Serge Jespers is a colleague of mine on the Platform Evangelism team. He's a longtime PHP developer and has recently dipped his toes into the ColdFusion waters. He recently developed the MAX widget that's been going around. In fact, he used ColdFusion to power it. Here are his thoughts on the matter:

...I'm fairly new to ColdFusion. I actually first touched CF about a year a go on the On AIR Train Tour through Europe. That was the first time I played around with CF after oh... some 10 years of working with PHP. I looked at CF a few years ago and never really took another serious look at it. I'm sure there are many of you out there in the same situation and I would like to invite you to take another look at ColdFusion. CF has changed and matured a lot since the early days and is just a breeze to work with. With a minimum amount of code, I was able to rapidly code my database calls for the widget. Another cool thing about ColdFusion is that once you write your database code, you can use it in a number of different ways. You can directly call the methods using Flash Remoting in your Flex application, call it as a webservice from a mobile Flash application and/or call it from an HTML page without changing anything in the original code. I surely was pretty impressed when I saw that the first time. If you're a long time PHP user and want to know more about ColdFusion, I'd like to invite you to my session at MAX. I'm going to talk about the difference and similarities between PHP and CF and also talk about what CF can do right out of the box....

If you want to find out more about his experience with the widget, check out the rest of the article.

Wow, that's a long title.

I'm doing a session at the ColdFusion Unconference at Max 2009 on promoting ColdFusion to non-ColdFusion developers. It's about going into other communities and focusing on the correct arguments for ColdFusion. I want to both share what I've learned in terms of winning arguments, and hear what you guys think resonate. So I'll be presenting a bit, but I'll also be listening to your experience (if you care to share.)

So sign up for MAX 2009, and check out the Unconference.

This session will be Tuesday October 6th from 1:30 - 2:30.

Also check out my main conference sessions:

Leveraging Exposed Services in ColdFusion Centaur
October 5 at 11:30AM
This session is about the new exposed services or CFaaS we have included in ColdFusion 9. I'll be talking about how to leverage them in Flex and other languages, and even how to enhance previous versions of ColdFusion with them.

ColdFusion with Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and Exchange
October 5 at 05:00PM
I'll be talking about how nice ColdFusion plays with Microsoft technologies. While Exchange integration has been around since ColdFusion 8, with 9 we've added the ability to interact with SharePoint and Office documents.

I'm in a weird place. Last week I was an Adobe community member, now I am an employee. Last week I thought I knew hidden unspoken motivations behind Adobe's actions, now I know I didn't even come close to guessing them. Last week Ben Forta was that guy on the stage giving keynotes, now he's my boss' boss.

Mind you, I'm not complaining, it's as awesome a gig as I've imagined, but it's still a shock to the system. But I figured, while I'm still fluent in being a community member, I'd share some observations before they slipped away.

Things I Expected:

• Every one else here is really fracking smart.
• There are good reasons for certain stances and positions from Adobe that don't make sense externally
• Most of the not sharing those reasons is driven by legal considerations

Things that surprised me:

• How much my co-workers listen to the community without necessarily piping in. They hear your complaints, even if they don't tell you. They take them to the engineers even if the problem can't be fixed for the next release.
• Just how affected any one product is effected by the others. For example, certain management processes for CF or Flex have to work for Photoshop or Premiere as well. Some issues that come up again and again are due to this. It's why the answer to "Why don't you just switch to..." isn't always as simple as "just switching to..."
• Internally, there is a lot of affection for our customers. I think this was hit home to me, when one of my co-workers who has a tendency to rile up his particular community said pretty forcefully that "we created [the technology], and we're not going to let our developers down." Just writing that, it doesn't seem too mind blowing, but it was yelled, at 1:00 in the morning, in 20 degree weather, so the passion was in the moment.

All in all, I'm in awe that I get to work here. I can't wait to see what I learn next week.