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Dallas TechFest 2010 Review

Dallas TechFest, a one day technology conference, has come and gone for 2010, but what an awesome day it was.  I honestly think that this years conference was much better than the previous year.

A huge thanks to Tim Rayburn for coordinating and also to each track coordinator, I know it's not easy to pull together so many awesome people from so many technologies but you guys did a great job and it turned out for the best!

This year I decided to stray from a 100% ColdFusion track and wandered into some very exciting and informative sessions.  I still attended more CF sessions, but it was good to see what else was out there.

First session of the day was Seth Bienek's "Getting RAD With ColdFusion - An Introduction for Developers". Though I'm not a novice, it was great to see Seth.  Despite some technical difficulties with Eclipse and through some creative use of Notepad, he was able to relay some great information for a new comer to CF.

I spent the second session slot with a presentation of my own, "Getting Started with Mura CMS for the Developer".  Despite having only 2 people in the room who had any experience with Mura, the turn out was great and some Mura converts were made.  I also had a chance to launch Mura Tools, a free Eclipse plugin for rapidly developing Mura plugins.  I highly recommend the plugin, not only because I wrote it, but I have been able to greatly speed up my plugin development process.  During my demo I wrote two plugins, a Google Analytics plugin and  Facebook Like Button plugin.  Both of which should be available on the new Mura App Store soon.

The session following lunch was Adam Presley's "Spicing up ColdFusion using jQuery" session. The name was a little misleading since the concepts could really have been applied to any technology and not just ColdFusion.  Despite that, Adam was able to take a web app that had zero AJAX and turn it into a "web 2.0" application complete with lightbox, modal dialogs and dynamic search forms.

Yahoo!'s Tommy Falgout presented a highly informative "Strategic MySQL Planning for Complexity & Growth" session.  This is the session that gave me the most practical information of the day with information I was able to implement right away in my own infrastructure. There was nothing mind blowing, but the information delivered was absolutely invaluable.

The last session of the day was absolutely the most exciting. Scott Davis talked about "Grails + CouchDB".  Though Grails was in the title of his session this was really all about CouchDB, though he did tease us just enough to want to know more about Grails.  The whole NoSQL movement is new to me, so I was already excited to find out more.  Scott was able to blow our minds with how fast and easy to use CouchDB is.  There were some people, myself included to a degree, who had a hard time changing their mindset from a relational database way of thinking to this more OO way of storing data.

This was only a small taste of what was available this year.  There were 45 sessions and over 400 attendees.  The topics ranged from introductory topics like "Deploying PHP Applications" and an introduction to the Zend Framework, to more advanced topics such as "Particle Physics in Silverlight and ASP.NET" and "Computational Geometry in Flex and Degrafa".  My only regret was that I wasn't able to attend more sessions!

I look forward to next year's conference and encourage everyone to attend!