We've already published a high-level list of session topics for cf.Objective() 2008 and a tentative list of speakers. We're still working on the topics and speakers and I'd like to offer an informal call for speakers (or speaker suggestions) for a few of the topic areas we have already selected. Contact me privately if you would like to submit a proposal to speak on these topic areas: Introduction to Design Patterns Advanced Design Patterns Integrating ColdFusion with .

webDU 2008 is starting to roll and is calling for papers. As usual, it's at the Star City casino resort in Sydney (a great venue). I attended MXDU (as it was originally called) in 2004 and 2005 and it was one of the most vibrant web development conferences I'd ever been too - highly recommended! Currently flights from the Bay Area to Sydney are around $1,200 including taxes... hmm...

Every time I've looked at Cairngorm, it's always seemed complete overkill to me. It's why I was so pleased to see Joe Rinehart start working on Model-Glue for Flex. Cairngorm made Flex development look much harder than I wanted to believe it really is. It's been years since I had to build desktop applications with a full event-driven, multi-threaded architecture and I finally realized on the way home from MAX Europe that web development has truly spoiled me.

Adobe and BEA have formed an "Enterprise Partnership" to co-market products. Under the deal, announced on BEA's website yesterday, BEA will bundle Adobe Flex Builder with BEA Workshop Studio and Adobe will distribute evaluation licenses of WebLogic Server with LiveCycle. It's an interesting development that should drive further adoption of Flex within the enterprise.

Adogo - Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando - is a new user group focused on ColdFusion, ActionScript, AIR and Flex. Maxim Porges, Adam Fortuna, Brian LeGros are all involved. The group meets on the first Tuesday of every month at 7:00pm at the Devry University at Milenia and the group is kicking off on August 7th with Adam Fortuna on Flex/ColdFusion Applications with ColdSpring and an RIA BOF which should be a good evening.

Model-Glue just launched a brand new website (can you spot a theme here?), along with an Alpha download of the new Model-Glue: Flex framework. I'll be blogging more about Model-Glue: Flex in due course - I'll be using MG:F, rather than Cairngorm, for the Flex (and AIR) development work I'll be doing over the coming months. It's also worth noting that Model-Glue 2.0 is now an official release.

Looks like there are nearly 30 ColdFusion sessions at MAX 2007. There are also lots of Flex and AIR sessions as well. Should be a really good conference for developers this year, based on Ted Patrick's comments about the direction of the conference.

Adobe has released Digital Editions which is a free, Flex-based eBook reader for your PC. When it was out as a beta, it was Windows-only so I'm very pleased to see the final release supports Mac OS X as well (although some of the book install pages in their sample library appear to require Windows... unless you spoof your user agent!). What do you get? A slick, clean monochrome interface with simple, intuitive controls. A library mode and a reading mode. Bookshelves to organize your books. Bookmarks.

This week I had the good fortune to attend the annual Adobe Community Summit - a San Jose-based event for User Group Managers and Community Experts to learn about the "state of the union" in Adobe-land. Last year I popped into a couple of sessions as an employee and saw some sneak peaks of what ultimately became the CS3 product line. This year I attended as a Community Expert, to learn about the many recent releases.

Just sat through a very interesting presentation on Open Source initiatives at Adobe by Dave McAllister and wanted to put out some links and notes. Dave noted that Adobe has been active in Open Source for a good long while but has recently begun to move away from the Adobe Open Source License (a vanity license - like the old Fusebox license) to more standard licenses such as BSD and MPL.