Great conference!

The Fusebox 2004 Conference was awesome! They keynote speech by Hal Helms was very insightful and candid about where Macromedia ColdFusion "sits" in the opinions of others with relation to .NET and JAVA. The short of it is this, push ColdFusion for the best interface while using its under-lying power to interact with .NET (through web services) or JAVA (through objects). The next release of ColdFusion, code named "Blackstone" should help make ColdFusion just that, the best and easiest way to create a web interface. The fast and easy way to create Flash based forms with Flash components as well as high quality report generating (to PDF or Flashpaper) will be a strong selling point.

Jeff Peters had two back-to-back sessions on creating a Fusebox 4 application from start (meeting with the client the first time) to finish (delivery). Maxim Porges did an incredible job sharing with the audience many of the development techniques that his group uses and has made them successful in creating web applications. Steve Nelson showed off some very powerful unit/harness testing tools for application "fuses" as well as a nice extension built for DreamWeaver in working with the Fusebox framework. He was also a sponsor and would sit down and walk through some of the FLiP process with a conference attendee, creating a persona and events and showing how using these techniques will help you develop better applications.

Finally, the Synthis company gave out beta CD's of their Adalon modeling product. This 3.0 release is a complete re-write of their application and looks incredible so far (installed and played with it for about an hour). I'm really looking forward to developing an application in it. I was also very impressed with how they interacted with the conference attendees, not only answering questions but sitting down to show them how their product works or answers questions. One attendee brought an application to them and they mapped it out together right there on a laptop! Personally I had three of my questions answered by them while I was working with an old project in the new editor. Kudos to Bjorn, Wells and Max for that!

For those that couldn't make it this year, make sure to come next year because it's well worth the money!