As we mentioned before we're thrilled to have Pud joining us remotely for a talk at OpenCF Summit, and rather than do a traditional talk he suggested an interview format, which we think will be a great way to pick his brain.

We of course have a ton of questions to ask the infamous Internet entrepreneur, but we also want to hear from you! Even if you can't be there in person feel free to submit questions by commenting on this post, and we'll ask as many as we can.

If you don't know how Pud relates to CFML, check out his great "Why Must You Laugh At My Back End" blog post.

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OpenCF Summit starts this Friday so to get attendees and Hackfest participants pumped up, here's a quick list of some of what you might win as an OpenCF Summit participant! We're extremely grateful for all our fantastic sponsors for making these giveaways possible.

Hackfest Prizes

The Hackfest is generously sponsored by MasterCard so the top two prizes for Hackfest participation are MasterCard gift cards in the amounts of $250 and $100.

In addition, to encourage participation in the Hackfest if you commit only one line of code to the Enlist project on GitHub, you'll be eligible to win a Kindle Fire and a $100 MasterCard gift card.

Attendee Giveaways

All attendees are eligible to win various prizes including:

• Three Cartweaver 4 licenses
• Three certificates for six months of free VPS hosting at Vivio Technologies

... and a ton of other stuff!

We'll see you in Dallas later this week! And if you're STILL not registered, go do it now!

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OpenCF Summit isn't just about pushing the CFML envelope.

It's also about growing our community by attracting people and ideas from other communities.

Listen to Matt and Jason pitch CFML to the Gov 2.0 community, explaining that:

• It's Free & Open Source.
• You can write it in tags or in an ECMAscript-style syntax.
• Still pretty ubiquitous in Gov't - handy if you're trying to befriend Gov't technies.
• Hard to beat for Rapid Application Development - handy for quick Civic apps.
• Great "gateway" language between the Gov 2.0 and Java communities.
• The perfect language for Activists getting into Hacktivism.
• Loads of sophisticated and Open Source frameworks and tooling.
• Backed by a vibrant and friendly community.
• Powerful.  Charting, document-generation, video, mail, caching, scalability, cloud hosting - from quick turn-arounds to gluing the enterprise together, Railo and OpenBD have you covered.

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Alex Skinner!

Alex Skinner is the Co-founder/Managing Director of Pixl8, a mid-size web development agency with offices in London and Kuala Lumpur. He holds a degree in Business Information Systems from the University of Portsmouth.

OpenCF Summit: Hey Alex!  So tell us about yourself.

Alex: I've been working with ColdFusion since version 4.0 (1999) when I was gifted a not-for-resale copy from the fine folks at Allaire to use for my dissertation.  I have been working with CF ever since University, first teaching the official Allaire curriculum as well as consulting around ColdFusion, particularly focusing on performance tuning and troubleshooting. I've been running Pixl8 since 2001 and oversee a team of 10 Coldfusion developers who all work with a Non-Adobe CFML platform day-to-day, since 2005.  We build an enterprise CMS, Intranet product and a number of SAAS products using CFML goodness.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Alex:  Development environment OSX, Windows 7 and Linux with Eclipse
Servers: Centos Linux with HaProxy, VarnishCache, MySQL
Window 2008 R2 with IIS and OpenBluedragon

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Alex: My main experience with open source has been with MySQL and Linux and obviously Open Bluedragon. I also am a fan of mixing open source with commerical offerings, hence the Linux for load balancers and caching, Windows for webservers and Linux MySQL for the backend.

I switched from Coldfusion Studio direct to CFEclipse, as I never liked the tools on offer in between.

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Alex:  I want to see real innovation stuff that makes you go oooohhh nice. Things that are huge time savers comparative to other languages - think CFQUERY.

"CFML community" is a funny description. People are not interested in genuine debate around the state of the language or advancing it as a platform and it descends into battles over my favourite engine.  So I'm happy to just contribute to OpenBD and keep my head down as well as dive in when i read something i don't like :).

