Well, it's all over for another year.Scotch on the rocks is a phenomenal conference for all things Cold Fusion (or, for reasons that will become clear) CFML.
The conference itself sets out, well, in their words:
Scotch on the Rocks, established in 2005, is a conference based out of Edinburgh, Scotland concentrating on all things ColdFusion. Incorporating keynotes, technical sessions and tutorials, as well as the most innovative and successful ColdFusion experts and companies, Scotch on the Rocks is a must-attend conference.
(For more information go take a look at their site here, go on I'll wait here...)
Dumm, de dummm. Oh! Hi, interesting eh? Well, I'll tell you it was. Very interesting.
Firstly, the conference sets out to give delegates access to very important people in the world of CFML. With speakers from Adobe, Railo and the Blue Dragon steering committee as well as CFML stars such as Ben Forta, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew and many, many more, there was something of interest available in every session but the real joy of this conference is the interpersonal availability of the speakers. Before, during and after each session the speakers were available to go over details or adjuncts to their points, something that just doesn't happen in some conferences.
The whole event has a terrific energizing effect on attendees which is bolstered by a great sense of fun (both in and out of the bar).
Railo goes open source with Jboss
Yup, for those who don't know yet both Blue Dragon and Railo are both are going to be (or are offering already) open source CFML engines.
This is a big deal to those of us who'd like to be able to offer solutions to clients who just can't (or won't) invest in licensing costs for Cold Fusion. That's not to say CF isn't brilliant, sessions on the use of AJAX proxying in CF8 showed just how fast prototyping or generic administration areas can be built in this system.
Open Blue Dragon and Railo will both give a huge boost to the community in being able to leverage CFML over other established "free" offerings such as .NET, ASP (assuming you have a windows server in place) and PHP.
Whilst their first open source incarnations won't offer
Additionally, it will be down to us CFML evangelists to tell Open Blue Dragon and Railo what we think will be of most use or (and here's a radical thought) to get involved, push these open source versions, contribute to the development effort (especially if you are a Java coder), help with the documentation effort or why not just download Open Blue Dragon (you can get jetty packages or even a pre built VM image) and try your applications on it?
Sadly, after a great 3 days and a post-conference get together it's nearly time to trust myself to FlyBe and leave Edinburgh for another year so, I suppose, I'd better crash for the night.
I attended Scotch last year and I can say that it was bigger and better this year and I can't wait to see what those guys pull out of the hat next year.
Here's a big thank you and well done to everyone who put so much time, effort and sheer dedication into Scotch for another year, cheers to you all!
I've got some images up from the conference on flickr here.
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