Scotch on the Rocks, established in 2005, is a conference concentrating on all things ColdFusion, Flex & AIR: Incorporating keynotes, technical sessions and tutorials, as well as the most innovative and successful experts and companies, Scotch on the Rocks is a must-attend conference.

In 2009 Andy Allan, Kev McCabe, Leanne Allan (and the speakers) are taking the road hitting London, Manchester and Edinburgh.

London recap

On the 1^st June 2009, I attended my first SOTR ever: very nice venue (a Club), 3 tracks full of interesting topics and very affordable (£49 only). As there will be 2 other venues, I won't give too much details on the sessions I attended.

The day started with Adobe Keynote (Terry Ryan, Serge Jespers and Claude Englebert were there): it was the first time in Europe for Terry and I can say that he has done very well. For those who have seen or heard about recent ColdFusion keynotes (ie. CFObjective) there was no real big surprise (CFScript enhancement, ORM, Extended Service Layer, CFaaS...). New feature announced was the extended PDF manipulation capabilities (extracting text, optimization...). Few slides on Bolt (extensions were mentionned but covered in a dedicated session) and of course, no date for the beta and the release - what about "soon" and "this year 2009" ? :-)

Second session was about CF & PDF workflow: Andy Allan showed us how to use ColdFusion and the built-in PDF capabilities to improve a workflow, from filling a PDF form to a multiple validation process. It was very interesting to see the "few lines of code" required to do it.

I did not attend the Flash, Flex and SEO session, but from what I've heard, it was about SWFAdress for deeplinking and manage browser history, but also about the headless Flash Player (Ichabod) used by Google and Yahoo to index swf content by extracting full text from swf and emulating user interaction (ie. button click).

Then I went to Mike Jones session on Flex 4 component architecture: he made a very good and detailed comparaison between the new Spark component architecture and the existing Halo one. Basically the new implementation is more flexible and gives more skinning options in Flex4 (ie. Left Vertical Label on a Panel).

An awaited session was Peter Elst on ColdFusion is dead (again): it was really appreciated by the audience. Inspired by a blog post from Aral Balkan, he showed us using examples how simple and interesting it is to use ColdFusion. Simplicity, Integration and Opportunity were his main topics. It leads to an interesting opened discussion at the end, driven by his concluding words on how to fix ColdFusion "weakness":

1. Look at licensing, cloud deployment
2. Support open source implementations (Railo, Open BlueFragon anyone?)
3. Focus on simplicity over functionality
4. Community involvement
5. Evangelize outside of the box

Last session was Terry Ryan again on Bolt Extensions: it's something which looks very promising - using CFML to extend Bolt capabilities! In term of restrictions: it requires ColdFusion of course (but a local developer server is enough) and it works only on RDS/Navigator/Outline views. It's very interesting to support framework, template generation etc... Some of them are already published on RIA Forge.

In the Ending Keynote, Andy and Kev announced Scotch the movie for 2010. Stay tune also for other possible SOTR venues (maybe in October): Brussels, Amsterdam and Munich.

Andy, Kev and Leanne did an amazing job again with Scotch on the Road and I wish them Good Luck with the next two venues: Manchester (3rd) and Edinburgh (5th). You can still get tickets, so don't miss this occasion! 

Read more from Cyril Hanquez.