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Alex: Sessions that are meaningful and offer the opportunity to learn something.  Looking forward to have some genuinely interesting discussions and meeting some bright people.

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Alex: I'll be doing a joint presentation with Alan Williamson discussing how we both use OpenCFML platforms to run our businesses. Plus any other sessions I get roped into.

Come talk shop with Alex at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Joseph Lamoree!

Joseph Lamoree is a software developer from Southern California, working primarily with ColdFusion for many years. Blog posts on CFML and technology in general at lamoree.com.

OpenCF Summit: Hey Joseph!  So tell us about yourself.

Joseph: I started using CFML in 1996 with Allaire Cold Fusion 2.0 to build intranet web applications. Since then, I've used each new version of the ColdFusion application server, as well as Open BlueDragon and Railo. I created cflucene, cfdns, and a handful of enhancements to existing open source projects.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Joseph:  Over the years, I've used a variety of platforms and tools. I prefer to develop using a Mac OS X machine with TextMate or CFEclipse, and deploy to CentOS running Railo. I wouldn't consider creating a new application these days that isn't based on a framework such as Mach-II or ColdBox. I do a bit of work in Java, and admit that I have a special fondness for clever Perl one-liners and handy shell scripts.

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Joseph: I try to contribute to open source projects whenever I can, and (almost) always use OSS over commercial products. There is a tremendous diversity in open source; licenses to fit nearly every situation and projects fitting nearly every need. I would like to be more active in social coding sharing solutions.

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Joseph:  I don't engage the "your language is dead" trolls or keep up with the surveys of active CFML developer numbers. For me, it's a perfect balance between rapid development and solid engineering practice. Every month there improvements and enhancements to CFML created by the two open engines, and I'm certain Adobe's next release will be a fine product. I don't fear that the code I write today won't be perfectly usable for many years to come.

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Joseph: I really enjoyed the conference last year, and I'm sure this year's will be even better. The session topics are interesting and useful, with a focus on openness that I appreciate greatly.

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Joseph: My session will be on taking advantage of current tools to quickly and automatically build, test, and deploy CFML applications. I will demonstrate a complete team workflow from development environment to production server done correctly every time.

Come talk shop with Joseph at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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Some minor updates to our day 1 schedule:

• Railo training will be a half-day in the morning as opposed to a full day
• Due to their travel schedule the Mura training on day 1 unfortunately had to be canceled
• Unconference gets one of the ballrooms ALL DAY so get your presentations ready!

We've also added the lightning talks to the schedule and we'll be joined virtually by Pud on Sunday! (More on that soon.)

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Jeremy will be speaking to us via a Brightcove video and touches on the birth of CFML, the innovative approach behind the language, what he's up to at Brightcove, and much more, but you'll have to come to Dallas to see it!

We're so thankful to Jeremy for agreeing to speak to us virtually. Hope to see you in Dallas in a couple of weeks!

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Alan Williamson!

Alan is the chair and lead architect of the OpenBD CFML project.  In addition, his day job is Chief Architect at aw2.0 Ltd, a company specializing in extreme scaling solutions using cloud solutions.

Alan blogs at alan.blog-city.com

OpenCF Summit: Hey Alan.  So how about telling us a little about yourself?

Alan: I have been working with CFML for over 12 years with my claim to fame being of course the man behind BlueDragon, which later became OpenBD, the first ever open source free engine for CFML developers.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Alan: Development environment is Windows7, running Eclipse.  I spend the vast majority of my day with Java.

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Alan: Without OSS I wouldn't be in a job.   I have been in a fortunate position where I believe I am OSS neutral; meaning that I have put as much into OSS as I have taken out over the years.  

The days of paying for huge costly server software licenses have gone.  They have been gone for a long time, just some companies haven't realized this yet.  Who pays to use a computer language these days?  No one.

OSS gives you freedom.  Gives you the freedom to deploy anywhere without having to worry about if you are legal or not. 

