Blog

Well I didn't get to write this until this morning, but I wanted to reflect briefly on the first day of Max. This being not only my first Max but my first conference in general. I've got to say that overall I have been pretty impresed.

I sitting here in the main session for Adobe Max 2008 and I can't believe how many people are here already. They just started us off with a beat box slide show... I ran into Jochem while cramming down breakfast and chatted with him up the escalater... he said that people claiming *some* usage or interaction with CF accounted for about 50% of the registrations-- and the CEO just annouced there is over 5000 registrations. I will update this post as stuff happens...

After a couple very long airport delays I have arrived in San Francisco and can't wait for the first workshops tomorrow. I have a laptop in tow and hope to blog what I can providing there is wireless available.

As we push ahead with our app using ColdBox and LightWire, we have been configuring our Dependency Injection as we go. DI is one of those things I'm pretty certain I see the benefit to, but I'm not sure how sold on it I am. At this point, we may only have 50 to 60 CFCs so perhaps we're just not deep enough in to see the real profit yet. The only real advantage I've seen to date is having all of our dependencies spelled out in one configuration file (with the exception of the stuff you are auto-wiring). Other than that, I don't know that I have really saved any code. That being said, I don't have any circular dependencies, and my dependency levels don't get much more than 2 or 3 levels deep right now so maybe I just need to be patient.

James Ward has a little tool called "Is It Flex" that will tell you if a given SWF file was made with Flex providing you know the URL to the SWF. James uses the SWFDump utility from the SDK and looks for some header info that the Flex compiler places in the SWF. A while ago I experimented with an ancillary tool on my site which attempted to find the URLs to all the SWFs in the page for you and check them all at once.

Here's a little tidbit that will be old-hat to any Flex/Flash people out there, but as a CF guy, I found it pretty interesting. Most ColdFusion programmers have probably heard of implicit getters and setters as a pattern some have adopted in CFML (and others seem to vehemently oppose). While learning Flex, I have found that ActionScript 3 also supports implicit getting and setting but it means something completely different that what I had expected.

Lately I've noticed how impossible it is to talk about Object Oriented Programming without peppering your conversations with scholarly-sounding acronyms. I don't know if we programmers just like to sound smart or if we see it as part of a special club of sorts. As my good friend Anonymous once said, "If it is Computer Oriented and if it doesn't have an Acronym, then it doesn't exist" That being said, here is a list I comprised of acronyms that are related to OO or have come up recently in blogs about OO. See how many you can identify, and comment with any additional ones you think of.

Christine and I, having settled into our new jobs, are rolling up our sleeves to dig in and start some hardcore re-factoring. The legacy applications we are dealing with run smoothly and quickly for the most part, but are teetering on the edge of being un-maintainable. They suffer from the standard trademarks of any legacy code which has seen many programmers over the years-- lack of code reuse, absent standards, poorly normalized data structures, and minimal separation of view, business, and data. Don't think I'm knocking it too hard though. It's probably not much different than a lot of the code bases out there. We believe it can be better though. Easier to maintain, understand, and extend. Enter our plan for world domination...

I found a humorous bug in Yahoo's news photos tonight. After reaching the last image in the "Most Viewed Photos" the "next" button brought up a list of "Most Viewed Slideshows". Three of the slideshows listed looked like this:

I can't tell you how excited I am to be going to Adobe Max in San Fran next month. This will be the first real conference I have ever gone to. I'm very glad my employer sees the benefit in the training I am looking forward to getting. So far there has only been one thing about Max that really sucks...