I'm the Co-Manager of BFUG, the Bloomington Flex User's Group and I'm spending the day at BFusion, an Adobe Cold Fusion event hosted at the Kelly School of Business here in Bloomington, Indiana. BFlex / BFusion is an event that spans the entire weekend and will spend all day Saturday talking about Adobe Cold Fusion, and Sunday talking about Adobe Flex.

I'm really excited to play around with Cold Fusion. I use a lot of other Adobe products, and I've been told that Cold Fusion does a great job of integrating with Flex (and coincidentally, tomorrow I'm helping to instruct BFlex, a similar event as to BFusion just relating to Flex, more on that later.)

So far, we've done a lot of basic setup. Getting Eclipse configured took quite a bit of time for most people around the room. I'm using the Flex Builder from Adobe, which is built on eclipse (same software more or less.) We are also using CFEclipse, a plugin for Eclipse to make it a little more Cold Fusion friendly.

I'll be updating this Blog as we cover new topics and information. I won't be doing a play by play of the actual code that we're doing however I will try to hit all of the major topics!

One of the most exciting things we've talked about is the versatility of Cold Fusion. Compared to a JavaScript application, a Cold Fusion application will take roughly 1/3 the amount of time to complete. From what I've seen so far of the code, it is considerably easier to code than JavaScript (as its comprised of a lot of pre-packaged libraries.)

Another very exciting thing about Cold Fusion, is its font abilities. Since Cold Fusion is itself a server, you can embed fonts onto the server so they are available for any flash or PDF content on the server. Remember too that Google has recently started indexing .swf (Flash) files so its now possible to maintain search engine optimization (SEO) while working with Flash / Flex. (Yes, I just called fonts exciting. Talk to your graphics designer they'll like it.)

Today, we're doing a pretty short overview of Cold Fusion. The "course" we're talking through is a 2-3 day intro to the product. However, we're doing in about a 6 hour block of time. So, obviously we're moving pretty quickly. The goal is to take a current HTML site and convert it into a Cold Fusion site.

To begin with, we're taking a lot of the HTML code and breaking it into reusable segments. I am a huge proponent of coding like this. I hate working with sites that use the same code over and OVER and OVER. Its a horrible practice and its so much simpler to just include common files (hooray php.) Cold Fusion certainly support the same sort of include functionality that is common in php and other languages. We're spending some time now breaking down the HTML template to remove redundant code and including a common header and footer file.

We're also doing a bit of work on a list. The sample file that we are using has an address book function in it. As a result, there is an un-ordered list (ul) that has 26 entries. Using Cold Fusion, we replaced approx 70 lines of code to setup list items (li) for the address book links with 6 lines, that simply defined the alphabet and then created a loop that reused the same list item element across the entire alphabet. MUCH cleaner code.

Key Note:

At Lunch we had a keynote speaker from Adobe (Adam Lehman from Adobe Systems) who gave us a pretty cool overview of some of the various uses for Cold Fusion and the other Adobe programs in their repertoire as well. We got a great look at Cold Fusion integrating with .Net services. Essentially he had a computer setup (Windows Machine) on his .Net account. He was using Cold Fusion to pull the system processes (similar to clt. alt. dlt. processes on a Windows Desktop). He was then using various ways of displaying this data. First we saw it with AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML), then we saw it with Flex, and finally as an AIR application. All 3 were quite similar, however, there was improvement / change at each step. The Flex app was a bit cleaner / crisper than the AJAX version. Also, it had the Flex charts and diagrams built in. Adam was easily able to swap between the table layout and a pie chart layout. He didn't have to do a new set of code to make the pie chart, it was built in with Flex. The AIR app worked the exact same way on his desktop, however he was able to easily export the data by dragging to his desktop and got a chart.

Adobe does a lot of cool things for students, one of which is their education licenses. If you're a student, you can actually get the Education version of Cold Fusion for FREE. Click here to go to their registration site. I highly recommend taking advantage of this if you're a student! (Please note, unlike the Flex education version, Cold Fusion is for Education / Training ONLY.)