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Alan: CFML I believe is heading into some interesting waters.   The OSS engines have demonstrated that all the exciting developments are coming from them and not from that once well known commercial alternative. 

This past year for OpenBD we've seen a huge growth in our user base, from both new people to CFML and also veterans.   People are quickly learning that servers like OpenBD they are getting additions/fixes at an extremely fast rate, but more importantly, they are getting their input there and then, instead of waiting for sometimes years to get their ideas brought to light.

Open source is about never having to wait.

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Alan: Completely.  I am excited to meet the OpenBD people who have been very active on our mailing lists and hear first hand how we are changing peoples lives and making them have more money in their pocket instead of lining the pockets of other companies.

Come talk shop with Alan at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Judah Johns!

Currently, I am the Chief Evangelist at Jelastic. My background is a bit of mash-up: the hosting industry, the tech side of the oil and gas industry and politics, and research science.
Blog: blog.Jelastic.com
Twitter: @judahjohns
Email: judah@jelastic.com

OpenCF Summit: Hey Judah!  So tell us about yourself.

Judah: I am quite new to the CFML community. My experience started a few months back when I started with Jelastic and a number of developers told me how easy Jelastic made it to deploy their apps. So I decided I woud start learning a bit myself and I've been enjoying it.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Judah:  Right now, I'm working mainly with Java, using Tomcat 6 and CouchDB. I really like open source software and do my best to promote it when I get the chance.

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Judah: I've worked with open source software for operating systems, frameworks and even video editing software. It really is the future. I think Android proved that against the iOS. I think we will continue to see this trend grow, especially as more and more developers get involved.

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Judah:  The CFML community seems to be quite active. With the progress and development of CFML being pushed by the dev community we can expect the future of it to be quite bright.

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Judah: This is actually my first CF event. I am excited about meeting folks and getting to know some of the people I have only met virtually in person.

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Judah: I will presenting Jelastic and showing how easy it makes it to deploy CFML apps to the Cloud.

Come talk shop with Judah at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Gert Franz!

Gert is the CEO of Railo Technologies, the company behind Railo Server. I live with my girlfriend in Switzerland, close to Zurich and I am a father of three.

OpenCF Summit: Hey Gert!  So tell us about yourself.

Gert: I started working with CFML in 2000 and at first I thought it was a big step back for me, being used to strongly typed languages like Java and Delphi. But it grew on me and the speed of development had a great influence on my opinion about CFML. In 2003 we started working on the engine that you today know as Railo. It took us 3 years to have a first version up and running and since then I am using Railo for almost all of my programming engagements. I really love the freedom of Open Source Software and I am happy of being a part of something great.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Gert:  Windows 7, CFEclipse, MySQL, SQL-Server, Railo 3.3.x

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Gert: In my opinion Open Source is the way to go for software. One should always consider offering free software and all different kind of services for it. In this way everyone who can't afford expensive software can still use it and even contribute to it, if the license and contributor agreements allow it. IMHO professional open source is the right approach since end users, especially in the enterprise need someone responsible who they can call if they run into issues or need help with configuration or tuning.

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Gert:  Difficult... At the moment the future of commercial CFML is not very clear to me. It depends really a lot about how big the impact of the CF10 release on the market is going to be and on the ability of the open source engines to foster all the users that are looking for alternatives for whatever reasons. The CFML community is VERY passionate and that is what I love about it so much.

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Gert: It is always very good to see good friends and discuss with them about the developments of the CFML market and to share knowledge as well as learn lots of new stuff. Open Source is definitely the future and so this is a very good opportunity to further promote it.

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Gert: I will present on what defines performance when developing with Railo.

Come talk shop with Gert at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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As part of OpenCF Summit's ongoing mission to promote Open Source Software, Gov 2.0 and to attract new members and ideas to the CFML community, we are thrilled to announce a partnership with the Code for America Brigade at this year's online Conference Hackfest, where we will be finishing up EnlistApp.org, the Free and Open Source Volunteer Management application we began at last year's OpenCF Summit.

