On day two of CFUnited, Adam Haskell and I sat down with the ColdFusion Jedi himself, Ray Camden. We discuss several topics, including Ray's career, his new position at Broadchoice (which he had only been at for a month or so at the time of this interview), his many open source projects, why he writes open source applications, Spry and jQuery, ColdFusion 9, his role on the CF Language Advisory Committee, maintaining a balance between family, coding and blogging, TV and... tattoos.

The quality of this recording was one of our better ones from the conference, thanks to the use of Jeff Coughlin's Blue Snowball microphone. We're trying to purchase a Blue Snowball of our own, and you can help make that a reality with a donation of an Amazon gift card, which start at $5. Here is a link to our Amazon wish list if you care to donate or show some appreciation to our podcast.

Run time: 34:16

Hey! Adam here... Brian got a bit of a break from editing and I took this conversation on to edit and produce, with Brian adding some finishing touches in the end. This was my first hack at producing an episode so please be patient as I learn more about editing levels. Editing it was a challenge but I had a great time, I hope everyone enjoys the episode half as much as I enjoy producing it!

With CFUnited quite a few weeks in the past and 10 episodes under our belt it's time to bring back the round table platform. We're bringing it back in style we've gathered 8 stellar participants including:

• "The God of ColdFusion" Sean Corfield.
• Myself (Adam Haskell)
• Brian Meloche (it rhymes with wash already!)
• Rick Mason
• "Mr Transfer" Mark Mandel
• Bob Flynn
• Jeff Coughlin, and
• Richard Goodrow

As one should expect with this stellar group of participants, the content is great and covers a wide range of topics.

Bob Flynn kicks this conversation off with an announcement about bFusion and bFlex, two days of free hands-on training in Flex and ColdFusion at Indiana University... check out the episode for more info!

From there, you'll get the opportunity to pick up hiring tips and ideas from some folks that have been very successful in hiring top talent in the past (Brian's note: This was recorded before it was announced that Brian Kotek was also joining Broadchoice).

The conversation doesn't stop there, as we had to take this opportunity to pick Sean's brain about the CFML Advisory Board. Brian also announced that a new vendor-neutral site to promote the CFML language is in development (Brian's note: I pulled the domain name from the podcast because, well, we're not quite ready to completely open it up to the general public yet [but the basics are up]. If you are really interested in helping out, use the contact form and I'll tell you more.).

We asked Mark Mandel how he felt about ColdFusion 9's Hibernate functionality, and we all chimed in about other ColdFusion 9 functionality, and talked a bit about alternative editors and search tools.

We also covered the SQL injection hot topic, including a free tool from HP called scrawlr and a project called Query Param Scanner.

CFUnited was covered for the last time, I promise.

We also talked about the Railo 3 beta and the Open BlueDragon releases.

Sean and myself closed out the conversation with a short discussion of an announcement that should have been made by now. It seems this announcement still has not come out so it's exclusively made on this episode! (Brian's note... nope, we're not mentioning it in writing... you have to listen near the end of the podcast!)

Run time: 1:36:37

On Day one of the CFUnited conference, several of us sat down with Gert Franz of Railo, correctly pronounced "Rhy-low" (not "Ray-low"). Railo, a Swiss company, sells an alternative CFML engine, also called Railo, which has been getting a lot of attention in the CF developer community in recent months. During Gert's keynote at the Scotch on the Rocks conference in early June, it was announced that version 3.0 would have support for CFVIDEO and Hibernate, which had been getting a lot of attention in the CF blogosphere, especially since the cf.Objective() conference in early May. Furthermore, Gert announced that Railo version 3.1 would be released as open source under the LGPL license, with support from JBoss and hosting from Jboss.org.

The Railo open source announcement was enthusiastically welcomed throughout the CFML community, as has been documented on several previous episodes of CFConversations. Even key Adobe personnel such as Ben Forta and Adam Lehman were enthusiastic about the announcement.

Also, during Adobe's keynote at CFUnited, it was announced that Gert was one of the members of the CFML Language Advisory Committee.

In this episode, we talk about all of these things, some of Railo's history, and a little about Gert himself, who's a warm and very approachable person, with an interesting history that I think you'll enjoy hearing about.

This was an interview that a lot of people wanted to be a part of, or just listen to in person. Also in the room were: Peter Bell, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew, Adam Haskell, Jeff Coughlin, Joe Reinhart and Rick Mason, and most of them get involved in the interview at one point or another. This interview was one of my highlights of CFUnited, so I hope you enjoy it.

This was the first podcast recorded at CFUnited, and we didn't have access to the Blue Snowball microphone we used for most of the interviews and round tables. This interview was recorded from three Macbook Pro built-in microphones, although one of them produced a recording that was unusable. The interview itself required substantial post production editing to make it listenable, so the quality may not be as good as episodes six through nine. However, I think, it's now in a listenable form.

Due to the difficulty in editing this episode and the timeliness of other episodes, this episode got pushed back a couple of times. Ironically, this worked out, as Gert is doing a U.S. user group tour that starts on Monday, July 28th, which coincides with the release of this episode.

This is the first episode where my inserts are recorded via the new headset, courtesy of Marc Esher. If you liked the new music track, it's from a band called spineCar, from the Album Up From the Mud, and the track is called "Smoke". I'm thinking it's going to be the podcast's theme song. What do you think?

