Notes from CFUnited 2007 - Day One

Right now I'm sitting in the Adobe Spry/ColdFusion seminar at CFUnited 2007, and what I've seen and heard makes me guardedly optimistic that the technologies we've chosen to learn and implement so far have us on the right path and well ahead of the curve for ColdFusion development.

So most of you only have a peripheral knowledge or experience with all of the framework enhancements that Jason and I have been making.  I'll try not to go into too many technical details, but suffice it to say we've embarked upon building a robust, object-oriented, comprehensive, scalable framework (we hope).  Currently in use in some form or another on the Humidx/Home Image site, and soon to be in production for the AAB and People 2.0, this evolving framework has sought to integrate some of the most current cutting/bleeding edge technologies available - ColdSpring, Spry, FCKEditor, and diverse Image Manipulation and other tools.

Our new framework integrates the latest Spry, ColdSpring, and ColdFusion technologies.  Additionally we've been using FCKEditor for years.  As it turns out, the latest release of FCKEditor has been included as a standard feature in the forthcoming ColdFusion 8.  CF8 also has built-in image manipulation components - I assume that they're hooks into some core Adobe CS libraries, but that's only speculation.  The point is, there's built-in integration for something else we've also been doing for years with a COM object extension, and the functional API is quite similar.

Let's break it down:

Congruent Media CFC Framework: Our Congruent Media CFC framework takes advantage of the best features of ColdFusion and object oriented programming, allowing us to easily drop in existing modules or prototype new ones.

ColdSpring Framework: ColdSpring allows us to easily manage our various modules and other components, without needing to worry about whether or not our factories, gateways, and services are instantiated or not, and which may depend on the other.  ColdSpring handles all of this for us and, as an added bonus, caches our components for added speed during the webb application lifecycle.

Spry Framework: Currently, we're using the Spry framework to integrate into our forms to provide dynamic client-side validation and manipulation, including enhanced error messages and item-level error notifications.  This enhances the user experience - no need to wait for the form to post only to find out your forgot to enter your email address...  This works hand-in-hand with our new form generator component and our existing server-side validation code to provide a seemless client/server experience.  However, Spry has additional AJAX features that we hope to take advantage of in the future, including dynamic data sorting, client data refresh, etc.

FCKEditor: FCKEditor is the WYSIWYG editor that we use in some form fields (FCK stands for Francisco Calderon-Knabben - the original creator of the editor).  This editor provides a rich set of customizable functionality, including all of the standard formatting features like in Microsoft Word, but also with file, image, table, and flash functions.  The built-in file uploader/editor allows user to add images or other files in-line to their content without the need of other management tools.

Dynamic Image Manipulation: Yes, we've been doing this for years - resizing, cropping, watermarking...  Heck, we could even read the XIF data if we wanted to.  Currently we use a third-party COM object to manipulate our images, and this object works quite well, containing a comprehensive set of commands that provide all of the basic functionality one could want to handle for images on the web.  In CF8, a similar set of powerful image manipulation tools will be available, and part of the standard CFML library.  This library includes built-in CAPTCHA capabilities.

What this all means for us?  Well, we're already on the cutting edge where it comes to ColdSpring, Spry, FCKEditor, and Image Manipulation, which, I believe, puts us well ahead of the curve, especially since we've taken all of these diverse technologies and glued them together with our own framework.  As our framework comes to fruition, this will provide for a great user experience and, hopefully, a very easy-to-extend and manage set of code.

Spry and ColdSpring are buzz-words right now in the CF community, and we're well ahead of the curve on integrating these technologies to produce highly efficient, streamlined, and user-friendly websites to our clients.  FCKEditor will be the de-factor built-in standard WYSIWYG editor in CF8, and our experience with dynamic image manipulation will carry over to the built in power of CF8.

Session ended.  They're kicking us out of here.  More to come soon.