If you've never heard of Code for America, check out this two-minute video and just try not to be totally inspired!:

...While CfA's flagship Fellowship program (think "Peace Corps for geeks") has been a resounding success, they've been unable to accomodate the flood of fellowship applicants.  In response, they've started up a kind of DIY version of the Fellowship, the Brigade!

"The Code for America Brigade is an organizing force for a growing community of civic minded developers, designers, data scientists, and community leaders who will contribute their talents towards addressing the problems we see everday. The technology that we’ll develop together and deploy locally will form a new Civic Web."

The Brigade aims this year to mobilize Civic Hacktivists from 50 cities across America to stand up 20 civic applications such as Adopt-a-Hydrant and Open211.  With this partnership, OpenCF Summit is putting Dallas and Open Source CFML on the map!

As for the app, Enlist was originally concieved of by Peter Farrell, after a volunteer event with Minneapolis-based Team Ortho, during which he noticed organizers tracking volunteers and their efforts on spreadsheets.  The application is built around three primary objectives:

1. To provide non-profits and civic organizations with a Free & Open Source web application for the management of volunteers and their work at community and civic events.
2. To promote the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) by modeling many of its strongest features and its support for best practices in software development; integration with and use of Open Source libraries such as jQuery, Twitter Bootstrap boilerplate UI, the Mach-II and ColdSpring frameworks; the Open BlueDragon CFML engine; extensive front-end optimizations; and of course, a Free Software license (GPL Version 3.)
3. To not require any investment in server infrastructure, but rather to be easily deployed by even non-technical users with a few mouse-clicks to any of the many new Java Cloud Hosting providers, in many cases, entirely for free.  (Several are presenting at the conference.)

We need coders, designers, subject matter experts and people of good cheer - register now!

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Things are hopping for OpenCF Summit 2012. We have a ton of great new partners this year, and we're continuing to pack more and more goodness into the OpenCF Summit schedule. Since registration is a mere $72 (no, I didn't leave off a 0 at the end there!) this is an unbelievable amount of great content for not many of your dollars.

Here's the updates to the Day 1 schedule.

• We have expanded lunch to 90 minutes so you can grab some grub and attend a great "Lunch and Learn" session on deploying CFML apps to the cloud with CloudBees.
• The fine folks at Blue River are doing a half-day session on the excellent Mura Content Management System.
• Railo training has been expanded to a full day. This is an accelerated version of their Railo Administrator training that includes Railo Administrator Certification. Since this is an expansion of their training offering it is not included in the OpenCF Summit registration cost, but if you register for the Railo training you can attend all three days of OpenCF Summit for no additional charge. (We'll have more details about this such as how to register soon.)

Register now and we'll see you in Dallas later this month!

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Daria Norris!

Daria had been working as a Web Developer for the Free Library of Philadelphia for the last five years.  I work on custom CMFL applications including the library's Intranet and Digital Collections application.  I also tweet as @cfGothChic and have a radio show called Daria's Cheat Sheet on CodeBass Radio.

OpenCF Summit: Hey Daria!  So tell us about yourself.

Daria: I started with CFML version 2 and have been working with it consistently for the last 15 years.  I spent 10 of that as an independent consultant building competitive intelligence search engines for a large telecommunications company.  I spent many years just using the 5 standard tags, but have moved into OOP with the help of CFCs and ORM integration.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Daria:  At work we are on Windows boxes with CF9 Ent, but for my small business and personal projects I have a Linux Railo VPS from VivioTech.  I use CF Builder when I'm in Windows and  CFEclipse in Linux.  I've been anti-framework for years, but recently have become a FW/1 convert.

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Daria: For the industry that I work in, I see Open Source Software as the next generation of library automation software.  As budgets grow smaller and as we get more and more librarians with a technical background, I see this trend continuing.  Currently we are working on our first big open source project to deploy VuFind, a library catalog search interface written in PHP.

