Hi Everyone,

Our next meeting is running as scheduled. Here is the official announcement:

Date: July 31, 2008

Time: 6:00 PM

Location: Fredricksen Library, Camp Hill

Food: Food and Drink Provided

Prizes: CS3 Web Developer Being Given Away

Railo (www.railo-technologies.com) is a CFML engine that runs on a wide variety of Java servlet engines, and provides a cost-effective, high performance alternative to using Adobe's ColdFusion engine. As you may have heard, at the Scotch on the Rocks ColdFusion conference in Scotland in June, Railo announced that they are partnering with JBoss to convert their software to a completely free, open-source offering.

Ben Forta (Adobe) had some very nice things to say about it on his blog recently: http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/6/8/An-Open-Message-To-Gert-Franz-and-Railo.

Gert Franz, CEO of Railo, will visiting to present an overview of Railo, and what the advantages of using Railo are for CFML developers. He'll also be talking about the upcoming open-source conversion of Railo, and what that means for developers. Of course, Gert will have some free versions of the Railo software to hand out, and some other goodies as well.

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Gert Franz was born in 1967 and lives in Switzerland since 1998, somewhere next to Zürich. He's one of the founders of Railo Technologies GmbH and accompanied the development from when it started back in 2001. Next to the development of Railo he worked as a system engineer where one of his favorite web projects was for instance www.zinodavidoff.com.

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Hi everyone,

Well, still no new user group manager, but I will be hanging out in our room this evening at the library at 6:00PM. If you want to stop by, let me know. I'm giving an "Intro to Web Applications with Adobe ColdFusion" to the Central Penn Adobe User Group on June 18 (kind of a 2nd meeting this month). I'll be working on my presentation and could use some pointers and suggestions for what you think a good intro should include.

July 31 will be our next "presenter" meeting with Railo being introduced by its founder. Please see the Railo website for more info. See the CFML compiler that is apparently like a Porsche compared to a Geo in terms of speed comparisons to Adobe ColdFusion.

By the way, it's pronounced "Rye-low", don't be a snood like me with "Rail-oh".

As for me, I've been working on Flex a little more and have my new application's model code residing in a ColdBox app. I still don't know what I'm doing, but somehow ColdBox is providing an easy "proxy" for my flex applications and it's working.

Justin

JB, who attended our March meeting, will present on Flex. He has also expressed interest in leading the group. So, we'll have some discussion about this during our pizza break. We definitely need to figure out where we are going as a group.

The meeting will be on May 8th at 6:00 at the Fredricksen library in Camp Hill. Pizza and drinks courtesy of Fry Communications. Please use the employee only side entrance of the library and the parking lot that has it's entrance off of walnut street.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=100+N+19th+St,+Camp+Hill,+PA+17011

All the best,

Justin

JB, who attended our March meeting, will present on Flex. He has also expressed interest in leading the group. So, we'll have some discussion about this during our pizza break. We definitely need to figure out where we are going as a group.

The meeting will be on May 8th at 6:00 at the Fredricksen library in Camp Hill. Pizza and drinks courtesy of Fry Communications. Please use the employee only side entrance of the library and the parking lot that has it's entrance off of walnut street.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=100+N+19th+St,+Camp+Hill,+PA+17011

All the best,

Justin

Please reply to this mail or post a comment on the blog if you will be attending the meeting.

Topic: Eclipse, CFEclipse, and Flex (part 1)

Location: Side "Employee Only" entrance, Camp Hill Fredricksen Library, 100 N. 19th Street, Camp Hill, PA 17011. Please knock on the window to the right if the door is locked. Call me at 717-658-4350 if you are lost or need assistance.

Time: 6:00PM

Food: Pizza provided by Fry Communications http://www.frycomm.com/

To use Flex builder to make glorious RIAs, you should use Eclipse to keep your IDEs together. Since some of our members are not familiar with Eclipse or CFeclipse, we'll cover those first. I'll be bringing install CDs so that you don't have to go through the pain of downloading and setting up everything.

We'll do an intro to Flex and talk about Flex vs. scripting. After a roundtable about the state of our own user interface issues and problems, I'll do a sample flex app without interacting with ColdFusion.

The next meeting will start off with a follow-up and delve more into connecting Flex to ColdFusion.

Of course, connecting Flex to ColdFusion works much more smoothly if objects are in play, so we'll be ready to head into OOP basics again.

There were five of us last night giving a demo of our various setups for CF development. No two were alike and all provided some insight.

Dave showed us that server instancing can be an awesome way to shield applications from others. If one application crashes, the whole server doesn't need restarted. The only downside seems to be the time to set it up.

Phil showed us exactly how complex of a system he has and made his wild balancing scheme a little more clear. He also pushed for everyone to be using SVN.

Mike relayed some interesting info about Unix based systems.

The next meeting is going to cover some intro to Flex stuff. It's going to be very basic on the flex end. If anyone else wants to talk about flash remoting, again, basic stuff, let me know.

The library is back in business and here is the schedule: (food and drink provided by Fry Communications)

February 7th 2008 Phil Gomer will present ColdFusion on a Mac and how to get started with alternative ColdFusion IDEs. We will have a generic round table discussion of how we setup our development/staging/development servers. This will include any platform. There really isn't a "best" practice, so we hope to discover what everyone is doing and maybe get some advice/criticism.

March 6 Flash/Flex presentation. Flex is having it's next release "soon". We need to talk about getting started. Flash remoting and CF integration into Flash/Flex will also be covered. (This was also requested by Matt)

April 10 ColdFusion and Ajax. We will focus on the user experience and how the next generation of ColdFusion can help. For those of you on CF 7, we'll also be discussing jquery for those that haven't been introduced. It makes javascript so easy that a child or my grandfather could do it.

May 8 Coding best practices in ColdFusion with a round table discussion.

June 5 An intro to frameworks.

If you have any topic for a presentation, please let me know. I sent out an email last week to everyone, but haven't heard back.

If anyone would like a particular topic discussed, I'll round up a presenter.

Just post a comment here on this blog entry.

All the best

Hi All,

A quick note here. I'm waiting for the library to get the LAN connection opened for us to do a Connect feed. They said they will have it done by the second week of November after they said it would be done last week.

I'll let you know when I have the new meeting date, but I think the Holidays are going to get in the way.

On a lighter note, Fry Communications has sponsored the user group for 6-8 months. We'll have plenty of Pizza and soda! Thanks Fry Communications and Mike Monk!

Thanks for your patience, some of you know the wireless connection is like trying to look at the Internet in 1992 and we really need a good connection.

All the Best, Justin

Meeting Location: Camp Hill Library
Meeting Entrance: Side door of parking lot on Walnut Street.
Time: 6:00

Dave Kraft will present PDF manipulation in ColdFusion and I, Justin Treher, will present using Ben Nadel's POI utility to do Excel exports in ColdFusion. These are both pretty short topics, so if you have any code to review/share, bring it along!

If you wish to come, let me know by replying to the email or posting a blog comment.