• CFML on the Google App Engine  - Adam Presley
  
  The Google App Engine brings Platform as a Service and "cloud computing" to the masses through free Python and Java application hosting. OpenBD, a free and open source CFML engine, are at the forefront of this technology by offering the only CFML engine compatible with the Google App Engine. See how easy it is to get started using Google's cloud platform and OpenBD!
   
• Effective Unit Testing - Steve Good
  
  Unit testing is not only important, but highly underused by the average developer.  I aim to show how easy it is to unit test and even how it can be automated both locally and on a build server.  I'll also cover some often misunderstood aspects of unit testing and Test Driven Development in general.
   

As always, food/drink will be provided by our host and sponsor, Paladin Consulting!

Meeting URL: http://experts.adobeconnect.com/dfwcfug/ (depending on our network reliability!)

Speakers:  Wesley Cockrum, Joe Kelly

Agenda:
Continuing our series on open source projects in and related to the world of CFML, we have presentations on the following topics:

ValidateThis  - Wesley Cockrum

ValidateThis is a framework that allows you to define validation rules for your ColdFusion objects in a single place (either an XML file, a JSON file or in ColdFusion code) and will then generate client-side and server-side validations for you.

Railo and BlueDragon on BlueOnyx - Joe Kelly

I'll explain that which is BlueOnyx and why you should use it to host your CFML sites.  We'll use BlueOnyx to set up our sites, users and MySQL databases as well as easily configure Tomcat.  Next we'll install and deploy Railo and BlueDragon WARs for fullly functional CFML engines.

Bring your laptop to hack around in my various servers on your own.

As always, food/drink will be provided by our host and sponsor, Paladin Consulting!

Meeting URL: http://experts.adobeconnect.com/dfwcfug/ (depending on our network reliability!)

varScoper - Chris Jordan
topic description:  varScoper is a code scanning tool that can be used to identify variables that are not explicitly scoped to be local or global to a ColdFusion function.

varScoper can be used in ColdFusion Builder as an extension, through a web based frontend, as an ANT task, or by directly invoking the cfc.

By default, variables created within a ColdFusion function are global to the component or .cfm file and not local to the function. Variables that exist outside of their intended scope can cause unintended thread safety issues. varScoper will help you identify these variables in your code.
 

CFFormProtect - Dave Shuck
topic description: CFFormProtect is a fully accessible, invisible to users form protection system to stop spam bots, and even human spammers. CFFormProtect works like some email spam protection systems, in that it uses a series of tests to find out if a form submission is from a spammer or not. Each test is given an amount of points, and each test that is failed accumulates points. Once a form submission passes the threshold of 'spamminess', the message is flagged as spam and is not posted. The points assigned to each test and the failure limit are easily configurable by you.

CFGroovy - Adam Presley
topic description:  CFGroovy is a Groovy-centric, pluggable scriptlet engine for CFML runtimes.   It allows you to embed any JSR-223 compliant scripting language into your CFML code with transparent passthrough to your normal CFML data structures (url, form, request, session, etc.).  It also provides support arbitrary additional "scopes", assistance with CFML ORM entities, and a few other bits and pieces.

As always, food/drink will be provided by our host and sponsor, Paladin Consulting!

Meeting URL: http://experts.adobeconnect.com/dfwcfug/

Date and Time: November 9, 2010 from 6:30pm - 9:30pm  

Address:
3030 Lyndon B Johnson Freeway
Dallas, TX 75234-7744
Suite 1140
Dallas, TX 75234

Speakers:
Dave Shuck, Andrew Leaf  

Agenda:
As we begin a new series discussing all things open source in the world of CFML, we will start of our meeting with topics on cfUniForm (Dave) and Apache XMLBeans (Andrew)

About the topics:

cfUniform - cfUniForm is a library of custom tags and other related assets that is based upon the Uni-Form markup by Dragan Babic. cfUniForm delivers the best of both worlds:

1) Standards-compliant (XHTML Strict) form markup that is consistent across all common browsers.

2) Build your forms by writing ColdFusion, and not (x)HTML/CSS.

For more information, see the demo page (http://www.quackfuzed.com/demos/cfUniForm/)

XMLBeans - XMLBeans is a technology for accessing XML by binding it to Java types. XMLBeans provides several ways to get at the XML, including:

• Through XML schema that has been compiled to generate Java types that represent schema types. In this way, you can access instances of the schema through JavaBeans-style accessors after the fashion of "getFoo" and "setFoo".

  The XMLBeans API also allows you to reflect into the XML schema itself through an XML Schema Object model.

• A cursor model through which you can traverse the full XML infoset.
• Support for XML DOM.

As always, food/drink will be provided by our host and sponsor, Paladin Consulting.

