You may think, "what's new about that?" Well, nothing. I've just had people ask for more beginner/intermediate and more admin-related talks. This seemed to fit the bill for both. Here's the (detailed) description (to make sure the right audience shows up).

Introducing the Adobe ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse

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.)

So were you surprised that the "simple" subject actually has a lot more nuance than meets the eye? You can RSVP for the event, as well as get a link to create an entry in your calendar and more, at the Meetup event page.

Note that you can also certainly just show up on the day at the Connect room.

Finally, again, there will be a 6pm (EDT) talk as well, Mike Henke on "Leveraging Eclipse for ColdFusion Development". For more on these, and all CF Meetups, see my blog category of CFMeetup announcements about them.

Hope to see some of you Thursday at noon.

PS Speaking of CFML development via Eclipse, I'll have yet another announcement about something that may interest many, separately.

"Centaur and Bolt Uncensored", with Terry Ryan of Adobe

We will have an extra special session of the CF Meetup, on *Monday* July 13 at noon (US EDT). Adobe CF Evangelist Terry Ryan will present "Centaur and Bolt Uncensored", the two-hour ultimate user group tour event.

TOPIC DESCRIPTION:

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). Spread the word, pointing people to this page, http://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/calendar/10841349/ for more information, and let's see if we can make this the biggest CFMeetup event so far. Join us online on the day at experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup.

(The CFMeetup is a an official Adobe CF user group that meets weekly, typically Thursdays, online. More at coldfusionmeetup.com.)

Again, please notice the special day for this meeting, Monday July 13, at noon US EDT (what time is that for you"?), and spread the word!

I've updated that entry, but those who get the feed of this blog won't get notified of that update, I've decided to do this new entry.

"Intermediate ColdSpring: Remote CFCs", with Tom Chiverton

Thursday, Oct 16, SPECIAL TIME 2:00pm US EDT (GMT-4)

Meeting description, details, optional RSVP

The unusual time in the early afternoon (in US Eastern time) is because our presenter is in London, where it will be his 6pm.

Of course, the first talk (at noon, with Isaac Dealey) is on at its scheduled time. More info in the notice last week.

Ray is at noon, Dan is at 6.

See the CF meetup site for details.

For more on the mistake, and an apology to those who may now have to miss out, as well as how to access the recording of the meetings, see my discussion of the mistake on the CF meetup discussion board.

Again, sincere apologies everyone.

The good news is that I do have a couple speakers already lined up the next 2 weeks (10th and 17th). I'll announce those soon, as well as any I might still arrange for this week (the 3rd).

In the meantime, I'll note that you can get some online training goodness via the many recorded CFUnited presentations that have been posted free for all to enjoy by the good folks who run the conference. You'll find 33 of them listed at my UGTV site.

Finally, I wanted to pass along news of a free resource from Adobe to help people learn more about Rich Internet Applications. It includes recorded online workshops, projects to work on, and book recommendations, all for free. Check it out at:

Rich Internet Application Teaching Resources

I announced both of today's meetup sessions yesterday, as I do each week, but I don't bother with all the details of each talk so as not to overwhelm my readers here. I give the link to the talk's event page on the meetup site and let interested readers go view them there.

Since this is my talk, I thought my readers may benefit from a more detailed clarification of my talk today, thus this entry. Here are the details:

Leveraging RDS in Eclipse, Dreamweaver, and Homesite+/CF Studio: It's more secure and more useful than you may think

Are you using the RDS-enabled features in Eclipse, Dreamweaver, or HomeSite+/CF Studio? If not, you could be missing out on a lot of increased productivity, from the query building tools it enables, to the component browsing tools, to enabling file access across the web, and more.

Perhaps it's been disabled on your server, or people may argue that it's insecure. If you could be shown how it could be secured, might you (or your admin) reconsider it? I think it?s a tragedy how many developers suffer without leveraging RDS, certainly on their own machines, and even on shared servers.

Whether you think RDS evil or a blessing, or are unaware of what it enables in your favorite CFML editor, and whether you use CF 8 or earlier, there may be more to RDS than you realize. And there are solutions to security concerns, especially in CF8 but even beforehand.

In this talk, frequent CFUG speaker Charlie Arehart will show you all the ways that RDS can be used to make you more productive in Eclipse, Dreamweaver, or HomeSite+. He'll also address (and in some cases resolve) common security concerns, especially the multi-user RDS security available in CF 8 (and CF 4 and 5), as well as how to enable it if it's been disabled (assuming you have the right to make configuration changes, of course).

Join us online at noon. Anyone's welcome. No preregistration required (though you may want to consider it: see below.)

About the CF Meetup

In case you've missed it, the CF Meetup is an online CF user group I run. I try to have weekly meetings, with speakers all over the world. FWIW, this is only the 2nd talk I've done of the 40 talks done so far, and the first this year. Anyone's welcome to attend.

While the descriptions of meetings are held on the meetup.com site (a commercial service to help groups meet up with each other), the actual meeting is held online at http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/. Anyone may join in on the meetings. Just log in as guest (everyone should, even registered members of the group.)

If you'd like to receive email notification of the meetings, as well as have access to other resources (to give ratings, take part in polls, participate in the mailing list/forums), you can join the group at no cost, again at coldfusionmeetup.com (which redirects to our group's site on the meetup site, http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/.)