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Daria:  I think Open Source is the future of CFML.  Having OS engines that I can recommend to other librarians as an option to revive out of date code written in older versions is great.  We need to get into niche markets and remind them how cool CFML is!

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Daria: Looking forward to talking with like minded people who think outside of the box!  Last year's conference was awesome and I'm looking forward to another great one this year.

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Daria: I'll be ending the main track of the conference with a talk on 'CFML in a Competitive Open Source Market' where I'll go into depth about the library industry I work in.  The library world is quickly moving to open source solutions for functions that were previously the domain of large enterprise propriety software.  Where does CFML fit in that picture? How do we as a community support niche markets like this that only see PHP as a solution?

Come talk shop with Daria at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Mike Henke!

Mike has worked with ColdFusion since 1999 for several companies. Mike co-hosts with Ryan Stille the ColdFusion Show, a ColdFusion-related podcast, featuring news and discussion about the latest topics in the CFML community.

Mike blogs at http://henke.ws

OpenCF Summit: Hey Mike!  So tell us about yourself.

Mike: I am an advocate of Eclipse, Source Control, Mylyn, Github, and anything to make developing ColdFusion more productive and easier. My main focus currently is learning Git, Ruby on Rails, and ColdFusion on Wheels. I am an Adobe Community Professional. I have spoken at several user groups and enjoy talking to people about ColdFusion.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Mike:  Windows, IIS, Adobe ColdFusion, SQL Server, ColdFusion On Wheels, Blueprint, JQuery
Sass, Ruby, Coffeescript.

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Mike: I have contributed to open sources projects like MXUnit. I also like to throw ideas and projects on github for people to use. I see OSS as a critical solution along side proprietary software in most businesses.

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Mike:  I think CFML is heading to re-establish itself as equal to other dynamic languages. We need to adopt ideas from other communities and refocus ours on what makes CFML great. I think the state of CFML community is good and looking for new leaders to step in as other leaders move on.

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Mike: Yes, it was a great, valuable time last year. It is a friendly, smart, fun group. Every attendee and speaker was very approachable.

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Mike: I'll be helping Curt Gratz with Git/Github session along with discussing CFML in 100 minutes and Cloudy with a Chance of Tests to everyone interested in these projects.

Come talk shop with Mike at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Ean Schuessler!

Ean is the co-founder and lead technical guy for Brainfood.com here in Dallas Texas. Brainfood specializes in building great looking commercial solutions using Free Software.

OpenCF Summit: Hey Ean!  So tell us about yourself.

Ean: I've played around with CFML a little bit in the last year or so specifically because of this conference. I have a Java background so I think CFML can be a great alternative to JSPs or Velocity macro pages and I intend to spend more time with it. I'm probably best known for being an early and vocal participant in the Debian community. I was there when, as a community, we came up with the concept of the Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Debian was where I first learned deeply about the Free Software concept and it will always have a special place in my heart. Since then I've spent a lot of time working with Java and solving business problems using Apache's OFBiz project. We spend a lot of time on that system and think it is very important. In the past couple of years I have started spending quite a bit of time working on the open government concept with a great group of people over at Open Source for America. I'm lucky enough to serve as that group's technical committee chair and have been having some amazing experiences and learning a lot about the vast and complicated processes of our government.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Ean:  We run most everything these days on KVM based virtual machines. We use almost nothing but Debian for those machines though we have a few Windows instances for things like accounting software. We use GIT for revision control. Most of our development revolves around the JVM and its various languages but we have drifted into using PHP for quick and dirty Wordpress sites. Of the JVM languages we probably use Groovy the most. For business solutions we focus on Apache's Open for Business project. We use a little bit of Maven but tend to still use Ant for builds. Mostly we do all of this in terminals over SSH using screen but I do run Eclipse on my desktop for some Android development tasks. I also grudgingly bought a Mac laptop recently so that I could do iPhone builds.

