CFConversations - an Adobe ColdFusion and CFML podcast - CFUnited

Vote for the CFConversations Open Mike at CFUnited!

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:43:00 -0400

I'm hoping to do a CFConversations Open Mike at CFUnited this year... but I need your help to get on the schedule. I'll be at CFUnited regardless (well, hopefully; I'm planning to be there), but I'd like to have a big audience for one of the podcasts. If you want to see it, vote for it here: http://callforspeakers.cfconf.org/?event=vote&eventId=188 Also, I've sent in another three topics that could use your vote:

Improving Website Performance in the Browser
LightFront - The CFML Framework that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to use!
Object Oriented CFML: 2010 Edition

I probably won't get another podcast out until March, as I'm pretty swamped with work right now until the end of the month, but I've got a few episodes coming, including a few guest interviewers, and two that are already recorded. I have to hit it hard in March, as CF Hour() is about to lap CFConversations. :( I'm all about healthy competition. :)

CFConversations 41, Interview 27 - Blue River (Mura CMS)

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:08:02 -0400

The last, but certainly not least, of the episodes recorded at this year's CFUnited was an interview I did on Day 3, with the guys from Blue River Interactive, the company behind the open source Mura CMS. Specifically, I interviewed:

Sean Schroeder
Matt Levine
Ryan Thompson
Malcolm O'Keeffe

This was a very fun interview to do, and I think that comes out in the recording. We talk about Mura, its beginnings, how Blue River markets themselves and Mura to other companies (very interesting to hear; it certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities), the name change (from Sava CMS), the guts of the CMS and Mura's reception at conferences, in the blogosphere and user group community, among other things. If you haven't looked at Mura yet, I strongly suggest you have a good look at it. I think you'll be impressed! My recent exposure to Mura motivated me to get this interview. I have been told that I am somewhat frugal when it comes to giving out compliments, :-) I don't speak highly of something unless I mean it... and I do mean it when it comes to Mura, and no, they're not paying me to say that! Enjoy! Run time: 1:04:38

CFConversations 40, Interview 26 - Mark Phillips of Vertabase

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:58:10 -0400

This episode's much later than expected, due to back to back but unrelated computer outages, and then several delays this month, but we're finally back with a new episode! And I apologize, but we won't be having any episodes recorded from MAX or CFinNC, and we'll only have stuff from this past weekend's bFusion/bFlex if we're lucky enough to have one of the guys record some for us (I'll update this once I know one way or another). On this episode, we have another of our "Speakers of CFUnited" series, even though CFUnited has long since come and gone. This is an interview Mark Phillips of Standpipe Studios, best known for Vertabase, a project management application and software as a service provider that's written in ColdFusion. I remembered Mark was at a Birds of a Feather at MAX 2007 that I hosted, where we discussed ColdFusion in the Enterprise. I was curious, as a lot has changed since that BOF. In the two years since that conference, we have two new and viable open source ColdFusion engines, a new ColdFusion 9 and much more. I asked what does any of that means for a company like his that sells both hosted applications and source code. We also discuss the conference (from a Day 1 perspective), project management, the Vertabase application, AIR and dogs (briefly). This interview took place on Day 1 of the CFUnited 2009 conference, which was August 12th. Enjoy! Run time: 30:49

CFConversations 39, Interview 25 - Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan Return!

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:01:00 -0400

I am happy to give you this second interview with Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe, following up the one we did at cf.Objective() 2009. This one was recorded on Thursday, August 20th over Skype.

In this post-CFUnited interview, we talk about the conference, both from each of their perspectives, and the corporate Adobe perspective. You may be surprised that one of them... well, you'll have to listen to find out!

I ask them about what they think about 4CFF.org, which was announced at CFUnited. Adobe isn't actually involved in 4CFF at this point, but they comment on it individually.

Since the last time we had sat down at CFObjective, Adam and Terry have been busy people! They both did stops on the user group tour, so I ask how the tour was for both of them. Since this was Adam's second tour, I also ask him how the ColdFusion 9 (Centaur) tour compared to the ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) tour two years ago.

Also since the last interview, ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder were released as public betas. I asked how the participation and response has been so far. It may or may not be common knowledge that ColdFusion Builder was built on Aptana Studio. I ask why Aptana was chosen over the Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst engines, which were also built on Eclipse.

From the last interview, I followed up on something that had been hinted at during the last interview: Battles with Adobe Marketing. I try to dig more to get some dirt, but I got a very good explanation of why certain things get held back. Specific to that, I ask about their/Adobe's efforts to get the word out about ColdFusion beyond the current developer base.

I ask about a couple of things that were recently posted on Twitter:

Terry's repost of this post, and some of the posts that preceded it.
Terry talks about apologizing for not being Ben Forta.

Note: Speaking of Twitter, I have setup a Twitter account specific to CFConversations, in addition to the ones I have for the Cleveland CFUG and my own: coofuushun.

We didn't get to touch on the CFML Advisory Committee much last time, so I ask more about it this time.