Finally, all meetings are recorded, and the recording URL will be posted after the meeting at http://recordings.coldfusionmeetup.com.

Besides not having any speakers who've proposed to speak, I'm out of town traveling in the great (rainy, chilly) northwest (where I was invited to an intimate Microsoft tech summit). I just don't know if my schedule will permit me to speak myself if I wanted to, so it's best not to set any expectations. Ray, also, is already committed, so we'll pick things up next week.

I'm always looking for speakers. I also have some interesting new ideas I'll be trying in coming weeks.

"Testing with cfcUnit", with John Mason

The info in the message was write. The blog title was all that was wrong. Again, the URL for info is:

http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/calendar/7356180/

What: "Step Debugging in ColdFusion 6/7/8", with Charlie Arehart

When: Thursday, Dec 6, 6:00pm EST (GMT-5) (What time is that for you? See this table, which shows it at EST, and you can choose your city from the list offered to see your time.)

Meeting URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/
Duration: Approx. 1 hour
Meeting will be recorded. URL will be posted after meeting on the Meetup Message Board, which can also be reached directly via http://tinyurl.com/2dbdnk

Our second talk on Thursday, Dec 6, at 6pm, will be your ColdFusion Meetup host, Charlie Arehart, speaking on "Step Debugging in ColdFusion 6/7/8", discussing use of both ColdFusion 8's debugger (CF8 only) and FusionDebug (for 6, 7, and 8).

Description:

In this talk, veteran CFML developer Charlie Arehart will introduce and demonstrate the ability all ColdFusion developers now have to step through their code interactively to debug it, whether running on CF 6, 7, or 8. For those moving to CF8, there is now a debugger built into CF, but it works only with CF8. For those on CF 6, 7, or 8, they can use the commercial FusionDebug tool (www.fusiondebug.com) . Both are plug-ins for Eclipse which enable step debugging, and they're very similar, which is why Charlie will show them both in the one talk. He'll also cover some differences.

Don't worry if you don't care for Eclipse. You can continue to use DWMX or CF Studio/HomeSite+ for editing: just use the Eclipse-based tools for debugging. Charlie will show you how easy it is and the problems step debugging can solve. And if you're thinking you don't need interactive debugging, Charlie will also explain over a dozen benefits this offers over traditional CFDUMP/CFOUTPUT debugging, as well as tips, tricks, and traps.

About Charlie Arehart:

A veteran ColdFusion developer since 1997, Charlie Arehart is a longtime contributor to the community and a recognized Adobe Community Expert. He's a certified Advanced CF Developer and Instructor for CF 4/5/6/7 who served as tech editor of the ColdFusion Developers Journal until 2003. Now an independent contractor living in Alpharetta GA, Charlie provides high-level troubleshooting/tuning assistance and training/mentoring for CF teams (carehart.org/consulting). He helps run the Online ColdFusion Meetup (coldfusionmeetup.com, an online CF user group), is a contributor to the CF8 WACK books by Ben Forta, and is frequently invited to speak to developer conferences and user groups worldwide.

Notices:

As always, we do appreciate folks RSVPing if they plan to come (using the link on this email or at the meetup site), though it's not mandatory and it's not a commitment. BTW, no need to RSVP if you can't make it nor even explain why you can't. With 1,000+ members, there's really no reason to explain your absence. :-) We'll also appreciate your sharing your feedback after the meeting (also offered via a follow-up email or via a link on the site).

Please note, as well, that when you use the acrobat.com (Connect) link above to view the meeting, the login screen presented there has no connection to the login information you've provided to access this meetup.com site. The two services are entirely unrelated. Please just log in with the guest account in Connect, even if you have a real connect account.

Finally, again, the recording URL will be posted on the Meetup Message Board, which can also be reached directly via http://tinyurl.com/2dbdnk

Learn more here: http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/calendar/6827442/

I've been asked to step up to the plate first. While I'm doing a few sessions at the conference (including two on Scorpio, more about those later), Michael Smith has asked me to preview my day-long class, "New in CFMX 6&7: What Did You Miss?"

Now, I'm sure some are thinking, "you're kidding? We're on the verge of CF8, and you want to talk about CF 6 and 7?" But hear me out. Actually, I'll let my description do the talking:

Planning to move to CF8? Did you skip either 6 or 7? Or have you perhaps installed and been running on them but doing little or no new development? Were you paying attention as all the new features (and folks' experiences using them) were being shared? There may be a lot you've missed. Veteran CFML developer Charlie Arehart will introduce both the key features introduced in those releases as well as many hidden gems. It's surprising how many little things get slipped into releases, and point releases, and sometimes it's those which can be as important to you as any prominent feature.

In his typical encyclopedic but pragmatic style, Charlie will help you make the most out of features you may have missed. Of course, this is just a 20- minute preview of what is in fact a day-long course. But it will give a taste of what's to expect and will provide value in and of itself.

The URL for RSVP'ing via the meetup site is http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/calendar/5756012/. There you can RSVP for the meeting as well as sign up to get notifications about future Online ColdFusion Meetups.

The URL for the Acrobat Connect session itself will be http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/, and indeed that will be the URL for all future Online ColdFusion Meetup sessions.