please don't be a stranger – come join us this Tuesday night (or on the last Tuesday of each month) down at the Adobe campus in Fremont – 6:30 PM. We hope you can join us – and maybe learn something in the process.

  - Brian