Objective Bias

My last blog post was mainly about how valuable conferences can be for networking and socializing with other developers. I had promised myself to attend one of the "big two" conferences next year (CFUnited or CFObjective). Well, we all know what happened to CFUnited since my last blog post (wow – has it been that long?). In the aftermath of the "death" of CFUnited, many people in the community have pointed to the state of the economy and companies have had to cut back on their conference budgets. With airfare, hotel and registration fees, one can easily spend up to $2000 attending one of these conferences (as a freelancer who has to pay his own way, that has been one of the reasons I have yet to attend). Another aspect of this discussion has the rise of smaller, shorter, regional conferences, such as NCDevCon, D2W, BFusion/BFlex, and RIA Unleashed. These low-cost (sometimes free) conferences can be a great value because many of them also include hands-on training workshops in addition to the standard sessions.

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Given the title of this post, I admit that the timing is a bit off, but I’ve had this post "in the can" for a while and felt like I needed to get this out.
Due to budget and time constraints (yet again), I actually wasn’t able to attend CFObjective() this year. However, I was able to manage flying out to Minneapolis for the "Programmers Guide to Mura CMS" pre-conference training put on by Blue River Interactive.

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I recently had a chance to listen to the latest edition of the This Week in ColdFusion Podcast wherein design patterns are discussed. One of the design patterns that Brian Carr talks about in the podcast is the Decorator Pattern. As an example, Brian describes how you can use the dynamic nature of ColdFusion to assign a function to a variable and then add that function to an object at runtime (this is also known as "method injection"). Bob Silverberg, who was a guest on the podcast then asked Brian whether the injected method would show up in the object's metadata if you called the getMetaData() function on it. Brian didn't know for sure, but he and Bob agreed that it was unlikely. This piqued my curiosity, so I set about to test this myself.

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I recently performed a minor update to my Embed Video Plugin for Mura CMS. One of the things this update addressed was a judge's comment from the Mura Plugin ColdFusion Throwdown contest, which basically pointed out that I didn't provide documentation for how the EmbedVideo tag could be used within a component (a Mura display component, not a CFC). Well, the original version actually couldn't be used within a Mura component. So I decided to do something about it and figured this would be a good opportunity to demonstrate how you can intercept and modify output in Mura using a plugin or your site's custom eventhandler.

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Wow! I was so happy to find out today that won first place in the Mura Plugin ColdFusion Throwdown! My entry was my Embed Video Plugin. I have to say, that I was sort of surprised and humbled, especially since my little plugin was pitted against such a great list of other plugins that were submitted.

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