This is my third day back from CF.Ojective() '08 and I think I have almost caught up on sleep.  No matter what your purpose, attending a conference is all work.  You're attending sessions, talking with other developers and sponsors, or networking.  Not to mention staying up late for social events.  Individually, each of these can be exhausting.  Collectively they can be overwhelming.  As a sponsor who is also speaking you get no breaks.  Despite the fact that I still want to sleep through the day, the conference was fantastic.  I may be a bit biased, but trust me, Jared put on a good show. 

CF.Objective() was the first conference Alagad has ever sponsored.  This was a new thing for me, being on the other side of the table.  Our purpose there was to help people learn about Alagad and what it is that we do.  In particular I spent a lot of time talking to people and informing them of Alagad's Object Oriented and Framework-based Coldfusion expertise. 

A recurring theme was that a lot of companies are really feeling the pain of years of procedural development and they were wondering if Alagad could help them refractor their application to OO and Frameworks and what the techniques for that are.  The short answer is yes, and the techniques vary depending on the client's goals.  Overall, I really sensed that ColdFusion shops are actively working to embrace enterprise development techniques.

We also spoke with a lot of people about our Performance Tuning and clustering services.  Mike Brunt, our specialist in that area, was on hand to teach a class on clustering.  It was really interesting to see how many people are exchanged knowing glances when I asked them about their applications' performance and stability.  It seems that many people are having challenges in this area.  However, they are beginning to realize that you can and should load test your applications and tune you JVM to get the best performance and stability out of your application.  We are also happy to lend a guiding hand where we can, of course.

Other recurring topics were, as would be expected, training and the various Alagad products.  I think the community really understands that Alagad is much more than just the Image Component. 

We handed out quite a bit of schwag.  We handed out about 50 or so Coffee mugs and couple hundred pens.  In addition to that, we had a drawing where Andrew Gscheidle won an iPod nano and Mark Mandel won a Wii!

Lastly, it was fun having everyone by the booth.  Here are a few more photos for good measure.