Lightning Introduction to CFML

Posted At : September 27, 2011 10:42 PM | Posted By : Stephen Moretti | 2946 Views
Related Categories: Web Development , Adobe , CFML

Last night I did my lightning talk to Northeast UK tech group SuperMondays (http://www.supermondays.org). The overall topic for the night was programming languages you might not have heard of.

How could I pass up the chance to pimp my favourite web application language? So I offered to talk about CFML.

The presentation took 20 minutes including questions, so I probably talked a little more than I should have done, but it seemed to go quite well and hopefully I managed to at least plant the seed in the minds of a bunch of php, ruby and .net developers that ColdFusion is still alive and kicking and a powerful tool to have available.

A surprising number of people actually knew of ColdFusion and some had even used it. One chap was actually using Railo as his CFML server and CFWheels as development framework. I managed also to introduce a couple of my colleagues to new CFML tags they'd never seen or heard of before, so even those that knew of and used ColdFusion managed to get at least a little something out of it.

As a bit of a personal challenge to try something that I've never used from ColdFusion and to prove a point of the power of ColdFusion I actually set up my presentation using ColdFusion 9 and the cfpresentation set of tags. Its not a particularly practical use of CFML, but it was fun to play with. I changed the tags this evening and exported it out of Adobe Presenter to a ppt and exported that as a pdf. The PDF is now available on SlideSix, a ColdFusion and Flex based presentation sharing site. The presentation isn't pretty. I am, after all, a developer not a designer. ;)

This is my presentation:

The other talks were on Node.js (http://slidesix.com/view/Nodejs), Backbone.js (www.slideshare.net/pootsbook/backbonejs-9432525) and R, a statistical analysis language. All the talks were very interesting. I've already looked at Node.js previously, but will be looking at both R and Backbone.js.

All the presentations were recorded on video which will be available on the SuperMondays website, so you'll be able to see all my presentation ticks in their full glory.

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Nice one dude, I'll defo look out for something like this near me.

Time for the big CF Come back ;)
# Posted By Big Mad Kev | 9/27/11 10:51 PM
Pet peeve (since I had a company with the word in it): It's lightning, not lightening!!! :-P According to dictionary.com: Lightening: "light·en·ing? ?[lahyt-n-ing] noun Medicine/Medical. The descent of the uterus into the pelvic cavity, occurring toward the end of pregnancy, changing the contour of the abdomen and facilitating breathing by lessening pressure under the diaphragm." I don't think that's what you intended. :-) Nice presentation, otherwise, though.
# Posted By Brian Meloche | 9/27/11 11:58 PM
I'm thinking of having my students give lightning talks to keep their presentations on point.
Heard a lot about cfwheels. Maybe I should look into it after I earn a PhD.
Now where's that phone number to Capella?
# Posted By Phillip Senn | 9/28/11 3:10 AM
Heh. You what Brian. I've been looking at my presentation for the past couple of days thinking that something was wrong, but being focused on the actual content that I couldn't see it.

Thank you for pointing that out. Though I could have done without the dictionary definition. ;)

I'll sort out links and spellings through today. If that is the only typo you spotted, then I did well!
# Posted By Stephen Moretti | 9/28/11 8:38 AM
Awesome on getting the word out to other. You may want to checkout this also CFML in 100 mins https://github.com/mhenke/CFML-in-100-minutes
# Posted By Mike Henke | 9/28/11 2:14 PM
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