On Day 3 of cf.Objective() 2009, May 16th, I was able to interview Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe.

I knew Adam back when he was a user group manager. Adam's been with Adobe for three years, first as a ColdFusion specialist on the sales team, and later as a product evangelist for ColdFusion and government. He recently took over as product manager for ColdFusion and Bolt, the code name for the new ColdFusion IDE.

Terry, or Terrence as you might know him, joined Adobe this year as a product evangelist for both ColdFusion and Adobe in education. Before that, he was an Adobe Community Expert, and an IT director at the Wharton School of Business.

In this interview, we talk about Centaur, Bolt, the reaction so far, presenting the new stuff, release dates, and what might be coming in what might be called ColdFusion 10 and the second release of Bolt. We talk about what it's like to be former ColdFusion fanboys now working for Adobe, and for Adam, taking over the reigns of ColdFusion. I also ask Adam about his recent accident while in London for a Wee Dram of Scotch and his recovery, the CFML standards committee, and the other open source engines.

We also talk about the user group tour, which starts today, is hopefully coming to a city near you in June. Check your local user group's website, or groups.adobe.com, for more information. In Cleveland, Adam is coming June 17th, and you can find out more and RSVP by going to www.clevelandcfug.org. Please note: RSVP is for those who will attend the meeting in person. This is not going to be recorded or available on the web. Sorry... this is a in-person event only!

The only thing I regret about this interview is that it's not long enough, but that's all the time we had. I didn't get to ask everything I wanted, and skimmed the surface on several topics. However, maybe that's a good thing. I hope to sit down again with each of them very soon.

A few announcements...

Several people have asked for my What to Do When OO Fails You in ColdFusion" presentation from CFObjective. I'm going to be presenting it next month to the CFMeetup group, and I had some issues with my demo code for the conference, so I'm going to hold off posting it until that presentation's over and I have better demo code. The wait will be worth it.

Ryan Mannion at Politico.com contacted me, and they are looking for a Senior ColdFusion developer. Politico.com is a high-traffic site, with 40-100 million page views per month and you may have seen them mentioned on CBS' Face the Nation or CNN. The position is full-time, in Arlington, Virginia, and if you're interested, please check it out http://www.politico.com/employment/senior_coldfusion_developer.html.

If you haven't found it yet, there's a new ColdFusion podcast out there. It's called CFHOUR(), with Dave Ferguson and Michael Sean Becker. They're up to episode 9, and you can find them in iTunes and at cfhour.com.

Lastly, and I don't know who to thank, but just before CFObjective, a beautiful new 24" ASUS monitor showed up at my door. The shipping label had my name for both the bill to and the ship to, so I'm not sure who sent me this wonderful monitor. It appears to be an upgrade from one that was on my Amazon wishlist. Whoever you are, thank you. If you're curious, my Amazon wishlist can be found here.

Run time: 43:27

I've finally managed to get out an episode! Woo hoo! I'm happy to finally break the long hiatus.

Recorded on Day 1 of cf.Objective() 2009, this features an interview with the new "Railo Gang of Four": Gert Franz, Mark Drew, Peter Bell and Sean Corfield. We go into how Sean, Peter and Mark each joined Railo, Railo UK and Railo US' corporate ties to the Swiss mothership, and how they are building a consultancy. I also ask them some challenging questions, like Railo going after the enterprise market of Adobe's, the relationship with Adobe, preaching to those Java and PHP developers they'd promised, and how the new guys each lost their Community Expert ties with Adobe.

It's a great interview, and it was something I could turn around fairly quickly (only a few hours), given the fairly decent quality of the recording and little editing needed. Thanks guys, for doing this!

Run Time: 42:30

A few It's worth noting that the Peter Bell and Sean Corfield interviews are NOT this interview. I interviewed Peter back in February, before the hiatus and him joining Railo. Sean's interview was on May 3rd, after him joining Railo, so it appears there are a lot of Railo episodes in the pipe.

Also, much to my disappointment, I have been unable to get a Day 0 or Day 1 roundtable done. Although I had interested people each night, both roundtables fell through. I'm going to try again on Day 2. I'm hoping that getting this episode out during the conference will help get a few more interviews and a roundtable done tomorrow (well, today, I guess). :)

For the fourth installment in our Speakers of CFUnited series, I interview longtime pillar of the ColdFusion community Charlie Arehart.

