CFUnited: My Recap

CFUnited 2008 was a great experience for me personally, I presented as a speaker for the first time which was a great experience and challenge, as well as learned a great deal of things that I would like to put into practice in my own development environment.

I wanted to put a quick post out there to go over some of the highlights that I was able to take away learning wise for others to see as well as a constant reminder to myself. So, what did I personally learn?

• In his own words, Ray Camden will be using tables for layout until someone stops him... Should've come to my session Ray!
• I want to start using CFToolTip more for my end-users benefit.
• There is a cool Event Validator at RiaForge that Mark Drew referenced, I would like to check into that when I get the time.
• From Hal Helms session, leave functions open for extention, closed for changes. Keeping things simple
• Just because MVC is used, doesn't mean I'm doing OO. I can still be doing procedural code in an MVC format.
• Get book called Design Patterns by Gang of Four
• Find the things that are constantly changing in my applications and encapsulate them.
• Good OO is all about abstraction.
• Pass objects to be persisted.
• From Chris Scott's session, keep ColdSpring simple - getBeans/setBeans
• Increase the JVM default on the CF Server.
• Increase the minimum memory on the CF Server.
• Turn on trusted cache in production.
• Cache queries used often in applications.
• Read the CF8 performance brief.
• Use SQL Server performance monitoring tools to profile, trace, look at execution plans and their costs, run database reports to see which queries are putting loads on the server.
• If session is not available, reject the form submission, because it means they didn't come from your form.
• From Joe's advanced Model-Glue session... you can use the include tags to include entire applications into your Model-Glue app.
• Prefix event handlers.
• Controllers should be as thin as possible.
• Use views for common joins, filtering, etc... when dealing with larger queries.
• Index all fields searched on in my SQL tables for fast searching and less load on the database. A good example of this is looking for pizza in the phone book, but searching every page of the book from A-Z. With indexing you don't need to search from A-Z simply jump to 'Pizza'.
• SQL views can be about 75% faster than CF for complex queries.
• Stored procedures can be about 90% faster than CF.
• Use cfQueryParams for security as well as not making the SQL Server re-write execution plans everytime a query is run.
• Be careful about how you index your tables, you could do more damage than good if it's not done right.

That was my quick recap of what I learned. Overall the venue was great, I loved the fact that the conference was in downtown DC instead of Bethesda, the hotel was awesome and close to the conference. Another great job by the CFUnited team. I hope to return in 2009.