Date and Time: December 14, 2010 from 6:30pm - 9:30pm  

Address:
3030 Lyndon B Johnson Freeway
Dallas, TX 75234-7744
Suite 1140
Dallas, TX 75234

Speakers:
Adam Presley, Steve Good, Andrew Leaf  

Agenda:
As we continue our series discussing all things open source in the world of CFML, we have presentations on the following topics:

MongoDB - Adam Presley: will be giving a presentation on using the "no SQL" persistance solution of MongoDB and discussing how we as CFML developers can leverage this technology

ClickHeat for ColdFusion- Steve Good: ClickHeat is designed to give you a visual look at how users navigate on your site.  From the product description: ClickHeat has two main parts: a JavaScript which tracks click coordinates and sends them via AJAX to a .cfm page which saves the information to a log file; and an application which reads the log file and converts it to a click map or heat map. A heat map creates a fuzzy, color-coded map telling you where the greatest amount of click activity occurs on your page (cooler blues indicate less activity, while brighter yellows and reds indicate more activity).

ColdFire - Andrew Leaf: From the project site: ColdFire is an extension to Firebug. It provides debug information in a Firebug tab as opposed to the bottom of the page. This lets you debug and keep your site layout intact, since ColdFusion's built-in debug information can sometimes mess with your site layout.

As if that was not enough, we will also be doing HUGE raffle giveaways, including a $2000 software license from Adobe, and other BIG ticket items courtesy of Paladin Consulting!

As always, food/drink will be provided by our host and sponsor, Paladin Consulting.

Meeting URL: http://experts.adobeconnect.com/dfwcfug/

At this meeting, we continue working though the Head First Design Patterns book, taking each chapter apart and seeing how they relate to us as ColdFusion developers.  April brings us to chapter 9 covering the Iterator and Composite Patterns.  Dave Shuck will be presenting on this chapter.

At 6:30, Adam Presely will be leading the training topic "Javascript 201" covering namespacing, closures, and JavaScript "gotchas".

Date and Time: September 14, 2010 from 6:30pm - 9:30pm  

Address:
3030 Lyndon B Johnson Freeway
Dallas, TX 75234-7744
Suite 1140
Dallas, TX 75234

Speakers:
Steve Good, Adam Presley   

Agenda:
At 6:30, Adam Presley will be starting off the presentation portion of our meeting by giving a walk through on setting up Railo under Tomcat.  If you have been intersted in open source CFML engines, but have not yet exposed yourself to them directly, this is a good opportunity to find out just how easy it is.

At 7:30, Steve Good will be doing a session on Getting Started with Mura CMS.  Mura is rapidly growing as the defacto CMS tool for CFML and with its extensible plugin architecture, it is flexible for a wide range of projects. 

As always, food/drink will be provided by Paladin Consulting.

Following Adam's presentation, we will be having a user group planning session.  All members are invited and encouraged to participate. 

Baseball junkies...Worried about missing the Rangers game?  Marlon from Paladin is working to make sure that the game is available on the high def screen in the lobby if you simply must sneak out to grab updates.

As always, food and drinks will be provided by our gracious hosts Paladin Consulting.

See you there!

Make sure to join us at 6:30.  As always, food will be provided by Paladin Consulting, so come hungry!

I look forward to seeing you all next Tuesday!

Date and Time:  January 12, 2010 at 06:30pm

Address:
Paladin Consulting, Inc.
3030 LBJ Freeway, Suite 1140
Dallas, TX 75234
google map

Speakers:  Guillermo Cruz

Agenda:  This month, we continue our quest to work though the Head First Design Patterns book, taking each chapter apart and seeing how they relate to us as ColdFusion developers.  This month Guillermo Cruz will be presenting Chapter 6, covering the Command Pattern.  Make sure to join us!

Topic Description:

Throwing things over the fence - The command pattern is a pattern that allows us to be able to encapsulate method invocation and know that what needs to happen will. Simply by sending a command object to an Invoking object (who knows nothing of how the receiving object does its work) it can call an encapsulated method that will set of what you wanted done. Think of how logging is important but does not have to happen real time (in most cases) but it must be done. Why not throw it over the fence knowing that it will be done and you can continue with what you need to get done.

• Chapter 1: HFDP for CF - Intro and The Strategy Pattern
  Presenter:  Dave Shuck
  Date: 9/8/2009
  Description:  We will begin our new series of presentations as we walk though Head First Design Patterns in CFML. HFDP is widely regarded as a valuable resource for learning about development design patterns. Our goal for this series will be to take one chapter at a time, creating the examples in CFML, and exploring how each pattern might be useful for us as CFML developers. The plan is to send my HFDP book home with someone at each meeting, giving them the opportunity to create the presentation for the following meeting. That person will bring the book back when they present and pass it onto the next person and repeat that process until we have covered the book. This month, Dave Shuck will be leading off with Chapter 1, which covers a general introduction of design patterns, and an exploration of the Strategy Pattern.
  URL: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p50727167/
  Duration: 00:38:45
  
  
• Chapter 2: HFDP for CF - The Observer Pattern
  Presenter:  Adam Presley
  Date: 10/13/2009
  Description:  This month, we will continue our progress in what I am coining Head First Design Patterns for CF as Adam Presley will be covering Chapter 2 - The Observer Pattern. He will be showing a ColdFusion implementation of the topic.
  URL: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p34878675/
  Duration: 00:40:14
  