This interview covers a lot of ground. We got into a lot and uncovered some of Charlie's own personal "hidden gems". We talk about Charlie's early career before ColdFusion as a Model 204 developer and the parallels between the ColdFusion and Model 204 communities, the early ColdFusion community, his involvement with ColdFusion user groups, speaking, and writing, his time at New Atlanta evangelizing BlueDragon, leaving there and going independent, and the type of work he does with ColdFusion today as an independent consultant. We find out Charlie is an old "song and dance man". We also talk about Charlie's seminary studies, and what he plans to do with it once he graduates. This is a great interview, and I think you'll enjoy it. If you don't know Charlie, you will after listening, and you will know him even better if you already know him. Charlie is one of the nicest guys around, and his detailed knowledge of ColdFusion and teaching that knowledge are what makes him one of our community's greatest assets.

Of the episodes we recorded at MAX 2008, the sound quality of this interview is definitely the best of the lot. The audio quality is as good as you can get for taking it in a hallway at a major conference, and you can hear both of us very well throughout the interview.

Enjoy!

Run time: 1:06:33

In our third installment of the Speakers of CFUnited series, Dan Wilson interviews Douglas Knudsen, consultant with Universal Mind, who is speaking on Connecting Flex to ColdFusion at CFUnited.

Doug talks about topics from his talk at CFUnited, working in a coworking group environment instead of working from home, his start with ColdFusion, and music to work to, including Chinese Silk music.

Run time: 46:37

Yes, I've gotten through my computer problems! This is first episode almost entirely edited with my new Gateway desktop computer. I've also added a beautiful new ASUS 22" 1080p monitor to replace my old 22" NEC CRT, more memory and a new KVM switch. I'd like to thank Charlie Arehart and past donations I've already thanked in previous episodes to help make those additions possible. This episode was edited in a brand new "studio" of sorts. Over the holidays, I set up a new office in my house for podcasting and other work, built a desk I had received as a Christmas gift back in 2007, and all in all have a much better setup now than the tiny mobile desk I had before.

Recent delays were not due to hardware at all, but were mostly audio related, as well as some health issues in my family that have taken some time away from the computer.

As mentioned here, the audio from the Meet the ColdFusion Birds of a Feather at MAX 2008 has severe problems, making it very difficult to edit. Sixty hours of editing - yes, that's right - 60 - have not produced an episode of enough quality for me to release it. One good thing from the experience is that I'm now using Audition for my editing, and, after a bit of a learning curve, it really gives you a lot of power. I think I can still recover at least some of the content from the BOF, but I've decided to put that on hold for a few episodes and release some interviews, including a couple that have been on the shelf for a while.

For our second episode in the Speakers of CFUnited series, Adam Haskell and I interview Luis Majano, the creator of the ColdBox framework. This was recorded October 24, 2008, so it predates the MAX conference, the Bolt announcement, and Adobe layoffs, and ColdBox is now up to version 2.6.2. Of course, Luis talks about Coldbox, but he also talks about growing up in El Salvador during its civil war, including Salvadoran cuisine, coming to America, how he started in ColdFusion, pre-Coldbox, what led to Coldbox and why Luis is excited about ColdFusion's future. This interview, which was originally scheduled to be released before MAX, is one of my favorites so far. It was delayed due to some time sensitive episodes, vacation, and the MAX episodes (including ones not yet released, as mentioned earlier) but I'm proud to bring it to you now, and I think you'll really enjoy it!

Run time: 1:07:26

CFConversations wants to let listeners know that the UK CFUG, including Mark Drew, Niklas Richardson, Neil Middleton, Andy Allan and Kevin McCabe are now doing a monthly podcast called CF Docs. It's on iTunes, and you can find it here.

And, the ColdFusion Muse, Mark Kruger, has released his first podcast episode in some time.

For our first episode of 2009, we begin a new series of podcasts, called The Speakers of CFUnited. In this episode, Doug Hughes, best known for his Alagad consulting company and as the creator of the Reactor framework. They discuss, among other things, Alagad, Reactor, advice for developers who want to start their own consulting company, and the future of ColdFusion.

Although the first three episodes in this series do not specifically talk about CFUnited, expect most of these interviews will include some information about their planned sessions at CFUnited, along with the usual interview stuff.

We're planning a lot of activity around CFUnited, and we have some special things coming up in upcoming months between CFConversations and CFUnited. Stay tuned!

And thanks to Dan Wilson for producing another great interview episode!

Run time: 54:12

(NOTE: Episode 27 was originally going to be a portion of the Meet the ColdFusion Team BOF session recorded at MAX 2008 North America. Why it's delayed is explained here.