Run time: 56:47

In this... controversial... special mid-week episode of CFConversations, Rick Mason interviews Nick Kwiatkowski, manager of the Michigan Flex User Group, and the organizer of the Michigan Flex Camp, which will be held in East Lansing on July 30 & 31. It's a two day Flex camp that only costs $40... and that's a heck of a deal.

This episode, like the last one, has a lot of Flex content, but there is a lot of ColdFusion content, too. Nick talks about what he thinks about ColdFusion frameworks, the ColdFusion "elite", Flex and "the cloud".

We're using a different theme from the last episode. This track is courtesy of monstertracks.com, and it's called MEGARAT30. Tell us what you think of the music intros. We're experimenting, and will try a few more in upcoming episodes.

Run time: 38:02

In this episode, Dan Wilson interviews John Wilker of 360 Conferences, the company that brings you the 360 Flex conferences.

John and Dan talk about the 360 Flex conferences, the upcoming conference in San Jose on August 18-20, ColdFusion and Flex. A summary of the conversation can be found here:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddsr546t_26fshzw7k2

Note: This is the first episode not produced by Brian - this one is all Dan! :) Dan is one of the team here at CFConversations, and we're pleased to have one of his episodes on the podcast. He's got more episodes coming! Also, by popular demand, this episode features our first experimentation with theme music. Let us know what you think. We'll experiment with other tracks and how they are presented in the next upcoming episodes. Also, since Dan was the producer on this episode, let us know what you thought of the audio quality, and how it compares to our most recent interviews.

Run time: 43:06

Our third interview episode is with John Farrar of SoSensible.

On July 2nd, Packt Publishing released John Farrar's ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial, their first ColdFusion title, and the first non-CFWACK title since Rob Brooks Bilson's Programming ColdFusion back in the MX 6.1 days.

John's a fellow user group manager, and a friend of mine. On Day 2 of CFUnited, I interview John, along with Adam Haskell (who's listening). We talk about the new book, John's CO-OP and SOS frameworks, JQuery, CF9, open source, and the Adobe education licensing of ColdFusion announcement. We also talk about his family. John's got a big family, and I try to get down to how he can get anything done working from home with twelve kids.

This was recording via Jeff Coughlin's Blue Snowball microphone, which was also used for the CFUnited Round tables. The sound had to be boosted in post production, but it seems to be good under the circumstances. There is some echo in the room.

Some people have noticed a quality improvement in the last few episodes. I hope this episode's quality doesn't suffer too much from the last two. It was recorded a different way, so it may sound different. As previously mentioned in other podcasts, we're still learning how to produce these, and although we're learning more as we go, we don't have all the equipment we need to do episodes of the quality Matt and Peter of Dan Wilson and Rick Mason who purchased the first few items off of the wish list to help make the podcast a better one.

Links to the book:
Packt Publishing
Amazon.com

Run time: 50:19

Our second interview episode is with Michael Smith of Teratech. We discuss putting on CFUnited, Fusebox, Teratech, the recent Adobe announcements made at CFUnited and open source CFML.

I have mentioned previously that I have help with these episodes. The interviewer this time is another Brian, Brian Swartzfager, who you may recognize from the ColdFusion Weekly roundtable episodes, as well as CFConversations Episode 3.

This was recorded using a handheld recorder. The quality is quite good, but it might sound a tad more "AM radio" like than some of our other episodes.

Enjoy!

Run time: 16:54

The first four episodes of CFConversations have all been in a roundtable format, but that's not the only format CFConversations will be using.

With episode 5, we begin releasing episodes in a new format: Interviews.

In this episode, Brian sits down with Liz Frederick and Nafisa Sabu of Teratech. We discuss putting on conferences as big as CFUnited, their thoughts on the CF developer community, their backgrounds, and open source CFML.

This was recorded using a Flip Video camera behind the booth on day 2 at CFUnited. The audio quality is surprisingly good, but you will hear some background noise from both the conference and the street.

Enjoy!

Run time: 19:59

Recorded at the end of Day 3 of CFUnited.

On this podcast:

• Brian Meloche
• Rick Mason
• John Farrar
• Dana Tierney
• Ken Auenson
• Chris Hough
• Seth Bienek
• Timothy Farrar
• Adam Tuttle
• Adam Haskell

Most of this episode focuses around the ideas that came out of the Promoting CFML Outside of the CFML Community session Friday evening. We think some of these ideas are a call to action for the CF developer community.

Group 1 - Promoting CFML to New Developers

Team Consisted of:

• John Farrar
• Rick Mason
• Dana Tierney
• Ezra Parker
• Jeff Coughlin
• Brian Swartzfager

Summary: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcdhg6m6_27dnzqx5gs

Group 2 - Promoting CFML to PHP Developers

Team Consisted of:

• Adam Tuttle
• Timothy Farrar
• Seth Bienek
• Dee Sadler
• Ken Auenson
• Chris Hough
• Adam Howitt

Summary: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcdhg6m6_26frtdsbv8

We hope you'll find this long podcast worthwhile!

Time: 1:37:27

Update 6/25: I have updated the MP3 to boost the volume level.

Episode 3 is a roundtable summary of Day 2 at CFUNITED, with Brian Meloche, Adam Haskell, Rick Mason, Judith Dinowitz, Brian Swartzfager, Dee Sadler and Bill Shelton.

We go through the morning and afternoon sessions, Host My Site's keynote, more conference discussion and we also get more opinions about Adobe's keynote, specifically the new educational licenses.

Play time is 42:54. Enjoy!

Update 6/25: I have updated the MP3 to boost the volume level.