Inspired by Sean's example, I asked myself, "Why doesn't Squidhead have a mailing list?"

"I don't know," I replied.

So now I have one. Feel to join and pester myself and the 2 other people that will join.

Squidhead ColdFusion Code Generator

Squidhead has gone through a little resurgence since I got back from MAX. It's happened for two main reasons.

1. I'm using to it to build a more complex application
2. I talked to a few people about it, and they actually liked it

But it occurs to me that I could/should do a better job explaining why you might want to give it a longer look.

Squidhead might be for you if:

• You or your organization requires a generator that uses stored procedures instead of inline SQL calls
• You or your organization prefers using foreign keys and wants a generator that can use them to discover business logic
• You want to fool around with code generation but don't the like MVC code that many of the others use.

Squidhead might give you an excuse to:

• Work with Ant, because of the build.xml files it creates for itself.
• Experiment with Unit Testing, because it builds its own CFUnit Tests and runs yours too

Squidhead isn't for you if:

• You find the name "Squidhead" ridiculous.
• You're already using a more established generated or framework

If you're interested, here are some resources for you:

• Squidhead at RIAForge
• Squidhead documentation online

Um, hey, did some of you try and download the Flash version of the video? Um, yeah, and did it crash your browser, and possibly crash your computer?

Sorry about that.

I've fixed the Flash version and it shouldn't do that anymore. I should have gone with Flash Video encoder in Flash CS3 from the get go.

Flash Version

A reader left a comment in one of my posts about the Selling ColdFusion outside of the Community, stating that I had to answer this before I could sell outside of the community. I figured it was worth a blog post instead of a comment.

Simply stated, I use ColdFusion because it is the most productive language I have ever worked in. I have done more, in less time with ColdFusion, than I have ever achieved in any other language.

Over the course of years at my job I have had to do work in ColdFusion, Perl, Php, C++, Python, and Java. I don't claim to know any of them; I just had to work in them. None of them have allowed me to build things as fast or as easily as ColdFusion.

Those languages I stated before, of all of them, I used Perl the most. I've spent more time figuring out how to do the few things I really know in Perl, than I spent learning ColdFusion. Part of that is Perl itself, part of that is the sheer sadistic joy that Perl programmers take in making even their sample code undecipherable to the non-initiated, but most of it can be attributed to ColdFusion's true ease of absorption.

I remember something a student interviewing for a co-op position said to me:

I wish I hadn't learned ColdFusion first. It made me expect all languages to be that easy to learn.

Some, (like this recent post from Kyle Hayes) have termed this a weakness with ColdFusion. But that should be considered strength of the language, people want to work in it; people expect other languages to be so accessible. These features should be embraced in the rush to get more users in the door, not thrown away.

There you have my 2 cents, please feel free to disagree.

I've long thought about doing a blog in 15 minutes demo of Squidhead. But come on, everyone's done one by now, right?

Then I thought about ColdFusion 8 and its image capabilities, and the image CRUD that I've added to Squidhead and thought maybe a facebook type application would be more compelling. So I did it, and put it up on Google Video. (cause I couldn't get it under 10 minutes.) Then I saw it on Google video and was repelled by the quality of the video. So I have few options to watch it below.

I show off three features of Squidhead in the video:

• Image CRUD interface
• Foreign Key usage
• Scaffolding your stored procedures.

If anyone watches it, please let me know what you think.

UPDATE: It appears that the Flash Version will cause your computer to crash. Sorry about that. I will have a replacement up at some point in the very near future.

UPDATE:Flash Video version works now.

• Google Video Version (pretty blurry)
• Flash Version (Takes a long time to download)
• Windows Media Version (download, still pretty long to download)

My last day at Max was marred by the technical problems. I was going to give a 5-10 minute demo of some of stuff we've done with ColdFusion 8's Exchange features. My laptop died right before I was to start, then I couldn't get my laptop's VGA to display on the projector at the same time. I totally fizzled out. I have to thank Jason Delmore for covering for me, and trying to explain to the audience that I wasn't a complete idiot.

I then wandered into a session named Best Practices for Creating Great Web Experiences. I was a pretty interesting view into the interworking of a design team. I found it interesting because it was so far afield of what I actually do.

I then wandered around for awhile and spent some time in the community area. There I demoed the exact thing I was supposed to demo at the Boot Camp, basically deleting all of my work contacts from Exchange and letting my ColdFusion application repopulate them. At least someone saw it.

My day started at the Keynote. I have a few random thoughts about it.

• Bruce Chizen would be pretty bitter about being the rich and famous CEO of Adobe if he didn't enjoy it so much. He made me feel guilty though for continuously looking up his salary for one of my work projects. It's impressive.
• Scene 7 does some absurd stuff with dynamic imaging.
• Share looks promising
• Thermo will be absurd if it does all it promises. Photoshop Composition to Flex application in one click.
• Next version of ColdFusion is code named centaur. My supposition is that it is so named because if angered, it will shoot you with an arrow, and then trample you to death. It does make me feel a little afraid that they will strap a horse's body on a shirtless Ben Forta, ala "Scorpio Man." I am disturbed.