For our final podcast before MAX, we have a very special interview with Michael & Judith Dinowitz, of the House of Fusion, Fusion Authority and Flex Authority.

Michael and Judith announce that they are giving away CDs with all issues of Fusion Authority Quarterly Update and Flex Authority at the MAX 2008 ColdFusion Unconference and Flex unconference. Of course, you'll be able to purchase subscriptions, too!

Of course, we don't stop there!

Michael & Judith go back to the beginning of ColdFusion, so Adam (who came in as an emergency interviewer, when my Skype recorder would only record my voice) and I ask about the early days of ColdFusion, the start of House of Fusion and the CF-Talk list, how Fusebox started with the help of CF-Talk, the technical side of the House of Fusion, other lists on House of Fusion, how Fusion Authority got started, then Flex Authority, the difficulties editing and publishing two journals, and family life.

Since we didn't have enough time to do a pre-MAX roundtable, we end the episode in a mini-roundtable fashion, speculating on what Adobe will announce at MAX next week.

You may hear a few weird things in the recording. It couldn't be helped, given the recording on Skype.

Run time: 1:21:15

In this episode, Jeff Coughlin interviews Geoff Bowers of Daemon Internet Consultants (pronounced demon). In North America, many developers may not know Geoff, but he's well known in his native Australia. Daemon organizes the WebDU conference, hosts the popular web aggregator Full as a Goog and are stewards of FarCry.

One of the frameworks that wasn't featured in our recent part 1 and 2 controller framework roundtables, but is an important framework, is FarCry Core.

Many ColdFusion developers only know FarCry for its CMS, and only think of FarCry as a CMS, but the FarCry CMS is written on top of a very powerful framework in and of itself, the FarCry core, that is used around many web applications, the CMS only being one of them.

In this interview, Geoff talks about his personal relationships with his employees at Daemon, what makes WebDU different from other developer conferences, the FarCry CMS, and explains the differences between FarCry Core and other ColdFusion frameworks. Namely, FarCry Core is completely object oriented from the ground up, where everything in it is an object, and has a built-in ORM.

This interview's a little long, but it's packed with content. I thought about splitting into two episodes, but we've got more coming before MAX 2008 San Francisco, so I'm releasing it as a single episode. Thanks to Jeff Coughlin for doing the interview and doing a fantastic job with the editing (I only had to tweak one thing, plus the intro/outro).

Show links:

• Fullasagoog.com
• WebDU Conference
• FarCryCore.org
• FarCryCMS.org
• FarCry 5.0 Jump Start Course
• Daemon Internet Consultants
• Some example sites using FarCry
• Mayo Clinic
• BlueScope Steel
• SelecTV
• Daemon Blog
• FarCry Twitter
• Fullasagoog Twitter

Run time: 1:24:48

This episode has been sponsored by Quality Logo Products, Inc.. Kurt Bonnet was kind enough to sponsor the podcast in exchange for this job posting:

Chicagoland Web / ColdFusion Developer (60k-80k) Quality Logo Products, Inc.

Quality Logo Products, Inc., located in Chicagoland, is a fast-growing company looking for a full-time experienced web developer to join our team. You'll have the opportunity to work directly with the business owners to design and implement new web sites, new features to existing sites, and digital marketing strategies. We offer an aggressive salary (60k-80k), $2500 per year allowance (in addition to the annual salary) for conferences/further education, annual performance bonus, retirement savings matching up to 3% of the employee's gross salary, 3 weeks vacation, telecommute/remote working opportunities, and more. Learn more at: http://www.qualitylogoproducts.com/jobs/ and apply at jobs@qualitylogoproducts.com.

This is direct hire by a fellow CFer, not a recruiter.

If you are interested in sponsoring an episode, you can do so with a PayPal or Amazon wish list donation. Email me at podcast at cfconversations dot com if you're interested.

You heard him on episode 19, and now, Adam Haskell and I interview Isaac Dealey, creator and lead developer of the onTap and DataFaucet frameworks.

In this interview, we discuss onTap and DataFaucet in more detail, and we also get to know Isaac in a very candid and personal way. We discuss Isaac's struggles with Asperger Syndrome, an Autism Spectrum Disorder, his diagnosis two years ago and his decision to go public about it. When you hear Isaac's story, you may realize that you might know or work with someone who has Asperger, but doesn't know it, or you might even have it yourself. I know I have worked with a few people who are definitely candidates for it. Regardless, Isaac's a brilliant guy, and you'll hear that in this episode. We also discuss Isaac's artistic side, with his Woohooligan site.