  
• Chapter 3: HFDP for CF: The Decorator Pattern
  Presenter:  Adrian Moreno
  Date: 11/10/2009
  Description:  This will be a continuation of our series: Head First Design Patterns for ColdFusion (CFHFDP). We are taking each chapter out of the HFDP book and writing ColdFusion implementations of each pattern that is covered. So far we have broken down the Strategy Pattern and the Observer Pattern. November brings us to Chapter 3 - The Decorator Pattern. Adrian Moreno will be presenting this topic as our main session of the night.
  URL: [recording not currently available]
  
  
• Chapter 4: HFDP for CF: The Factory Pattern
  Presenter:  Dave Shuck
  Date: 12/08/2009
  Description:  HFDP4CF - Chapter 4: The Factory Pattern - In this presentation, Dave Shuck will be walking through the topic of the Factory Pattern in the HFDP book and covering the examples using ColdFusion. This presentation will include real world examples of how his development team employees this pattern in their enterprise today.
  URL: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p80423634/
  Duration: 01:08:09
  
  
• Chapter 5: HFDP for CF: The Factory Pattern
  Presenter:  Tom Woestman
  Date: 12/08/2009
  Description:  HFDP4CF - Chapter 5: The Singleton Pattern - Tom Woestman will be covering the chapter explaining how the Singleton Pattern can be used in the CFML world. As with the other chapters in our series, Tom will be demonstrating the samples using ColdFusion.
  URL: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p72462372/
  Duration: 00:27:58
  
  
• Chapter 6: HFDP for CF: The Command Pattern
  Presenter:  Guillermo Cruz
  Date: 1/12/2010
  Description:  This month, we continue our quest to work though the Head First Design Patterns book, taking each chapter apart and seeing how they relate to us as ColdFusion developers.  This month Guillermo Cruz will be presenting Chapter 6, covering the Command Pattern.  Make sure to join us!
  URL: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p40193462/
  Duration: 00:38:05
  
  
• Chapter 7: HFDP for CF: The Adapter/Facade Patterns
  Presenter:  Adam Presley
  Date: 2/09/2010
  Description:  This month, we continue our quest to work though the Head First Design Patterns book, taking each chapter apart and seeing how they relate to us as ColdFusion developers.  This month Adam Presley will be presenting Chapter 7, covering the Adapter and Facade Patterns.
  URL: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p52951992/
  Duration: 00:36:16
  
  
• Chapter 8: DFWCFUG - HFDP for CF: The Template Pattern
  Presenter:  Adrian Moreno
  Date: 3/09/2010
  Description:  As we continue working though the Head First Design Patterns book, taking each chapter apart and seeing how they relate to us as ColdFusion developers, we come to chapter 8 covering the Template Pattern (Encapsulating Algorithms). Adrian Moreno will be presenting on this chapter.
  URL: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p83031468/
  Duration: 00:44:03
  
  
• Chapter 9: DFWCFUG - HFDP for CF: The Iterator and Composite Patterns
  Presenter:  Dave Shuck
  Date: 4/13/2010
  Description:  This month, we will continue our progress in what I am coining Head First Design Patterns for CF as Dave Shuck will be covering Chapter 9 - the Iterator and Composite Patterns. He will be showing a ColdFusion implementation of the topic.
  URL: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p19211660/
  Duration: 01:05:50

As always, our first hour will be devoted to "intro" ColdFusion topics.  the following topics are the slate for this meeting :

• Stopping form spam without making your users do the work.
• Using a simple bean, how to get data, set data, and return snapshots of the data.

See you there!

• Tom Woestman  - Application Logic Management:   While developing an internal travel application servicing over 14,000 trips a year, we found we needed to manage a complex web of roles and states to determine whether a particular user may perform operations such as: submit the travel request to the next approval step, cancel a travel request, send the travel request back for more information, etc.  After initially creating the complex web of logic to manage this complex set of criteria, we developed an alternative approach that moved handling the logic of this from the programmer to the business analyst and made updating this logic trivial.  I would like to share this approach with you and hope that you find it as useful as we do.
• Robert Gatti - Database Indexes:  One of the too often overlooked performance bottlenecks with database driven applications comes from either the lack of use, or the misuse of database indexes.  Robert will be showing some examples of how proper database indexing can benefit your systems.  The examples will be using MS SQL Server, but the principles apply to most DBMS.

I look forward to seeing you all there.

Topic Description: We will be discussing the pros and cons of abstracting the persistence layer and programming objects without the persistence layer, including the design of an object by using the Noun Phrase Analysis process of a given description for a stated application. 

If time permits, Guillermo will also be covering re-factoring an already existing application and why the above process is extremely important.

We will also be discussing some BIG ColdFusion related events in the next month here in Big D!  Make sure to join us at our regular meeting time of 6:30pm at the Paladin Consulting Inc. Offices.  For directions, see our Meetings page.