Wednesday, October 10, 2007

The Week at Max

Wow ! What an incredible week it was. A week that saw the largest ever MAX, a week that saw the largest get together of ColdFusion community, a week that saw the best ever visibility of CF at MAX general sessions, a week that saw U2's Bono (err.. his fake??) having fun at a tech conference like MAX and a week that saw lot of cool and amazing Adobe technologies shaping up.

It also had moments of a Hollywood thriller for me. I was presenting a session on "Leveraging ColdFusion for AIR application". My first session was on Tuesday, 2nd October at 4 o'clock and at around 2 o'clock my laptop crashed and after that it just refused to boot up. Luckily I had the backup of my ppt and some demo files and hence I decided to use Sanjeev's (Pdf and compiler guy in the CF team) laptop to make the presentation. I just had one and half hour and I needed to setup everything back on his machine - install the air runtime, air sdk, cfeclipse, copy all my files etc and keep the setup ready to run whatever demos I was left with. To add to this, somehow there was no Internet available in the conference area - So where to get AIR runtime and SDK from? Sanjeev suggested that may be AIR guys might have it and so we ran across to the AIR park to get those on my flash drive. I can't tell you what those one and half hour were like :-). I barely managed to get the presentation ready in time and thankfully the presentation went well.

As if this was not enough, the adventure continued for the repeat session as well. No this time the laptop didn't crash.. but this time I could not find Sanjeev so that I could take the laptop from him. I just had half an hour left for the session and I did not have any laptop. And I didn't even have the patience for setting it all up once again on another laptop. Finally found him just 15 minutes before my session while he was chatting with BEA guys. phew..

Anyway, here is my presentation and some of the demo files if you are interested to take a look at that. I could not upload it earlier as I got a temporary laptop just yesterday. I will upload the flex part of demo in a day or two.

If you were there at MAX, you must have seen Hemant talking about ColdFusion and AIR at sneak peek. Though this was just a prototype, it surely gives an idea what can be done in CF for air apps. It would be great if you can share what exactly or what else would you like to see in ColdFusion to help you build AIR application easily. Thoughts??