Come see a preview (about 20-30 minutes) of one of my CFUnited sessions, this one on Apache Derby. No, it's not "new in CF9", but many have missed or dismissed it. In this session, you will learn about the Apache Derby database included in ColdFusion 8. A full-featured database with a ten-year heritage, Apache Derby is fully transactional, easy to use, and standards based and has the advanced features you'd expect in any quality DBMS. Yet it's small, at only 2MB. You'll find out how to use Apache Derby within ColdFusion, as well as about tools that work with it and where to learn more. Again, this is just a preview, but for many it will be more than they've ever heard about the Derby DBMS embedded in CF8. I'm sure some will have preconceived notions about the tool. Come share your thoughts. I hope to dispel a few myths along the way.

Have you wondered about using or trying out the "multiple instance" feature of CF (technically the "multiserver" installation option). Available in its current form since CF 7, many developers and shops still have not adopted it, perhaps because they don't understand its benefits, or maybe they tried it and got confused about the options during installation/configuration. Or maybe they assume it's only about creating clusters/load balancing and/or replication: it's not and can be valuable for many other reasons. In this talk, veteran CF troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will introduce the topic, presuming you have no prior experience with it. (Note that while it's a feature of CF Enterprise, you can also use it with the free Developer edition, and he'll explain why you may want to.) What we will (and will not) cover: We'll address things from the ground up, starting with what the feature is, how it's evolved, and why you should use it in development and/or production. Charlie will demonstrate an installation from scratch, talking about the various choices presented, and proceeding to add another instance and how to demonstrate successful setup. He'll also show connecting the new instance(s) to an external web server and share tips about that. Along the way Charlie will address such other practical concerns as how to share admin settings among the instances, whether and how to share jvm.config settings, how to find the various logs for each instance, why to be careful about scheduled tasks, how you can monitor the instances, and more. He'll also offer some recommendations that could vary depending on your setup, such why you might want to use the cfusion instance only for creating instances, when/why you may be able to stop and disable the cfusion and admin instances, why you may/may not want to consider sandbox security, and more. We will not have time to discuss or demonstrate clustering, load balancing, and replication, but can mention it only briefly. If that may be what you'd want to hear more about, please know this is not the talk for that. Perhaps a later talk. But you will be pointed to many resources available for you to further investigate more on all the things we discuss (with a warning to be careful about older resources which describe an older but still-supported approach to multiple instances, from the CF 6.1 timeframe.)

We will cover Eclipse terms and using the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment.) Adobe's new ColdFusion development tool, ColdFusion Builder, will be Eclipse-based so this will give you a head start toward using it. We will demonstrate how to develop ColdFusion in Eclipse starting with coding cfm and cfc pages. Once you understand Eclipse, it can be use to help code css, js, css, and even integrate seamlessly with source control and ticket systems. We will show a task-focused interface for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. Plugins we will be covering are basics with CFEclipse and Mylyn.

In "ColdFusion Uptime, All The Time", we'll discuss the key concepts and practices that form the foundation for high availability ColdFusion systems. We'll discuss what we call the "performance and stability stack", which is the combination of hardware and software (in particular ColdFusion) that makes up a high-performing, highly-available Web application. We'll also go into some depth on the data tier, which is typically the main dependency for ColdFusion applications. The concepts presented here are drawn from Webapper's years of real-world field-work assisting clients with in building high-performing, highly-available implementation.

In this session, we'll be looking pragmatically at Yahoo's Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html), as well as Google's newly published "Let's Make the Web Faster" (http://code.google.com/speed/). Brian will go through the best practices, and share his own research on what works, what will give you the best bang for the buck, where he disagrees with Yahoo, and also chimes in on Google's recommendations. This is an updated presentation from one presented at the MAX 2008 unconference. This meeting will also serve as the Cleveland ColdFusion User Group's July meeting.

Join us for this special one-time only event, on a special day: while Adobe has been doing Centaur/Bolt user group tour event over the past few weeks, at each meeting they've shared more and different things. This event will be the capstone tour event, revealing all the features shared to this point, and more. Adobe ColdFusion Evangelist Terry Ryan assures me that nothing will be held back as he talks about both Centaur and Bolt. While this will be recorded, like all meetings, it's a unique chance to get your questions answered as well as hear the most info yet available on Centaur (the next release of ColdFusion) and Bolt (the new CFML integrated development environment).

Performing validations on user input is something that all of us, as application developers, must do. When moving from a procedural to an object oriented approach many developers have difficulty determining how and where to perform validations. In this session you will be introduced to an object oriented approach to validations. This approach enables you to add validation "smarts" into your business objects, while keeping that logic fully encapsulated outside of the objects, meaning that any changes to your validation rules and/or logic will have zero impact on the rest of your model. We'll look at the individual objects that comprise this approach, and understand how they work together to automatically perform server-side and generate client-side validations using metadata from a simple xml file. You will leave the session with a better understanding of how to design using objects, as well as a tool that will greatly simplify the task of adding validations to your object oriented application. This session is aimed at intermediate to advanced developers who are familiar with object oriented concepts and are interested in learning about how to incorporate validations into their objects, as well as object oriented design in general.

Whether you're already using Eclipse (via CFEclipse or not), or you've still not gotten into using it (or are waiting for Bolt), this talk if for you, if you don't know about the Adobe CF Extensions for Eclipse. Not to be confused with the CFEclipse plugin, the Adobe ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse are a free set of very useful tools (for the free Eclipse editor) that many have missed, even if they do use CFEclipse. And if you don't yet use CFEclipse, these additional tools may offer features that might make you reconsider using Eclipse for CFML coding. In this session, veteran CFer Charlie Arehart will introduce the extensions (not CFEclipse), including how to find and install the extensions from the Adobe site, as well how to use them to do many things: browse datasources and build queries, generate code using wizards, browse CFCs and web services, view log files, debug CF apps (discussed only briefly and supported only for CF8), and more. Note that most of the features shown apply to if you're using CF7 as well. And since the upcoming new Adobe editor, codenamed Bolt, incorporates these same features (and many more, as discussed on the labs site), this talk will help you whatever your current or future plans.

We'll provide an overview of the open source Mura CMS and show how to leverage Mura's built in functionality to quickly build your site and handoff site content management tasks to other stakeholders, allowing you to customize your site by extending Mura or by integrating your existing CFML applications. More on Mura (formerly named Sava) at http://sava.riaforge.org.

Generating PDF documents is a simple task in ColdFusion 8. That is if you know what you are doing. This meetup will discuss the basic knowledge needed to create a PDF document. From something as simple as taking an image and converting it, to converting an entire web page or other document. Advanced features such as page extraction, PDF merging and document security will also be discussed. Real world examples, as well as basic demos, will be used to explain the features discussed. The goal is for everyone to leave the meeting with the feeling that they can do it themselves.