My CFFree Presentation from Dallas TechFest
Dallas TechFest was last Friday and although I was sad to be missing the final CFUnited, TechFest was a blast. It was incredibly refreshing to see 400+ CFML, PHP, .NET, Java, and Flex people all in the same place at the same time for some geek cross-pollination. This doesn't happen nearly enough so thanks to all the organizers of the event, all the great speakers, and to Dave Shuck for inviting me to speak.
The talk I gave was entitled "CFFree: Building and Deploying CFML Applications on a Free Software Stack." This was a 90-minute introduction to developing, deploying, testing, and monitoring CFML applications using Tomcat, Open BlueDragon, Railo, and a plethora of other free software applications and tools. If you didn't make Dallas TechFest this year and are interested in this topic you're in luck! I gave everyone who attended my session a VirtualBox VM that has all the free CFML goodness installed on Ubuntu 10.04, and you can download the VM from my Dropbox (2.5 GB). You can also check out the presentation slides above (view or download PDF). My apologies that the speaker notes get cut off in the PDF version, but I created the presentation in Google Docs and as far as I can tell there's no way to control the font size of the speaker notes in the PDF. You can also view the presentation directly in Google Docs; just make sure to click "Actions" at the bottom then "Show Speaker Notes" to view the speaker notes since the slides alone don't tell you all that much. As always if you grab the VM or read through the presentation and have any questions about any of this feel free to contact me. I'm considering doing a couple of screencasts on this topic because due to time constraints I had to breeze over some of the configuration details, not to mention some of the free software goodness I didn't get to show at all. If you want to learn more about free CFML in person, next up on the calendar is a full day hands-on session that Adam Haskell and I will be doing at BFusion in September, and then of course three full days at OpenCF Summit in February 2011. Hope to see you at one or both of these events!