This interview's a bit long (for an interview), but we think you won't get bored and you'll enjoy every minute of this episode.

Run time 1:10:55

This episode's a little different than what we've had in the past.

bFusion & bFlex was a two day event held last month at Indiana University, organized by Bob Flynn and the Indiana Multimedia User Group.

I missed the event, due to a scheduling conflict, but thanks to Bob, this episode features selected "Man on the Street" interviews from the event. I also want to give thanks to Heather Warnsman, a member of Bob's user group, and Keith Danielson, manager of the Indiana University Flash User Group, who conducted these interviews.

Run time: 20:25

This episode features the last of our interviews from CFUnited.

On day three, Brian Swartzfager sat down with Joshua Cyr, Principal Developer at Savvy Software, the makers of Savvy CMS, and manager of the Seacoast ColdFusion and Flex Group. In this interview, Joshua talks about Savvy, selling a CMS and ColdFusion at the same time, Adobe's direction with ColdFusion, conferences, and frameworks.

Run Time: 20:33

Due to some audio problems on the six year-old Dell Optiplex SX260 that I'm now using to produce the podcasts, episode 16 was delayed, but I finally got it out without crashing! :( Unfortunately, I can't afford to buy a new computer right now, so I have to make due. If you're tired of me complaining, a gift card from my Amazon wishlist would help me finally get some decent hardware or you can donate via Paypal.

This is our eleventh interview, and the first with an Adobe person in the hot seat! On day four of CFUnited, I sat down with Josh Adams. Josh is a Systems Engineer with Adobe, specializing in ColdFusion.Before that, Josh worked in a similar position at New Atlanta and, before that, was the Atlanta CFUG manager. During this interview, we talk about working for Adobe, his time at New Atlanta, user groups (a passion Josh and I both share), open source CFML and the initiatives surrounding CF9.

Run time: 30:12

Episode 15 was delayed a few times, but we finally have it for you!

On June 25th, Dan Wilson interviewed Mark Mandel via Skype. Mark is best known as the lead developer and creator of the Transfer ORM framework, as well as JavaLoader and teaming with Luis Majano on the new CodexWiki project (still in private beta). This episode was recorded around the time Transfer went to Version 1.0 release. Since then, development on Transfer 1.1 continued and is now at Release Candidate 2. Mark was also a member of the last CFConversations round table episode (11).

Thanks to Dan Wilson, who did the interview and all of the editing for this episode! I think you'll really enjoy this episode, and I second Dan's comments about Mark being a good guy to have a beer with.

Run time: 39:56

After an unplanned one week hiatus (personal commitments came up over the long weekend and during the week), we're back with episode 14!

On day four of CFUnited, Adam Haskell interviewed Mark Drew. Of course, most of you know of Mark as the lead developer of the CFEclipse project, and, of course, CFEclipse is discussed, but Mark and Adam talk about a lot more during this interview, including Railo, ColdSpring, conferences, tattoos, cooking, a little about bendy buses, and a couple of things you might not know about Mark.

We'll be starting up another round of interviews in upcoming weeks, and if we have spoken to you about an interview, you may be contacted soon to get it scheduled, especially if you aren't going to be at MAX San Francisco. We'll also be doing similar coverage at MAX as we did at CFUnited, so expect more roundtables and interviews then. If you want to be interviewed for the podcast, please email me at podcast at cfconversations dot com, or use the contact form.

Special thanks go out to Steve Bryant, Sid Maestre, and Ezra Parker for their generous gifts from the Amazon wishlist. Sid's donation helped pay for some well needed RAM on the six year-old desktop I am using to edit the podcasts (since I no longer have access to the laptop I had been using). Steve's donation was a new Blue Snowball microphone, which we'll be using at the MAX conference, and Ezra's donation is a step towards getting us a new laptop of our own for the podcasts. If you want to help out, too, a gift card from the wishlist is appreciated, or you can donate via Paypal. Thanks in advance for your donation!

Run time: 32:22

We're a little late with episode 13, which was partially by design (to get us back to a weekend release) and partially due to other commitments this week, but the wait is worth it!!!

On the 4th of July weekend, Brian Swartzfager was able to interview one of the legends in the ColdFusion community, Hal Helms. Hal's well known in the CFML circles for his contributions to Fusebox and Mach-ii, his numerous speaking engagements, his articles in CFDJ, FAQU and on his personal site, his training and as a podcaster.

At the end of the recording, I mention a Paypal donate button. You'll see that under our Amazon wishlist. Thanks in advance for your donation!

Run time: 50:07

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

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