Adam and I mentioned on Twitter that we were going to have this interview, so Some questions to ask (names not identified to protect the innocent):

Do you have a release schedule for ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder?
When are you releasing ColdFusion 9?
How much will CFBuilder cost?
More info on EC2 licensing?
Will the ColdFusion 9 licensing be changed to allow for development and staging licenses? (You may want to listen to the podcast for this answer specifically!)
Is ColdFusion so powerful that it can create a problem that ColdFusion itself cannot solve?

An aside: I'd like to congratulate Adam and Rachel on their recent announcement!

Run Time: 1:00:51

CFConversations 38, Roundtable 14 - Post-CFUnited 2009: Wrap-up, Withdrawal & Fallout

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:18:00 -0400

Recorded on Thursday, August 20th, this episode is a post-CFUnited 2009 "wrap-up fallout" roundtable, where we review the conference as a whole, "post-conference withdrawal and fallout" of things that both happened and what didn't happen during the conference. On this roundtable, we have:

Brian Meloche (Host)
Adam Haskell
Dan Wilson
John Farrar
Mark Mandel (who had to leave about 45 minutes into the podcast)

If not mistaken, aside from the last roundtable (which I split into two episodes), this is the longest episode published so far! I could have split this one in two, but I've decided that it has to reach two hours to be split. And, besides, it took me long enough to edit this one, and splitting it would have meant even longer delays. During this episode, we discuss whether or not CFUnited 2009 was the best ever, the venue, some of the highlights from the conference, including the day 2 keynote (where my friend Todd Sharp's SlideSix was prominently mentioned), the day 1 keynote, as Dan tells us about the 4CFF.org foundation (he's on the board), the CFML Advisory Committee, and memorable sessions from the conference. We also talk about some of the things that happened on the periphery of CFUnited. We ask Adam about the Fusebox fork to FuseNG. We talk about Model-Glue 3.0, Railo 3.1.1 coming out and going out of beta, and Mach-ii 1.8 beta. We also talk about what I call "Post-conference fallout & withdrawal", especially the "fallout" portion of that. We talk about several speakers cancelling last minute, the most prominent of them being Hal Helms. We talk about his last minute cancellation, and his training offer, and offer some other suggestions, like doing a ColdFusion Meetup and giving his slides to Liz so they can be put on CFUnited's website. Lastly, we talk about upcoming conferences, such as CFObjective ANZ, CF in NC, bFusion/bFlex, RIA Unleashed, and MAX. Here are some links to things mentioned in the episode (in no particular order, and please add any not mentioned here in the comments):

Run Time: 1:41:22

CFConversations 34, Interview 23 - Lawrence Cramer (corrected)

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:29:02 -0400

Note: This episode had an issue in the recording that has since been corrected. Hence, I am reposting. The first of a deluge of CFConversations episodes is upon you! It's time to break the log jam! This episode that is one of the Speakers of CFUnited series, is an interview with Lawrence Cramer, who you may know from Cartweaver. Lawrence is speaking (in one hour! - apologies to all) on Real World eCommerce with ColdFusion, and he talks about his presentation. He also talks about how he got started in Dreamweaver and later ColdFusion, ColdFusion 9/ColdFusion Builder (still code named, at the time) and some other projects. Run time: 40:11 (was 36:17) [8/17 Update: There was a track overlap at around the 20 minute mark of the recording. It was mentioned to me, but not fully explained, so I only went back to listen to it today - 8/17 - and finally confirmed the issue. The track has been corrected, and now no longer overlaps. Apologies to all!]

CFConversations 37, Roundtable 13 - CFUnited 2009 Day 2, Part 2!

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:35:00 -0400

I told you that I wouldn't keep you waiting for part 2 of the Day 2 CFUnited roundtable. Well, I did not disappoint! In part 2, we cover a lot of stuff, including things both at the conference and other things to think about. We talk about the importance of giving feedback to speakers, particularly if the talk didn't meet expectations. I shared reactions from my recent CFObjective presentation and how, although most feedback was very positive, some of the more negative comments helped me for when I present it next. That sent us off on a tangent about OO in ColdFusion and the recent discussions in the Blogosphere, including the podcast Hal Helms recently did that OO (and software development in general) is not a destination but a journey. We discuss several of the birds of a feather sessions on Monday night. John Farrar talked about his silent authentication BOF. Listen to the recording if you don't know what that means; I didn't myself know what silent authentication until I heard the definition. FYI, the Google Group hinted at in the recording is: http://groups.google.com/group/cfauthentication We also talked about the CFML standards committee BOF, the user group BOF, the iPhone development BOF, and the sci-fi BOF. We discuss Joe Reinhart's inspiring day 2 keynote that prominently featured my friend Todd Sharp's Slide Six site as an example of sites CF developers should aspire to build rather than oldschool CF CRUD-style apps that ColdFusion no longer has the same advantages it historically had over other languages. We also talk about some of the other announcements that might be lesser known by CFUnited attendees, such as Railo officially going gold on Wednesday, Model-Glue 3.0 going gold on Monday, and Mach II 1.8 beta being released. We FINALLY talk about 35 minutes in about the Fusebox forking announcement, as the fork will be called FuseNG. We discuss some of the interesting day 2 sessions we attended. Janine Driver, Mark Phillips, Charlie Arehart, Mike Brunt, Adam Haskell and Barney Boisvert were singled out as speakers with interesting talks. Lastly, some of the demo derby apps were discussed, as the two Johns and Timothy are each competing in the derby. If you are at CFUnited, we'll be doing another roundtable tonight (Friday, August 14th) at 7:30pm in the Legolas room (Dogwood E) if you would like to participate in the next CFConversations roundtable. Also, I am trying to schedule some CFConversations interviews for the rest of today and tomorrow morning with speakers, sponsors attendees. Even if you only have a few minutes, I'd like to talk to you. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook contact me through the contact form or just yell at me in the hallway! Run time: 1:03:50

