Sorry for the short notice on this one. Snuck up on me again. Following on our recent FW/1 theme, this month's meeting will do a quick recap and then build on what we've learned.

This presentation is intended as a follow-up to Daria's FW/1 presentation that was given back in February. Being inspired by her presentation, I learned FW/1 and we have now standardized on it where I work. I'll demonstrate a couple of things that made life easier for me when learning the framework. We'll start from square one: Downloading and installing the framework. After that, we'll create and discuss the very flexible layouts that FW/1 makes available. Afterward, we'll wrap it up with a data call or two and call it a night. If we have time I'll also demonstrate how to integrate Hyrule to simply form validation within FW/1.

If you are looking for a lighter-weight alternative to the larger/heavier frameworks that are out there then come and join us for an evening of FW/1 discovery.

I apologize to anyone who already made arrangements to attend our May meeting on migrating from Verity to Solr, but I need to reschedule.

Instead of meeting on Thursday May 19th, we will meet on Wednesday May 18th. I'm still waiting for confirmation on the room reservation, but I will update all of the appropriate blog posts once it has been confirmed -- as well as tweet it.

Finally, and in case you didn't already know, I would like you to Please RSVP if you plan on attending so that I can try to prevent food over- or under-ordering.

Thanks for your understanding. See you there!

In order to reduce food over-ordering and the occasional under-order, I'm re-instituting RSVPs for meetings. If you're planning to attend the May meeting: Solr Powered - Making the move from Verity, please RSVP here.

Steve Rittler, Philly CFUG regular and reformed uniped, is going to cover a topic specially requested by some of our members: Migrating from Verity to Apache Solr, the new search product built into ColdFusion 9. Here's what he has to say on the subject:

We're all familiar with Verity, the search product built in to ColdFusion that made most search needs much easier for many. But the time has come to move on, as Adobe has announced that Verity will be EOL with the next release of ColdFusion. In its place we now have Solr - an open source package with far greater capabilities and a whole lot of new features we should get acquainted with.

BUT FIRST...we have to get our existing Verity collections ported over. How do we do that? What's different? What do we need to know? Relax...it's actually quite easy!

I'll show you what's the same, what's different, what you may want to tweak "out of the box" and where to look to make your collections more efficient and useful. You'll want to know this - Solr is awesomely powerful and it'll make you look like a genius. And who doesn't like that?

We normally try to meet on the 2nd Thursday of the month, but in May this overlaps with the cf.Objective() conference, so we're pushing our meeting back one week:

Just a quick reminder that our next meeting will be tomorrow, April 7th, at 6pm. See you there!

For our April meeting, Vicky Ryder will be stopping by to present MediaSlurp, which I like to think of as a case study in writing awesome applications.

MediaSlurp is a popular tool that delivers community-driven content to your desktop. The presentation gives an overview of how it was built by three people, in three weeks, leveraging the Adobe stack and community libraries: AIR, airORM, Flex, BlazeDS, ColdFusion 9 ORM, ColdSpring and Swiz. This presentation will give an overview of how the application works and an open Q & A about the tools, process and the MediaSlurp application.

For our March meeting, Adobe Evangelist and Philly local Terry Ryan (blog) will be back in town to demo some of the new goodness that's going to be available in the upcoming release of ColdFusion Builder 2.

I wouldn't miss it if I were you!

We'll be back in our normal building, this time:

While we normally meet in Wharton's Jon M Huntsman Hall, we were unable to get space in that building for our February meeting. Instead, we'll be meeting in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, room 1203. A map showing Huntsman Hall (in red) and Steinberg-Dietrich Hall (in green) is below:

(click for full size)

Sorry we didn't have a January meeting. My wife just had our second child and I won't be back in downtown Philadelphia until the last few days of January. We'll just be skipping it and moving on to February.

This time around, Daria will be presenting the MVC framework called FW/1 ("framework one"), a simple yet powerful, convention-over-configuration framework for ColdFusion applications.

We hear a lot about Model View Controller (MVC) and how we should use it in our applications, but how do you apply this practically in your code?  Framework One provides a simple way to use MVC without overwhelming you with features you might not need or want. This presentation will show how you can take your existing spaghetti code and turn it into a robust MVC application.

Daria will cover the basics of MVC and why FW/1 is a great implementation of it. She'll then provide demo code showing how to convert a simple CRUD spaghetti-code app into MVC with FW/1.

In lieu of a regular meeting in December, we are going to crash (on invitation, of course) the PANMA Holiday Party. See their post for all of the details.

If you're not already aware, PANMA is the Philadelphia Area New Media Association -- a large gathering of Philly area geeks. It's a great group to get involved in, if you can.

You need to register to attend, registrations are capped, and the event is free -- so don't wait, register now! I'll see you there!