The ColdFusion world traveled down to Disney World this October - without even having to win a major sporting event first. The occasion was Macromedia DevCon 2002 - the world's largest gathering of all things Macromedia - which took place October 27-30. It was a very successful conference on all fronts, with a keynote by Macromedia chairman and CEO Rob Burgess, and appearances by Ben Forta, Jeremy Allaire (via Flash video), and other Macromedia executives and product managers.

The theme of the conference was "Architecting a New Internet Experience," and many of the sessions stuck to that theme, showing how you can combine Macromedia's products to build better Internet applications and Web sites. The MX product line is now in full swing with one third of Macromedia's revenue coming from the new set of products. Many conference attendees who I spoke with were advanced ColdFusion developers who had been slowly dragged into the worlds of Dreamweaver and Flash and, now there, didn't know how they had survived before.

Things are going very well in the world of ColdFusion these days. More than 70% of the 2,500+ conference attendees were there to learn all they could about CF in three action-packed days. An interesting statistic is that more than half of the attendees had never been to a conference or user group meeting before, so there was a lot of new blood, and a high level of excitement about all that could be done with CF.

Almost 30% of ColdFusion MX purchases are by new users, with 70% coming from upgrades. That 30% number is a sign that ColdFusion is doing very well, and Macromedia is committed to continuing that success. They are the number-two software company in research and development spending, and the reasons are evident with their recent and upcoming releases.

Conference attendees were able to see a lot of real-world examples showcasing the new Flash server, as well as take a sneak peek at Macromedia's next release - Contribute. It's a product that we'll be covering more in the upcoming months because it's designed to make developers' lives easier - and who of us doesn't like that?

I've always advocated attending conferences, and I think everyone at DevCon would agree. It provided fantastic opportunities for learning, networking, sharing ideas, solving problems, and even taking some time to have fun at a Macromedia special event at Universal Studios Florida. Next year's DevCon has been announced for September 7-10, 2002, at the San Diego Convention Center - I hope to see many of you there!

This month we've got another information-packed issue of CFDJ, and we're working very hard to make 2003 our best year yet. There is one feature in this month's issue that I wanted to mention, because it's viewed by many in our always-interesting industry as a touchy subject, and one worth covering.

We've commissioned a product review of New Atlanta's BlueDragon, a Java-based server that also compiles CFML pages. The current release, 3.0, supports most of the standards of the CFML 5.0 language, with an MX-compatible release under construction. Phil Cruz's in-depth review hits upon some of the high and low points of the server, and it's worth a read.

We've had several e-mails in the past few months from people asking us to give the product a good look, and even more e-mails from people wondering where it fits into the ColdFusion market. I think that the product is good for the ColdFusion market because it shows the embrace of CFML as a standard language and, on the server side, the ColdFusion world as a maturing market.

Till next month - happy coding!