In this issue of ColdFusion conference and training news: 1. CFUNITED News - Team CFUNITED, MiniMax 2. ColdFusion Live! Every Thursday 12:30pm 3. "FarCry : A Free ColdFusion-based CMS" interview with Steve Rittler 4. "Creating Sound for Flash Movies" interview with Jeffry Houser
Happy coding - Michael Smith, TeraTech, Inc http://www.teratech.com/ "Creating excellent custom software since 1989" "There is no better ColdFusion conference out there than CFUNITED. One con- ference at a world class conference center gets you three days of classes that wil l make you a better programmer and personally connect you with the top ColdFusion experts in the world. No car rental necessary. Fly to Washington, D.C. and hop on the Metro to take you across the street from the hotel. There is no better choice if you know ColdFusion or want to learn ColdFusion: CFUNITED is a self contained can't miss affair if you are serious about ColdFusion. Miss it and you lose out for yet another year while others leave you coding in the dust." - Frank Nickerson 1. CFUNITED News **************** * Only 7 weeks until CFUNITED-05. Regular price $649 expires 6/10/05 * Look out for the 20 page CFUNITED brochure in the (postal) mail. Got two? Then pass one to a programming friend! * Team CFUNITED Want to join other insiders with CFUNITED? Want to get benefits from telling your friends about CFUNITED? Want to get exclusive Team CFUNITED swag and name badge at the event (including months of free hosting from CFDynamics and 6 months of Adalon from Synthis). Then join Team CFUNITED. To join you will need to post about CFUNITED on your blog, write an article about CFUNITED or email your organizations listserv about the event. To join fill out this survey http://www.cfconf.com/ttSurveyTool/survey_run_any.cfm?surveyid=115 If you want to add a banner to your blog or website go here http://www.cfunited.com/spread-the-word.cfm * 543 people have already registered for CFUNITED-05! * There are so many topics at CFUNITED we have created "virtual tracks" of interest for ASP, government, managers and newbies: ASP programmers http://www.cfunited.com/asp_programmers.cfm Government employees http://www.cfunited.com/govt_people.cfm Managers and CTOs http://www.cfunited.com/managers.cfm CF Newbies http://www.cfunited.com/newbies.cfm * Common questions - check out the CFUNITED FAQ http://www.cfunited.com/faqs.cfm * Upcoming classes: CF201 - Intermediate ColdFusion May 17 2005 FB101 - Intro to Fusebox May 24 2005 FB201 - Intermediate Fusebox Jun 7 2005 FB301H -Hal Helms FastTrack to Fusebox 4.1 Jun 20 2005 CU201 - Hal Helms - Designing and Developing OO Applications with CFCs Jun 27 2005 CU202 - Simon Horwith - Roll Your Own API - Maximizing Code ReUse with CFCs and Custom Tags Jun 27 2005 CU203 - Geoff Snowman - Intro to .NET for CFers Jun 27 2005 CU204 - Nate Nelson - Beyond Basic SQL for CF Jun 27 2005 CU205 - Charlie Arehart - CFML Leveraging .NET Strengths Jun 28 2005 CU206 - Sandra Clark - Advanced Cascading Stylesheets Jun 28 2005 CU208 - Jeff Peters - FLiP and Fusebox walkthrough Jun 28 2005 For more info http://www.teratech.com/training/ * MiniMAX 2! Join Adam Bell, Simon Horwith and four additional speakers for the prelude to the CF United conference on Tuesday Night, June 28th at 7PM ET. http://www.minimaxconference.com/ It is FREE! (but must register online) * all previous interviews are now posted at http://www.cfunited.com/interviews.cfm 2. ColdFusion Live! Every Thursday 12:30pm ******************************************** ColdFusion Live! A CFUNITED preview every Thursday Two 15 minute "preview" talks from CFUNITED speakers. They will provide an brief introduction to their topic during these sessions. 12:30 - 1:00 US/Eastern Time See also http://www.timezoneconverter.com/ Part 1) Tim Buntel - What is cool in CFMX 7 - Tim is the Macromedia Sr. Product Manager for ColdFusion and will talk about what his favorite CF MX 7 features are. Part 2) Simon Horwith Design Patterns and CFML. Design patterns are a way to making architecting your apps easier and to reuse common software designs. Meeting: http://macromedia.breezecentral.com/cfliveno4/ (Breeze v.5) RSVP: http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/events/4695389/ Future speakers are: 5/19 Geoff Snowman - ASP and CFML Robi Sen - Advanced Scaling and Tuning 5/26 Glenda Vigoreaux - Leveraging Web Services with ColdFusion Sean Corfield - Enterprise Integration with ColdFusion 6/2 Michael Dinowitz - Consuming popular web services Steve Rittler - Farcry: A Free ColdFusion-based CMS 6/9 Charlie Arehart - Integrating CFML and ASP.NET Server Controls 3. "FarCry : A Free ColdFusion-based CMS" interview with Steve Rittler ********************************************************************** Michael Smith: This time we are talking with Steve Rittler about his CFUNITED- 05 talk "FarCry : A Free ColdFusion-based CMS". So why should a developer come to your session Steve ? Steve Rittler: Michael, I'm going to be showing them how a great open source product can be used to address a constant business problem - managing website content. We'll not only go over the features and functionality of the package, but also get to the code and show how easily extensible it is. Some might say that FarCry is similar to Spectra (a content management toolkit sold by Allaire several years ago), but it works much, much better and is boatloads