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Ean: My Open Source experience started back in1993 during the golden years of the Dallas electronics swap meet. This was before eBay and once a month a huge chunk of downtown Dallas would be overrun by vendors with trucks and card tables full of every technical widget you could imagine. I bought everything from a NeXT cube to a Super Mario machine down there and tried to come every month. It was on one of those visits that I came across a copy of "Yggdrasil GNU/Linux" for $6. The insert claimed "A complete UNIX operating system with X windows, games, DOS emulator" and on and on. I was totally skeptical but at $6 the price was right and it turned out to be one the best purchases I've ever made. I spent a little time with Yggdrasil and then Slackware but moved on to Debian when I heard it could "upgrade in place". That was around 1996 and Debian has been my right hand ever since.

After almost twenty years of playing with Free Software I have had plenty of time to think about where we are headed and I think its pretty clear. We have finally reached a point where the mechanisms of collective public thought are transitioning from physical to digital.  This has been a work in progress since the days of the Apple II but with the advent of the smart phone we have reached a tipping point where the digital form is becoming the dominant one. I think this is going to be a difficult period where the Free Software community has to learn how to communicate its ideals to this larger audience. We have to help people understand how important it is that the world's thoughts not become trapped  in a centralized and all-seeing fulcrum of corporate control.

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Ean:  Pretty obviously, I think that CFML is becoming part of the JVM ecosystem. I don't think this diminishes CFML at all. I think its making CFML important and relevant. CFML has a great community that, sort of like PHP, has this strong connection to the world of web design. If CFML can leverage that and act as a bridge for web designers into the technical power of the JVM then I think it can become just as important as it once was, maybe more so.

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Ean: I'm always excited to be at the center of a smart community where change is occurring. I've been really impressed with the brilliant technology minds in the CFML community and super curious to see what it evolves into.

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Ean: I'll be doing an updated presentation on the Gov2.0 phenomena. I'm going to get a little more nuts and bolts this year and cover the emerging groups, the apps that are blowing up and the APIs you can use to build your own apps in CFML.

Come talk shop with Ean at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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Come to OpenCF Summit to talk freely and openly about the important issues facing the CFML community today. Since the open source CFML engine makers will be at OpenCF Summit, you can be assured that your ideas and opinions will be heard and that you’ll have a direct impact.

No one is excluded. All are welcome. No topic is off limits. We are at a critical juncture in the history of CFML, and we need to have open, frank discussions on the issues facing CFML today and learn how to solve them collectively to ensure a healthy future for CFML.

It’s an exciting time to be a CFML developer. Come to OpenCF Summit and help shape the future of CFML.

See you in Dallas, February 24-26, 2012!

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Billy Cravens

Billy is an independent CFML developer and manager of the Houston ColdFusion Users Group.  He is currently building logistics auditing solutions while keeping his head in The Cloud.

OpenCF Summit: Hey Billy!  So tell us about yourself.

Billy: I suppose I'm "old school". I've been working with ColdFusion since my career began, which was around 1999 in the Allaire ColdFusion 4.0 days. I even used Homesite before Allaire bought it. Before I got into CF, I had a short and fail-filled career in fast food, then some ISP help desk work. I tend to be best known for pushing the need to be multi-lingual while treating CF as one's first love.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Billy:  The production environment is full-stack Amazon Web Services: EC2, SQS, RDS, ElastiCache. Run a mixture of Adobe ColdFusion and Railo for general purpose servers; Open BlueDragon is used for utility servers that deeply integrate into Amazon's API's. These days I'm loving SublimeText for development - nice to have an IDE that gets out of the way. I used Fusebox back to version 2, these days I'm mostly in ColdBox, but am also giving FW/1 a nice spin. Other languages? Used PHP, C# extensively. Node.js is getting me excited too.

