I'd like to thank Adam Tuttle and the Philadelphia CFUG for inviting me to speak last night on CFSpreadsheet. While the thought of listening to someone talk about spreadsheet generation from an hour would only make a true techie's heart race, I think those who were there got a good overview of what this new functionality can do for them. If anything I hope that I lowered the bar for many in attendance while simultaneously increasing pressure on their bosses to buy those licenses!

My preso focused on the basics (here's the tag, here are the functions) up front and followed up with 6 examples of how these new functions can be used to manage spreadsheet creation and editing no matter how mangled or ugly. If you want the CFSpreadsheet presentation assets and (commented) sample code, feel free to pull this ZIP. I will be updating it this weekend with Derby databases so you can just unzip and run everything. For now, unpack the zip into a folder in your webroot. You may need to comment out the ORM settings in Application.cfc to make it run. Ping me with any questions either here or via twitter (@scrittler).

I also had the opportunity to touch (very lightly) on the new ORM features of ColdFusion 9 during the presentation. One of my demos (not in the zip file) is the start of an app that is intended to replace a spreadsheet with a web app. After 90 minutes of work I had the spreadsheet imported to a db using Hibernate, a quick add/edit form put together and a re-export (since the end users still cling to Excel) of the current db. If I had to write all that SQL it could have easily taken far longer. Finishing the app should be trivial from here, so props to Adobe for putting all the right pieces in the box for me to play with!

It's pretty clear that the whole concept of using an ORM engine is very, very new to most of the ColdFusion world and is definitely holding back adoption. You don't need to know terribly much to use Hibernate with ColdFusion but letting go of having to write SQL is certainly showing to be more difficult than expected. It's a different way of thinking, one that the user group community can definitely help to encourage. The time savings and maintainability improvements alone are well worth starting the trip. I know the Philly CFUG calendar is pretty well packed, but I hope we can put together some talks on this topic (preferably hands on) soon.

Again, thank you to the CFUG for inviting me to speak. I look forward to seeing everyone at the next meeting on Feb. 25!