faster too! MS: How much does Farcry cost? SR: The software is FREE (as in beer)! The folks at Daemon have released it into the world under the Common Public License. MS: Wow! What kind of things can FarCry do? SR: FarCry can manage your site's navigation structure, HTML content, images, files such as Word and PDF documents, news items, event listings, and links to other websites right out of the box. There's even a built-in user directory for managing permissions that integrates with Active Directory or LDAP if you so desire. FarCry is built on ColdFusion MX and has been designed from the ground up to be extensible - you can easily add new features and functionality to it using the same ColdFusion knowledge you already possess. Say, for example, you wanted to integrate "Michael's Book Club" in your Farcry-managed site. You could easily create a new "book" content type and add it to the managed core of FarCry by writing *one* ColdFusion Component (CFC). Spend another 5 minutes tweaking some display code for "book" objects and you're all set to manage your entire library through your website. It's pretty powerful stuff! Did I mention that I didn't have to write a single query to make that work? MS: How is that possible? SR: Daemon managed to abstract all of your database operations into a single tier composed of four queries, hence the name "FourQ" for this layer of the FarCry core. All of the SQL code is created and written for you dynamically based on the properties of the objects you define. In the example of our "book" content type above, some properties of the object might be title, author, summary, and year of publication. When you deploy that CFC into the FarCry core, FarCry takes on the task of creating the database table(s) to store that information and manages all database interaction from then on. MS: That is cool - but doesn't it take a long time to set up a site this way? SR: Actually, no. You can be up and running with a site just as fast as you can populate the content. That, as well as the site layout design, usually represents the slowest part of any site development process anyway. Creating simple custom types and integrating simple applications is a piece of cake. Even my first attempt at doing so didn't take more than 20 minutes to figure out and test. MS: What versions of ColdFusion does Farcry run on? 5, MX, MX 7? Standard, Enterprise? Windows, Linux? Macromedia, New Atlanta? SR: Farcry runs on all versions of ColdFusion from MX forward . Enterprise edition is not required. Farcry will run on BlueDragon, but from what I understand there are some minor tweaks that you have to make. Nothing that will cause you to rip your hair out anyway! It'll run on whatever flavor of OS you've got, assuming you can run CF there. I'm currently working on making a G4 my development server - i'll have to let you know how that works out. MS: What about support options? SR: Farcry is open source, but Daemon (www.daemon.com.au) is the company behind the development of Farcry and maintains the code base. They do offer support and consulting packages if you should need them. Other than that, there is a very popular (and immensely helpful) mailing list that is monitored and archived by Daemon. There are a growing number of resources online (blogs, newsgroups, tutorials and walkthroughs) that are easily Googled as well. I use all of these on a regular basis. Someday i'll contribute back to the core codebase! --- Farcry: A Free ColdFusion-based CMS ************************* Farcry is an open source Content Management System for ColdFusion. This talk will review what it is, where to get it, and how it can be extended to handle any requirements your application may need. Speaker Bio: Stephen Rittler is the owner of Countermarch Systems LLC, a consulting firm specializing in business process automation and content management solutions using Macromedia technologies. His company has developed effective solutions for clients in education, government, publishing and manufacturing. He is a Certified Advanced ColdFusion MX developer and has contributed to the CF community through his writing, leadership of the Philadelphia ColdFusion User Group and presentations on a variety of topics. Steve is a musician at heart but has yet to figure out how to play his saxophone and code at the same time. You can read his blog at http://www.countermarch.com/blog. 4. "Creating Sound for Flash Movies" interview with Jeffry Houser ***************************************************************** Michael Smith: This time we are talking with Jeffry Houser about his CFUNITED-05 talk "Creating Sound for Flash Movies". So why should a developer come to your session Jeffry? Jeffry Houser: If you've ever created something in Flash, you probably added sound to it. Many people used canned sounds to suit there needs. But, it is a very easy to create a lot of great sounds from your own computer with minimal investment. Sound is often the overlooked portion of a Flash Movie. As Rich Internet Applications become more prominent, adding sound is going to become more important. This presentation will teach people about what you can do to create sound effects, what you can do to enhance them, how to put them into a format useable by Flash, and how to add them to your Flash movie. MS: That is cool - what are the benefits of adding sound to an application? JH: Your users have been