I was unfortunately unable to make the Allaire Developer Conference in Boston last year, so I was extremely excited when I found my schedule free and clear for this year's event in Washington, DC. The conference was expanded from last year's, offering longer technical sessions and extending the overall length of the conference as well. Also of note this year was that attendees could take the new ColdFusion Certification Exam in one of several testing rooms on all of the conference days. Well hyped by Allaire to be a sellout for the second year in a row, the conference had me flying into town with high expectations. The question was whether it could live up to all the hype. The answer is a resounding Yes!

A packed show floor with outstanding companies, industry-leading speakers, and over 3,000 attendees from more than 500 companies made it the place to be for anyone developing in ColdFusion today (Spectra and JRun were represented too, of course!). Exhibiting companies were quite pleased with the enthusiasm of the developers in attendance, who were able to gather loads of information on the latest products and services.

Overall, the mood at the show was positively upbeat, which wasn't a surprise. Being able to put faces to names from online forums, and the wide variety of people representing thousands of companies around the globe, all coming together for one common interest, made the trip worthwhile. There was also some excitement about being in Washington during Election Day. This of course led to a few calls for CF guru Ben Forta for President - maybe in 2004?

Another highlight was the SYS-CON Radio interviews that I did with representatives from almost all the major companies in the industry attending the show. You can tune into all of these and our complete conference coverage at ColdFusionJournal.com. You'll also see some of the highlighted interviews in the magazine over the next few months.

The feedback on the technical sessions and the buzz on the show floor was that they were the best yet - with both 60- and 90-minute hands-on and workshop sessions on several different topics. The tracks offered covered a wide range of ColdFusion topics: Application Development, Solution Development, Server Management, Technology Integration, and Best Practices - almost everything that developers need to know today.

Perhaps the most exciting moments of the conference came during Jeremy Allaires opening keynote on Monday morning during which he spoke about the course that ColdFusion would be taking throughout 2001 and beyond. Among the several new technologies previewed were ColdFusion 5.0 (to be released sometime in the first six months of 2001 ) and the next generation of CF (J2EE compatible) Neo coming toward the end of 2001. Look for extensive coverage of these new releases as they enter testing over the next few months. If the enthusiastically cheering audience response as several new (and often-asked-for features) were demonstrated was any indication, the best is certainly yet to come.

So if you didn't make it to the year 2000 event, I certainly hope to see you next year! And to sweeten the deal for all of us, some details about the 2001 Allaire Conference were announced during the long weekend. It will be held at Walt Disney World in Florida, October 21-24, 2001....Mickey and CF - what could be better?