I am happy to announce the location of our first ColdBox Europe training here in Amsterdam.

Thanks to Ernst van der Linden, of Team Coldbox and BehindThe.net, along with the crew at RemuNet Services for offering to host the event.

The facility is in the heart of town, and has the real Amsterdam feel.

You can check it out on Google Maps:
Keizersgracht 83A
Amsterdam 1015 CG

The affiliation has also allowed us to offer the 3 DAY course for a discounted rate of 1200 Euros (early bird - before Oct.14th) and 1500 Euros after the 14th.

So spread the word and sign up soon, seating is limited.

Registration and Event Info at cboxams.eventbrite.com

Scotch on the Road is coming to Amsterdam on October 26th. If you don't know it is a FREE event. Check out their site for session information and other specifics.

We are considering offering a 2 day Coldbox 101 training and an additional hands-on Workshop. Since it's short notice, this is a quick poll for interest. Details and specifics will follow.

Schedule:
Thursday & Friday: Training
Saturday: Additional Hands-on Workshop
Sunday: ---
Monday: Scotch On The Road

This way there is enough time to go through the concepts, features, and syntax of Coldbox. And an extra day to put it into practice. Develop a full application using Coldbox with some of the latest technologies, like Coldspring, Lightwire, Transfer, etc. Not to mention, plenty of tips, tricks, tools, and shortcuts for developing. Not only with Coldbox, but in general. I'll even touch on some Object Oriented stuff, where it's good, bad, and why.

If you are coming from out of town, or just need a reason to bug the boss to spend some of that training budget...Amsterdam has one of the best public transport systems in the world. You can do plenty of sight seeing, beer drinking, and ...it's Amsterdam!

The guys here at CFUG NL are putting together a battle of the frameworks.

Bringing in presenters for each of the major frameworks: Coldbox, Mach-ii, Model Glue, and Fusebox.

I have been asked to represent Coldbox.

Each presenter will give a walk-through on how to build a basic application. We don't have too much time, so we will squeeze in as much info as we can about the frameworks, as well.

To help benchmark and to give developers a better understanding of what each framework offers, we will all be building the same app.

It will be held at the Adobe Office at the Amsterdam Arena and will start at 14:00 hours.

A number of requests and inquiries have come in about TransferSync and multiple application instances running on the same server.

Thanks goes to Dylan Miyake, who was kind enough to provide the solution.

I have updated the project TransferSync @ RIAforge, you can get the latest code there.

Team Coldbox is preparing to offer Certified Coldbox training courses here in the Netherlands.

I am hoping to offer our first course this winter in Amsterdam.

So if you have any interest or suggestions, please send them this way.

Luis and Team Coldbox have been busy as usual creating top-notch code for us all to use.

The upcoming 3.0 version of Coldbox is packed with improvements, new features, and all kinds of tools to make a CF developers life easier.

It's in alpha now and available from the Coldbox download page.

You'll also find LogBox, a logging framework, and MockBox, an object stubbing framework, are ready for the public to get their hands on. BlenderBox, a new IOC framework is around the corner, as well. Whether Luis likes it or not, I have deemed the new collection the 'Box Suite', for obvious reasons.

I have received a number of emails and some comments about my lack of involvement in the CF community lately.

I do apologize, and am hoping to make a strong return.

After spending a year taking a beating on the West Coast in a corporate environment, establishing a development department, while managing a team, and playing the role of lead developer on applications with unrealistic deadlines...I am happy to still be alive.

It was a learning experience to say the least. Fortunately, I was able to get away when I did.

I have accepted an offer from fellow Team Coldbox member, Ernst van der Linden, to join his company, BehindThe.net and partner RemuNet Services. It's more then just a new job, it's a new country and a new lifestyle.

ColdFusion has taken me from New York to Miami, and from Miami to Los Angeles. Now, it's landed me in the Netherlands. Who says its not a powerful language?

It's been a little over 2 months, and I am finally settled in my own place, and the paperwork is practically complete. I have started to get organized again and re-acquainted with my projects.

I am looking forward to the synergy between Ernst and I, and expect to be contributing quite a bit on a solo and team effort.

I have some old entries to post and a handful of new ones to come.

I also want to thank those who have sent me feedback, comments, and contributions to existing projects during my hiatus. That's the spirit that makes it all worth it, and what makes the CF community so special.

I'm no novice when it comes to Coldbox, but I've also never had the opportunity to sit and go thru the system with the author himself. That alone had me looking forward to the seminar.

The course kicked off with a nice breakfast and a goody bag loaded with training materials, a t-shirt, cheat sheets, candy and snacks, not to mention the bag itself is pretty nice.

The training manual has to be around 300+ pages, and that doesn't include the exercises. That's a separate booklet 100+ pages thick. Both are as rich in content as they are in size.

The lecture began with an intro to Design Patterns, Object Oriented methodology, and the vocabulary needed to comprehend the framework's architecture. He also went over some Best Practices not specific to Coldbox. A good lesson for those migrating from spaghetti or even well structured procedural code.

The highlight for me came when he mentioned a few things to be aware of when using ColdFusion. Years of CF and I guess a few things had slipped by me.

Did you know:

1. Variables of type string, array, number, and date all pass in and out of components by value. But structures, queries, and all other 'complex' objects including CFCs get passed by reference. May seem obvious to some, but to me, the ARRAY type seemed liked it should of been grouped with the complex types and passed by reference. Apparently, its a CF thing. Don't know how I feel about that, your thoughts?

2. ColdFusion creates java inner classes for each method in a CFC. So on top of the classes it uses to build CFC objects, it also has to instantiate these inner classes for each method. So consider the overhead of bloating objects with simple getter and setters, is it worth it?

Definitely, got me thinking...

From there we jumped into framework itself. Luis went over how to get it installed, configured, and how to tweak your IDE (eclipse and dw snippets and dictionaries).

The focus with Coldbox has always been the developer. If you don't know, there are lots of features that you wont find in other frameworks that make coding easier, and more fun. Luis touched on the development tools such as, the dashboard, debugger, cache monitor, and even the SideBar, to name a few.

Things started getting pretty advanced when we got into the Coldbox architecture and hierarchy. A great way to really understand the power and the functionality you have available from within the framework. I don't want to spoil it for those attending the seminar at CFUnited, so I wont go in to much more detail. I will say there are lots of details and knowledge to be absorbed, even for a veteran like myself.

Looking forward to Day 2's lesson. We still have half of the training manual to go.

Major updates have been made to TransferSync.

This version has a critical fix for those dealing with related objects. Somehow, the afterCreate event was overlooked during the early conception of this approach for managing the Transfer cache using a JMS gateway.

Once, that was implemented, it was apparent that better synchronization for parent objects was needed. For instance, when a new child is created, or existing child has a parent switched during an update.

I have temporarily removed the sample app. Once I get a chance to clean it up, I'll bring it back. If you need samples, contact me.

Other then that, there have been some great improvements. Take a look at the change log, or grab the latest version here: TransferSync @ RIAForge

I apologize. I left out the test page and sample code from the latest release.

I've updated the project to include the Application.cfc, which is required for testing the security token persistence using the session scope. Along with the testForm.cfm, which has all the example code, and demo.

SalesForceCFC @ RIAforge