working with desktop applications for much longer than they've been dealing with web applications. Sound is common on the desktop. Buttons click, windows flutter, and numerous beeps and bips alert you to errors and other events. Web applications are traditionally mute. Adding sound may help your users make the transition to different ways of doing things. In less corporate applications, you can also add background music to help set the mood. A "Design your own T-Shirt" application might benefit from ambient background music, while the virtual tour of a haunted house might benefit more from a creepier sound, such as the Nightmare on Elm Street theme. MS: Couldn't that get annoying? Can the user turn off the sounds? JH: Properly done, it will not be annoying. However, In flash it is very easy for create a mute button for application. It will keep the few people happy. MS: So can the sounds tie to any event on your Flash page? JH: Yes, you can. The most common uses for sound effects will all be user driven, such as when a user is clicking on a button or rolling over a hot spot. But you can also create sounds that will trigger after a certain amount of time. MS: hmm, why would you want to do that? JH: Sounds that trigger after a time span are used generally for more for games than it would be in applications. Think of the invincibility star from the original Super Mario Brothers. It was always triggered after a certain amount of time, not by user action. MS: So do you need lots of expensive software and hardware to create sounds for Flash? JH: You can do it very cheaply using a computer microphone and Windows sound recorder, but that does limit your options. However, for a nominal investment you can get some software and hardware which will provide you with significantly more flexibility. The best thing is that you don't have to buy the equipment all at once, you can start with a few items now and expand later, as needed. A good audio editing program, a microphone, and a "Microphone to USB" convertor will cost under $300. MS: Will you be demonstrating how to do this in your session? JH: Yes, I went ahead and created a little animation, located here: . I created all the sounds that you hear in my own home using common every day items. I video taped the sound creation process, and will be demonstrating it for you. How did I create the sounds? I won't tell just yet, but get your guesses ready. I have some time allotted in my presentation to grab some audience members and have them create a sound from scratch. We'll step through the full process, from start to finish. MS: That sounds fun! See you at CFUNITED. You can see more interviews at http://www.cfunited.com/interviews.cfm CFUNITED-05 is Wed 6/29/05 - Fri 7/1/05 in Bethesda MD, just outside Washington DC. It costs $649 until 6/10/05 then $749. For more information on CFUNITED see http://www.cfunited.com/ Creating Sound for Flash Movies ************************* Will show the user the ins and outs of recording custom sound effects (or voice overs, or music) for Flash movies, including topics such as choosing microphones, setting levels, and putting the finished sound into the flash movie. Speaker Bio: Jeff Houser is owner of DotComIt, a full service web consulting firm based out of Connecticut. He is a certified ColdFusion developer and has been dealing with computers for over 20 years. He currently writes a column in the ColdFusion Developer's Journal and is the manager of the Hartford Connecticut Macromedia Use Group. He has authored 3 books, including ColdFusion: The Complete Reference. He has also owns a recording studio and has been recording music for more than 12 years. Tell your friends about CFUNITED-05 - pass this email on ---- Check more about CFUNITED at: http://www.cfunited.com/ We have: * 3 days * 7 tracks * 20 sponsors * 64 sessions * 1000+ attendees * 100% nicer hotel * Includes lunch each day and open bar reception We have seven tracks this year: * Bootcamp - Basic ColdFusion and Flash topics * Advanced - Advanced ColdFusion topics (Blackstone included!) * Manager/Empowered - Fusebox and Project management topics * Integration - Flash, Flex and other technologies integrated with CF topics * Accessibility / usability - section 508, CSS and disabled access * Deployment - tuning, install issues, OS, picking a database * CF Platform Integration - interop with Microsoft and other technologies The timely bird price of $549 for CFUNITED-05 ends 4/30/05. Save upto $400 by registering now! * Early Bird $449 til 2/25/05 * Timely Bird $549 til 4/30/05 * Regular $649 til 6/10/05 * Late $749 til 6/28/04 * At the door $849 Register today at http://www.cfunited.com/ -- Michael Smith, TeraTech Inc - Tools for Programmers(tm) TeraTech voted Best Consulting Service by CFDJ readers! CF/ASP Web, VB, Math, Access programming tools and consulting 405 E Gude Dr Ste 207, Rockville MD 20850 USA Please check out http://www.teratech.com/ - email mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], or call us for more information; in the USA at 1-800-447-9120, +1-301-424-3903 International, Fax 301-762-8185 Thanks! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Logware (www.logware.us): a new and convenient web-based time tracking application. Start tracking and documenting hours spent on a project or with a client with Logware today. 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