cfObjective Australia is coming up fast.. just a few weeks to go! Held Nov 17 & 18 in Melbourne Australia. There is a star line up of presenters including Terry Ryan, James Talbot, Kai Koenig, Marc Mandel, Geoff Bowers, Justin McLean and .. and me!

I’ll be presenting a talk on Model Driven Development in the Flex stream. Thats right.. there is an entire stream of presentations for Enterprise Flex Developers.. now you’re interested right?

From the organisers;
“cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex 2011 doesn’t focus as such on Livecycle or ADEP – but our Flash Platform and Flex track is the finest conference content Australia and New Zealand has to offer for this field. If your organisation is in the Asia-Pacific region and looking into building Rich Clients with an LC or ADEP backend – cf.O(ANZ) + Flex 2011 is the place you want to send your developers and architects to for learning about the front end and integration part.

The program is available online here:
http://www.cfobjective.com.au/program

On Nov 16 there are also a few excellent full-day workshops happening and we’d like to see them get a bit more uptake as well. 

The most interesting ones for Flex/LC/ADEP developers are:
– Developing Performant Flex Components for Desktop and Mobile (Mike Labriola)
– Building Mobile Applications for Android and iOS using Flex (James Talbot)
- Agile Technical Practices for Rich Client Developers (Sandy Mamoli and Kai Koenig)
http://cfobjective.com.au/program/workshops/

Check out more on the site: http://www.cfobjective.com.au/

In case anyone is using Lanyrd, there is a Lanyrd page for the conference. It can be found here: http://lanyrd.com/2011/cfoanz/

There is also a LinkedIn event here: http://events.linkedin.com/cf-Objective-ANZ-Flex/pub/717170

And a Facebook page here as well: http://www.facebook.com/pages/cfObjectiveANZ/280504190302

drop me a note if you are planning to attend!

Adobe have just released a great new tool called Adobe Enterprise Café, which helps you stay in touch with the enterprise community, receive news, find information, and aggregate content related to Adobe LiveCycle ES (Enterprise Suite), Acrobat, Connect, ColdFusion, and the Adobe Flash Platform in a timely and customized fashion. Targeted at developers and technical staff, Café is the one tool you need to search across the entire community knowledge base and stay in touch with the Adobe teams.

Enterprise Café provides the following plug in modules* and capabilities:

* News – Highlights important news and alerts about Adobe’s enterprise-focused applications and other relevant Adobe software. Note that news items differ based on your login credentials.

* Search – A dedicated tool searching across multiple targeted sites focusing on product specific content.

* RSS Reader – A feature-rich content aggregator that lets you share stories via AIM, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, e-mail and more without copying and pasting, or dragging and dropping.

* Notes – Saves search results and other text snippets for viewing later, whether you are online or offline. You can also share notes with the community.

* Water Cooler – Provides a live chat room for the community to engage and discuss product related issues.

* Forums – A direct link into the latest information found on Adobe Forums.

* Events – Allows you to quickly locate upcoming LiveCycle events in your area or online.

* Training – Provides a listing of upcoming training events for your product.

* Demos and Sales Tools – a launchpad to LiveCycle solution demonstrations and enterprise sales tools for Adobe employees and partners.

* Partner Showcase – Partners can upload solution demonstrations for review, approval, and dissemination.

* Adobe TV – Pre-filtered enterprise-focused shows are continually updated with the latest videos.

* and much more…

Find out more about Enterprise Cafe and download it here..

For quite a few months now Adobe has been talking up Flash Builder, Flex 4 & ColdFusion Builder, but with the caveat that these tools were in beta.  Each of the betas made available via Adobe Labs added new features and allowed you to test and provide feedback to the product teams. Today, however, Adobe is announcing the immediate availability of the production versions of the following!

Flex 4 – Including the new Spark skinning and component architecture enabling a new level of expressiveness in RIAs in addition to supporting the new Flash Catalyst to Flash Builder workflow.

Flash Builder 4 – There are over 90 new features in this release, and you can use them with both Flex 3 and Flex 4 to gain big improvements in development time, integration and building more expressive apps. (Note: Please be sure to uninstall any FB4 beta SW before installing the release product)

ColdFusion Builder – This new Eclipse-based IDE for ColdFusion development is deeply integrated with ColdFusion 9 in addition to making it fast and easy for CF developers to create Flex applications with integration between ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder.

The following is a list of resources where you can find out more information;

• Read Andrew Shorten’s Flex Team Blog post
• Get Flash Builder 4 (remember to uninstall any FB4 beta SW first)
• AdobeTV: Learn what developers like about Flash Builder in this video from Flash Camp Boston from March 19th
• AdobeTV: David Wadhwani, VP and GM of Adobe’s Platform BU introduces new Flash Platform  products
• Test drive Flex 4 – Take the Flex Test Drive: Build an application in an hour and learn about Flex 4 using this new guided, video tutorial
• Flex-in-a-week free video training – New for Flex 4
• Get ColdFusion Builder
• Video: ColdFusion Builder Feature Tour
• Flex product info on adobe.com
• ColdFusion product info on adobe.com

Lots of new toys to play with! Make sure you let me know what you’ve built.