I sat through Sean Corfield's session on Design Patterns, it was simply tremendous. I tend to be a fan of Sean's but I'm not exaggerating. He did a great job of explaining the theory and the concepts behind patterns. Even though I thought I knew them already, he did bring a new perspective to the whole thing.

I also attended Ryan Stewart's session on Air and PDF integration. It looked interesting, but I have no idea why the hell you would ever do it.

If my day looks a little light, I had a minor problem with something back at home, so I had to skip my first session. I also had an opportunity to give an ad hoc demo of Squidhead, so I took it. If for any reason anybody wants a 5 minute demo, drop me a line. I'm always willing.

I finished up the day at Max Awards and Sneaks Session. The following really stood out to me:

• Visual Communicator is a niche product that will make video presentations very easily. I think it's going to be a very cool boon to the vlog space.
• Photoshop express is just beyond cool. Pretty much everything anyone would need to do to a photo can be done in an online client. The demonstrator completely retouched a photo in under 30 seconds. Crazy.
• Hemant presented on ColdFusion publishing to Air. This is something I really wanted for CF since I saw the Air Bus Tour. They've done more with it than I ever thought. You can do online and offline applications. Cooler than what I was imagining.
• Flash gets skeletons. Very cool.
• C++ on Flash leads to Quake on Flash. Tremendously cool.
• Adobe hired that guy who does the dynamic image content resizing.

I ended up skipping the Event, because it didn't really cry out to me, I had to prepare something for the CF Boot Camp tomorrow, and I'm beat from last night.

I attended 2 Birds of a Feather last night.

The first was Meet the Team: ColdFusion. I think Sean Corfield blogged about it, and I tend to agree with him. I was fully expecting the crowd to go feral again, but no it was quite cordial. I think ColdFusion 8 being so rich, and the alpha and beta program being so inclusive was definitely a big part of it.

The second was Selling ColdFusion Outside of the Community. I think the biggest thing I got out of it was the idea that the ColdFusion community has to start swimming in other ponds. We tend to form an echo chamber amongst ourselves. Then when something negative is said outside the ColdFusion community piles on and just disagrees. Instead we need to be continuously engaging those outside of the community so that we can build credibility over the long whole. So when we tell them ColdFusion is an enterprise worthy language that can really drive rapid application development, they might just believe us.

Afterwards I lured Steve Rittler and Rob Brooks-Bilson over to the Hilton to have a stogie with Ryan Steward and John Piotrowski.

I'll be updating this over the course of the day, so feel free to come back, the contents will change.

For the first time in a few years I did not oversleep at all. I actually made it to see the entire Keynote. There were some cool things to be seen. For me the highlights, in no particular order, were:

• Refactoring and profiling in Flex. Finally Flex developers have the kind of detailed performance information that ColdFusion developers have had for years.
• Hydra ?? A language that allows Flash developer to write their own effects.
• Premiere Express, a web version of Premiere, that while not great for the power editor, would be a huge boon to the amateur video editor.
• The sheer plethora of Air application that I want to download and try, specifically:
  • Buzzword
  • Snippage
• Adobe Developers Connect which will now keep the introNetworks application for Max up all year round.
  

Unfortunately, staying for the entire keynote made me late to my first session. With it booked solid this year, if you are in a popular session, and you are late, don't expect a seat, or standing room. I wandered into a few other rooms, but nothing grabbed me.

After Lunch I attended the session given by my coworkers. Before I recommended their session based on knowing them; now I can recommend it on the content. They did a great job of explaining how and why they converted a VB 6 Trading floor simulator to Flex and ColdFusion. I highly recommend it: A Virtual Trading Floor: Bringing Wall Street to the Classroom.

Next I wandered into an Inspire session about the design of Buzzword. It started late and had a lot of technical issues. That was a real shame because Buzzword just looks too good to be true. I signed up for a beta, and I'm hoping to get a test account soon.

I'm here, and loving it so far. The venue is ginormous. I was at the Welcome Party, and halfway through discovered that there was a whole half of the party on the other wing of the center. Huge. HUGE!

While at the welcome party I picked up two interesting bits of information.

1. During Ray Camden's Inspire session on Riaforge, I learned that Riaforge automatically makes a zip of your project if you post it to Subversion. Very cool, and will simplify posting Squidhead updates for me.

2. I caught Damon Cooper and had a great talk with him. In the course of that he told me something very interesting about the business side of ColdFusion and Adobe. I don't think he necessarily wanted it spread, and I'm going to honor that. But I encouraged him to show up to the BOF session that Brian Meloche is running (and I'm on the panel,) and let the rest of you in on it. Without giving too much away, let's just say that Adobe as a company is pretty surprised about the success of ColdFusion 8 and that may have very positive implications for its marketing. So, if you see Damon tomorrow, make sure you remind him to go.

I also learned that Steven Rittler smokes cigars, and Rob Brooks-Bilson and I have almost identical taste in TV's shows, but that's probably less interesting to you all.

Looking forward to tomorrow.