Well, the party is still going on in Croydon as I speak, but being the parent I am, I am already back from the CFDevcon conference here in the UK. So, here I am sat with my laptop open and a net connection burning with downloads left, right and center.

Overall, a great day (if a long one) with a wide variety of topics ranging from the Scorpio sneak that Ben Forta gave at MAX, as well as topics such as BlueDragon 7.0, FusionDebug, API's, Flex 2 and CFEclipse. There was some great presentations given by the likes of Mark Drew, Vince Bonfanti, as the king of CF presentations Mr Ben Forta.

So what I have I taken away from the day? Well, to be honest, I'm pretty underwhelmed by Scorpio (or CF8 as it will be known). Nothing that was shown really lit my fire. PDF Intergration doesn't bother me, as does the image manipulation tag. Also, you can integrate with Breeze (or whatever weird name it has today) which is fantastic if you use it - which I don't. Scorpio to me seems to be a tying together of Adobe products into Coldfusion. I don't see anything there that really pushes CFML forward, which leads me to BlueDragon 7.

BD looks very interesting, and I had the oppoutunity to have a long chat with Vince Bonfanti of New Atlanta over lunch. BD to me appears to more of a programmers CFML engine. It worries more about performance, scalability and resilience. It gives you multiple threading, it gives you interfaces, it gives you null, it gives you intelligent query caching - and all at an apparent CPU saving over previous versions of BD and CFMX. I will most likely post more about BD as I download the Beta and give it the run around.

There was also a presentation from Nick Tong regarding API's (or as I call them “Web services”) and basically the theory behind them and why they are a good idea. It's good to know that more people are being made of what I beleive to be an easy architectural decision.

So, overall a great day, and I guess tomorrow we'll hear more about the after party.

EDIT: Dammit. Forgot Alex Skinner at Pixl8 who gave a cracking demo of Preside as well as some insight into BD.net. I have a growing list of questions for you.