CFConversations 36, Roundtable 12 - CFUnited 2009 Day 2, Part 1!

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:36:41 -0400

Unfortunately, the roundtable scheduled on Day 1 of CFUnited kind of fell through, but we made up for that big time on Day 2! It was two hours of non-stop podcasting goodness! Since it went as long as it did and there was nothing to cut, I decided it would be best to split the episode into two parts! That is a first for a roundtable episode. On the roundtable panel:

Brian Meloche (moderator)
John Mason - By the way, check out John's new RIA Podcast.
Timothy Farrar
John Farrar
Anita Neal
Jason Dean

In part 1, we talk about the new venue for CFUnited this year, Stellr, the day 1 keynotes from Liz Frederick and Adobe, day 1 sessions, birds of a feather and hints at several other things that we dive deeper into in part 2. I think you'll really enjoy this one! Run time: 59:46

CFConversations won a CFEmmy!!!

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:02:00 -0400

Thanks to everyone that voted for CFConversations in the Community Achievement Awards (CFEmmys) for Best Podcast. It's much appreciated, and good to know that the community supports what we're doing. It's not always easy producing the podcast, believe me, but things that are worth doing aren't always easy. For those of you who are at CFUnited, you're all welcome to attend our next roundtable at 5:45pm. We are in the Legolas room, which is Dogwood E. If we need a bigger room, we can move if we have to. Recording will begin at 6pm sharp, but you can pop in any time between 6 and whenever we finish. I want to encourage fans of the podcast to attend!

CFConversations 35, Interview 24 - Barney Boisvert

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:10:35 -0400

Another one from the backlogs, this episode in the Speakers of CFUnited series features Barney Boisvert. This is a great episode, which was recorded on Day 2 of CFObjective in May. Barney talks about his session, CFGroovy - Groovy for the CFML Developer, which he's doing Thursday at 4:45pm at CFUnited. Of course, that means he talks about Groovy and why he uses it with CF. We also talk about Hibernate, Grails, Fusebox and his mini Fusebox-inspired framework called FB3Lite. This is a great interview that I think you'll enjoy! Run time: 58:04

I know, I know... but I'm on my way to CFUnited! Prepare for a CFConversations flood of episodes!!!

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:58:00 -0400

Yes, I know... I am the suck! :-) I have been trying, but I've had a whole bunch of things going on that have prevented me from getting out a podcast since the last one, which came out June 8th, some of that I can tell you about (work, user group stuff, personal stuff), and something new that I can't yet talk about that's been taking up a lot of my time. Let's just say I've been pretty busy lately, but there are other CF podcasts now (which I'll promote later), so I hope you haven't missed us TOO much. I wanted to just send out a quick post to let you know, that CFConversations is still around, and that content is coming your way. I have a bunch of stuff planned for CFUnited! We have a day 1 open mike round table podcast scheduled for 5:30 on Wednesday, and CFConversations will be situated in the Legolas room throughout the conference, interviewing and podcasting away. Anyone who's at the conference can attend the open mike session, and I'll be looking to schedule interviews throughout the conference. In addition, I am going to TRY (can't promise) to get some of the many interviews we have done over the last few months out DURING... yes, DURING... CFUnited. This may sound like a bad idea, but, trust me, although I am not going to explain why right now... it isn't. Already recorded are interviews with Peter Bell, Sean Corfield, Barney Boisvert, Lawrence Cramer, Dee Sadler and Rachel Lehman. I think I may be able to get out one or two of those during the conference (or even today). We've already got some new interviews scheduled while at CFUnited... so although I've kept you waiting... you're about to be flooded with podcasts from CFConversations!

CFConversations 33, Interview 22 - Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe!

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:27:00 -0400

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

CFConversations 30, Interview 20 - Charlie Arehart - 02/24/2009

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:05:00 -0400

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

CFConversations 29, Interview 19 - Douglas Knudsen

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:06:00 -0400

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

CFConversations 28, Interview 18 - Luis Majano - 02/03/2009

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:50:00 -0400

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.