MAX Conference Summary
I attended the Macromedia MAX conference this past week in Salt Lake City. I intended to write a few entries about the conference while I was there but never got around to it. Overall it was a good conference. I decided we really need to migrate our system to ColdFusion MX 6.1. Now that I think about it all the sessions I attended dealt with things that can only be done with MX.
Most of the sessions I went to dealt with CFC’s (coldfusion components) which were added to MX. Basically it enables object oriented programming in ColdFusion, although it’s pseudo OOP. For web purposes I think it’ll work great. ColdFusion itself is actually a procedural language. Now with the addition of CFC’s you get the benefits of OOP and procedural all in one. There are a few limitations such as single inheritance (a CFC can only extend one other CFC), although you can chain the inheritance (ie. a.cfc extends b.cfc which extends c.cfc etc…) but like I said for the web I think you can get by in most cases.
A few of the benefits I see to using CFC’s:
- Business logic can be easily seperated from from presentation logic. Currently (in 5.0) the .cfm files can become fairly large with queries, custom functions and other code embedded throughout the presentation logic. With CFC’s you can keep all your queries, custom functions, etc seperate from the cfm files. Very nice.
- EASILY deploy web services. Using CFC’s it’s possible to deploy a web service in less than 5 minutes (we actually did it in a hands on lab). Not only is it easy to create a web service it’s possible to lock the security down to individual functions within the cfc file.
- .cfc files are self documenting. By pointing a web browser to the .cfc file on the server an html file is returned with a complete description of the file and it’s available functions.
- Promote code reuse
- Makes it much easier to model real world problems (create a cfc for each entity)
I could go on and on, but I won’t. I took a few pictures during the conference. I’ll post a link to’em when I get them uploaded. Unfortunately I didn’t take my camera to the party Thursday night at the Olympic Speed Skating Oval. The food was ok (it was the type of food that’s prepared for 2500 people) but the activities and atmosphere were pretty cool. I hear next year it’ll be on the east coast, hopefully I’ll be able to go.