Rob Brooks-Bilson

Now that Evet Gateways have officially gotten more coverage (ala MAX), we in the ColdFusion community need to start thinking about the possibilities they open. By piecing together everything we heard at MAX surrounding gateways, we know that Blackstone is going to ship with several included gateways:

• Lotus Sametime Gateway (IM)
• Jabber/XMPP Gateway (IM)
• Directory Watcher Gateway(Looks for new additions to a file system directory)
• SMS Gateawy (for sending/receiving SMS text messages)
• Asynchronous CFML Gateway (for multi-threaded CFML invocations)

Beyond these gateways, it would be fairly simple (provided you know a little Java) to create additional gateways for communicating with all sorts of additional technologies via protocols other than HTTP. Considering the possibilities, this means you (or a third party) could write a telnet gateway, a gateway for connecting to a messaging service such as JMS (Sean Corfield has already mentioned he's worked on this for an internal project) or MQ Series, or a gateway for communicating with the X10 protocol. The list goes on and on. Themain point here is that the possibilities are limitless.

This also opens up a potential new revenue stream for companies wanting to produce and support commercial gateway add-ons for ColdFusion. So, if you don't know Java but need a gateway for a particular application, chances are that a solution would be available from either an open-source or commercial provider.

The coolest thing about gateways, though, is that you only need to know Java if you want to write your own. To use and existing gateway, you only need to know ColdFusion as all gateways are implemented via CFCs.

What uses for Event Gateways are you thinking about?

I didn't get a chance to blog this yesterday because my wireless connection in the auditorium wouldn't stay up. That, and the demo machine blue screened, so Damon Cooper had to basically just tell us what the sneak would have been, rather than demoing it. Nothing really new here, except I think this may have been the first time that anyone mentioned that the new gateway funcitonality would include an Instant Messaging gateway that included support for Lotus Sametime this interests me because my company uses Sametime).

MAX 2004 is winding down with only a few hours left to go. Time for a little reflection and some thoughts for next year.

Macromedia consistently puts on one of the best conferences I've been to. While it's true that some things go more smoothly than others, and that the choice of location has a lot to do with how things run, all in all, MAX is and always has been a well run event. Hats off to everyone at Macromedia who makes MAX the event that it is.

Now, on to a few suggestions. The only real "complaint" I have about the sessions is that the higher level sessions still tend to be to general. From talking with people at the conference, it seems that people want even more "advanced" content that helps them understand the concepts and gives them practical advice on how to apply it. For example, the Hal Helms session on OO ColdFusion was a great introduction to OO development for ColdFusion developers, but I think a lot of attendees were then ready for a follow-up session on applying those ideas and principals. They needed concrete examples, maybe a sample application that they could walk through with a presenter to get more indepth experience with the concepts.

This leans me into my next suggestion - include even more interactive Birds of a Feather sessions for people interested in different topics within CF and let the learning and knowledge sharing happen at a more organic level. Do a BOF for CFCs, a BOF for reporting, a BOF for Mach-II, etc. All Macromedia needs to do is provide a room, and maybe a projector, and the rest will happen spontaneously. Steve Rittler has more on this on his blog.

Next suggestion is to leave a little more time between sessions. Scheduling them back to back doesn't leave people enough time to make it from one session to the next withoug being disruptive often times.

Not sure where MAX is going to be next year, but it's looking like they are considering a West coast city. I think that's a great idea and would love to see MAX in a city like San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle.

I made some really good connections at this year's MAX and look forward to keeping in touch throughout the year. Hopefully, I'll see many of you again next year!

Dreamweaver:

• Template driven design using XML/XSL
• Binding with XSL stylesheets
• Code Toolbar ala Homesite
• Drag and drop XML/XLS, including repeating regions
• Code collapse ala Homesite (4 years ago ;-)
• New zoom tool. Marquee selection allows marquee and zoom ala Fireworks

New customer facing knowledge base on the way from Macromedia.

Problem is that both internal and external "customers" have a hard time finding things and sifting through content on macromedia.com.

What's coming:

• RSS feeds for almost everything -product tech notes, forums threads, etc.
• Guided search by specific topic types, starting with dev center content or technotes. More types to follow. Category based results - activity, symptom, product version, environment, etc. Also lists best bets in a highlighted area. Recognizes abbreviations such as UI, etc.

He isn't being aggregated over at MAX Bloggers, but you might want to check out Steve's Blog. He's got a lot of good info coming out of the conference.

Coming live from sneaks, connection willing...

Breeze Live

• Conference call calls you as opposed to you calling into the conference call

Fireworks

• Improvements to vector path tool
• Automated text layer on text creation
• Simple, instant red-eye removal
• More Save As Options

Sitting in on Hal Helms's Object Oriented ColdFusion session right now. I had heard great things about it and wanted to see what all of the buzz was about.

If you haven't heard Hal speak before, he's an excellent speaker, presenter, and speaker (as well as an acomplished programmer). Much of what Hal is saying rings true for me. Things like 70-90% of an applications cost are in long term maintenance. Applications that often start off well written become messy after multiple additions and revisions at a later point. His contention is that object orientation can help with these problems.

This session is more about OO fundamentals, and Hal does a great job of taking those concepts and explaining them in simple terms.

I'd love to see do a follow on next year (or at a subsequent conference) where he takes these concepts and shows how to develop with them in CF (I know he has training classes on this, but I think an intro would work well in a conference format).

If you get a chance to see Hal speak at MAX (or any other time), it's worth checking out.

Macromedia's push with Breeze: Meetings without travel, presentations without meetings, training without delays.

Live demo linking Don Norman (Nielsen's Norman Group) from Amsterdam with the conference in New Orleans. Audio quality is good. Camera (video conf) not too bad. Don spent most of his time talking about design and how the browser has set us back about 10 years in that area. Lots of good info on design stuff (which you can read in his book). The main point he makes is that Breeze and Flex and Flash make things possible today that really are set to take things to the next level.

Experience, experience, experience.

US Army using Breeze in the field for forward deployed SATCOM. Ma

More from Tom Hale on eLearning initiatives...

In the beginning, eLearning was focused on developing skills and competencies. Now it's shifting more toward criticalknowledge transfer and information broadcast.

Various tools to do this, Breeze and Captivate (formerly Robodemo). Silke Fleischer goes on to dispell the commonly held misconception that Captivate is just for making software demos.

Silke demonstrated in real time how quickly you can put together an eLearning app. It definitely *looks* easy to use. The app wasn't a simple demo, it was more of a simulation. The simulation showed the user (Tom) how to insert a Flash movie into PowerPoint. It had audio instructions, and scored his compliance with instructions. This is just a small example of what you can do with Captivate.

Macromedia is pushing Breezr for Informational content and Captivate for Instructional content.