The CFUnited conference this year was in Leesburg Virginia, an hour or two from Washington DC, at a place called Lansdowne Resort. It was a great conference, over 600 ColdFusion and Flex developers were there, and the Stellr team did a fantastic job of organizing it and hosting it.

I posted about my conference experience on my personal blog.

Do any of you attend conferences regularily? This is only my second, my first being Adobe Max 2008 in San Francisco. I think they are incredibly valuable for being part of a larger community and networking but it can be tough to justify the cost sometimes.

The second day's keynote was interesting - it attempted to answer the question "Is ColdFusion Dead?" Of course, it isn't, but Joe Reinhart made the point that we often sell it as a tool to "get databases on the web". If that was all ColdFusion was, it might as well be dead. That was 5-10 years ago! There are many languages and packages that can do that very easily.

The community needs to start realizing that ColdFusion is "Enterprise Glue", a tool that allows for integration between services in a way that NO other language does. In the case of ColdFusion "proper" (the Adobe product, as opposed to CFML), it is a well-supported commercial program that companies can trust.

The community needs to start getting passionate and pushing the boundaries of ColdFusion/CFML. Remember how you felt when you first started building database driven apps in minutes? There is a whole NEW set of powerful features that can make you feel the same way. Look at the PDF and Microsoft Office integration, as well as image manipulation. Look at Sharepoint and Exchange integration. Look at concepts like ORM and built in Ajax tools that can once again allow you to make cutting edge apps in no time.

The next version of ColdFusion has been nicknamed "Link", and according to Adobe they chose that because it nicely represents how ColdFusion can be a link, or a glue, between so many worlds.

Anywho. Hope everyone is enjoying their summer!