text: Flex | Web Monkeys with Laserbeams
  BFusion + BFlex '08
  This September 6-7 a group of us attended the BFusion + BFlex '08 conference in Bloomington, IN. This was a free ColdFusion and Flex hands-on conference sponsored by Adobe, Indiana University, other business and local user groups.
  Day One – BFusion
  For BFusion, I participated in the Advanced ColdFusion track. There were some great sessions, but for the purposes of this post, I'll just recap on two. Specifically those that were emceed by Elliott Sprehn and Mike Brunt.
  Elliott's presentation on "Frameworks for SOA Platforms" walked us through a custom implementation, his "Shared Services Architecture." The platform technology stack includes ColdSpring, Model-Glue and Fusebox, and your ORM of choice. Model-Glue is a popular ColdFusion framework that uses a MVC design pattern. Elliot is running a customized version of Model-Glue and basically using the Controller as an ESB of sorts. For ColdFusion shops who want to migrate to an SOA platform, check out Elliot's presentation.
  Mike Brunt's session on "ColdFusion in the Enterprise Space – Tuning and Clustering" was perfect timing for us. We've just purchased new web systems hardware and are in the throws of configuring it all and rolling it out.
  Day Two – BFlex
  This was my first foray into Flex development. The first day really exceeded my expectations for a free conference and day two followed suit nicely. The session on event bubbling was really sweet – Flex has done this very nicely.
  The other presentation that interesting was "Extending Components." I wrote my first Flash app with Remoting and some of the earlier components back in 2002. We all remember the Pet Store app that the Flash development team at Adobe (then Macromedia) put together. It's cool to see how far they've come with the entire inheritance structure and extendability in Flex. Really slick. Silverlight has it's work cut out.
  To sum it up, it was completely worth going to this conference. Not every session was not groundbreaking or applicable to our situation, but the ones that were valuable give me the confidence to recommend next year's event to others (assuming there is one).
  Hats off to all of the speakers and volunteers WHO PAID THEIR OWN WAY to be there and put this on for us. It was amazing to know that they did that for those attending and really enjoyed being there.
  At one point I was looking for a vending machine to buy bottled water, and couldn't find one so one of the guys from IU went to his office to get a bottle for me. Now that's serving with excellence!