Boston Scorpio Tour

Last night the Boston ColdFusion User Group was held at Adobe's office and it was all about Scorpio.  Despite some bad weather there were 60 or so people who showed up to find out more about CF 8 and all its goodness.  There were no new tags or features mentioned as far as I could tell.  The crowd was kind of quiet which may have unnerved the speaker (Jason Delmore I think, I came in late) a bit.  Jason did a good job even though he was sick and every one was very excited to get their hands on Scorpio.  I am sure everyone in the room thought at least once 'that would have made my life so much easier'.

After the presentation I asked Jason why they chose to use FCKeditor to bundle with CF when Adobe owns KTML which I  thought was a better editor.  He pointed out that they have been working on CF8 for a few years now and that the editor was done a while ago.  KTML was just brought into the Adobe fold 6 months ago.  Basically too late to be considered.  That made sense to me.  I am still a bit concerned about the ease of applying bug fixes to YUI, Spry and FCK.  I get the impression it would probably be pretty easy to appy the new code, but support would be gone at that point.

As for me I was already aware of much of the presentation since I read up on Scorpio through other blogs the past few weeks.  Still it was great to actually see the sample code and applications running.  It is funny to think of the server monitor as a new toy, but that is kind of how you feel the first time you see it.  You just want to play.  Plus it was nice to hear directly from the CF team (managers and engineers) about Scorpio.  The passion they have for CF and upcoming Scorpio really showed and made me feel good.

The presentation features are still foggy to me.  I am very interested in learning more since this is an area that could be very useful and non-traditional for me.  It was also good to see that they have decided to use both YUI and Spry as their Ajax / javascript libraries.  I spent a lot of time several months ago reviewing everything available and came to the same conclusion of using both YUI and Spry in our CMS. 

On a side note I want to thank Brian Rinaldi.  He is the group manager for Boston CFUG and also puts together that great Open Source Update blog post weekly (along with lots of other projects).  People really enjoy his update and it certainly has been very valuable to me.  I am sure it takes quite some time to put together.  Thanks Brian!

On a side side note:  Driving from NH to Boston at rush hour really stinks.  I really SHOULD go to more CFUG meetings but the only one in northern new england is Boston.  None for New Hampshire and none for Maine.  Would there be any interest in having one in Portsmouth, NH?  If you live within 30 min of Portsmouth raise your hand. :-)