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Billy: My life with open source started back with Slackware back in 1998 - installed it on a 486 using floppies! Through the years have used a variety of frameworks and applications. I've done public open source CFML through the years on Allaire's Custom Tag Gallery and CFLib.org. Recently reported a bug with OpenBD (fixed the next day- go open CF!) I see OSS bringing a revolution in hosting and deployment: the FTP and SSH model is going, away, to be replaced by a package-based deployment based on OSS. (See what's happening in the Rails and node.js worlds with services like Heroku and Joyent - auto deployment of gems and modules when you define the dependencies)

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Billy:  CFML is driving more towards MVC-framework driven development. Some days I look at CFML apps and they don't look much different than comparable .NET or Java-based ones. (I actually took code I wrote in C# working with the Selenium .NET object, pasted into CFScript, and it worked with CFSelenium with very little change!) I see the CFML engines getting bigger and bigger - honestly, I'd like to see a more modular approach, where I can load the libraries/tags I need. I think in coming years, we'll see more API integration. The CFML community is becoming more software engineering focused, which I feel positions us better: we need to be developers who prefer CFML, not "CFML developers".

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Billy: Meeting people who are really using CFML in an open way, whether it be open applications or open CFML engines. I'm hoping to see how they're building real applications meeting real business requirements, showing that open source is as much the corporate ethos as the Slashdot one.

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Billy: I'll be giving a regular session on WebSockets: it's coming in the next version of Adobe ColdFusion, but you can implement it in Railo and OpenBD today (there's also an option for the current version of ACF). If possible, I may also give a talk at the Unconference on building a distributed workflow on Amazon Web Services using Open BlueDragon.

Come talk shop with Billy at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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One of the hottest areas in web development today is around the burgeoning open government and Gov 2.0 movements.  The opportunities in this space are huge, and as you might imagine developers who are leveraging the power of FOSS are at the forefront of Gov 2.0.

If you’re a CFML developer in government, you’re probably starting to hear rumblings about moving to more FOSS in your agency. Some of United States CIO Vivek Kundra’s initial remarks upon taking office were that FOSS is key to making government work better, at lower cost, and with greater transparency, and agencies across government at all levels are taking this to heart.

If you’re interested in working on side projects related to Gov 2.0 in your spare time, or taking advantage of the limitless business opportunities around Gov 2.0, you’ll learn about all the angles of Gov 2.0 at OpenCF Summit.

See you in Dallas, February 24-26, 2012!

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Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: James Milbery:

James is an operating partner and the CTO for Chicago Growth Partners.   CGP is a Chicago-based private equity group with over $1.2 billion in assets under management.   Follow James @jmilbery or his blog at jmilbery.wordpress.com

OpenCF Summit: Hey James!  So tell us about yourself.

James: I've worked with CFML in some form or fashion for the past seven years, thanks to Alan Williamson of OpenBD fame (we met on the staff of Java Developer's Journal).   Known more as a pre-sales maven and a database jock than as a core developer.  Worked with a ton of different technology stacks since starting out writing FORTRAN on a PDP-11.

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

James:  In our portfolio of companies we have just about got it all; CMFL, Java, Ruby, PHP, Oracle, mySQL, MongoDB, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Windows Server, Linux, MacOS.

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

James: We've been moving our portfolio of companies from proprietary languages and platforms to OSS and the cloud whenever possible.   Since we specialize in lower mid-market companies (less than $50 million in EBITDA) -- OSS is a key element to our growth strategy.

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

James:  The CFML community is a terrific group of people to work with -- smart and fun.   The challenge for all of us is fighting the market perception that CFML is a "dead end".   We don't believe it, but how can we do more to keep CFML on the forefront for developers?

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

James: Great, smart people in a relatively small venue.   Gives us the chance to meet everyone.  Looking forward to seeing what folks are doing with the platform these days.

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

James: I'll be talking about the CFML platform (and open source in general) and how Private Equity groups view technology and technology projects.

Come talk shop with James at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

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