Last week I presented at the Melbourne based cfObjective conference. My topic covered a quick look at SOA principles, how they related to ColdFusion, then introduced LiveCycle ES2.

Apart from the slides below, I was able to build an application from scratch in just under 40 minutes, including an approval process with workflow, a common data model that spanned across all UI/Forms, and built all the forms in both Flex & PDF.

I wrapped up the session on how ColdFusion & LiveCycle ES2 can be used together and how to get started. Thanks to everyone who attended!

Adobe’s Ben Forta visited Australia this week and I had the pleasure of joining him in the ZDNet studios in Sydney. Below is the video interview that was filmed with Chris Duckett. Ben talks about ColdFusion, the Flash Platform and a whole bunch of other interesting things!

10-13 November 2009 is shaping up to be a week of ColdFusion in Australia with many CF related activities!

Ben Forta in The House

It’s been years since Ben Forta has journeyed to Australia. Happy to announce the original ColdFusion evangelist is back and visiting Melbourne and Sydney. He’s joined by Terry Ryan from the ColdFusion evangelism team.

ColdFusion User Group & Drinks: 10-Nov (Sydney)

The “Forta” and Terry Ryan are in town for a gab-fest at the Adobe Offices in Chatswood. Plan is for a 2-4pm CF9/Builder presentation via Connect and/or in the Adobe Office in Sydney then low key meetup at a pub somewhere in Sydney at 8.30pm. If you are interested in joining us in the Adobe office send me a note on twitter.com/mszulc

Tune in to catch the latest CF news at 2pm, Tuesday 10th Nov via Connect at;
http://pacific.adobe.acrobat.com/coldfusion/

FarCry Dev Camp: 11-Nov (Melbourne)

Inaugural FarCry DevCamp at Melbourne Law School. Learn about the future direction of the open source FarCry framework and CMS, in-depth technical sessions, case studies and general developer tom-foolery. It’s free and should be a lot of fun.

http://farcrydevcamp.eventbrite.com/
http://twitter.com/farcry

cfobjective(ANZ): 12-13 Nov (Melbourne)

The inaugural cf.objective ANZ Conference!!!  The line up includes Ben Forta & Terry Ryan from Adobe US plus Andrew Spaulding & me from Adobe AU. Even better is that you get to hear from the experts and your peers in the community and many other guest stars from home and abroad. Mega ROI for ColdFusion boffins, and L-platers alike. Get the low down on the latest ColdFusion 9 release and the upcoming ColdFusion Builder IDE, not to mention world’s best practice CF development from the world’s best.

http://www.cfobjective.com.au/
http://twitter.com/cfobjective_anz

I’ll be presenting a session on how Adobe LiveCycle ES & ColdFusion can be used together, why they should be used together, and how to get started!

We’re certainly seeing a ColdFusion renaissance worldwide. Don’t be a stranger, get re-acquainted with the ColdFusion community.

Thought ColdFusion was dead? No way! As of today you can now access both the public beta of ColdFusion 9 and the new tool called ColdFusion Builder.

Since I’m still a ColdFusion newbie, I’m not going to go into a full writeup here, but some of things that continue to impress me about ColdFusion, and now added to in this release are;

1. ColdFusion is Java..it runs just as fast as JSPs & EJBs on your favourite app server

2. It offers very high productivity as a result of being a mature language

3. Adoption of ColdFusion has accelerated since Adobe took over and released CF8.

4. ColdFusion 9 offers a massive array of enterprise services, including Hibernate based ORM, Reporting & Charts, PDF document / forms support, full text search as well as Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint & Office integration

To help ColdFusion developers be more productive Adobe have also released ColdFusion Builder, an Eclipse based IDE, purpose built for the needs of CF developers, that includes code completion for CFML, JavaScript, HTML & CSS, Debugging, Server Management and is extensible using CFML!

Read the full press release here:

The ColdFusion 9 public beta is available for download at http://adobe.com/go/coldfusion_beta_download. The ColdFusion Builder public beta is available for download at http://adobe.com/go/coldfusion_builder_beta_download.

Over the last few weeks Andrew Spaulding & I met up with a handful of Australian Web Developers and Designers in both Sydney & Melbourne. I put together this video on what they do, their opinions of Adobe technology and what they think about the Australian community and its potential.

Featured in the video are
Robin Hilliard from Rocket Boots, Todd Trevillion from Gruden, freelancer Andrew Muller, Andrew Apostola from Portable Content, Glen Peterson of Cummins Nitro and
Chris Maisano from Citrus

There is a lot of great work happening out there and its good to see such a vibrant selection of talent. We’ll be doing more interviews over the next few months so if you’d like to show off what you do let me know!