cf.Objective(), ColdFusions Enterprise Development Conference, was this past weekend in Minnesota. Although I didn’t make it this year, I’ve been impressed by the amazing number of blog posts the ColdFusion community has been making. Here’s a few comprehensive blogs that have posted very detailed accounts of the sessions they attended:

Brian LeGros posted a write on every session he attended, as well a few other takes on hallway development.
Chris Phillips also posted in depth descriptions of about a dozen talks he went to that I’ve been reading through as he’s posted.
Matt Woodward of The ColdFusion Weekly has been posting links to his Google Docs notes from the conference.
Terrence Ryan posted recaps at the end of each day about the sessions he went to.

And of course you can readFullasagoog for more find from the conference.

Recently, I stumbled across a very unexpected book at a trek to Barnes and Noble: Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action. Being a long time Prototype user and reader of Justin Palmer I was surprised there wasn’t more press on this one. Not to be outdone though, the Pragmatic Programmers series announced the new book Prototype and script.aculo.us – You never knew JavaScript could do this! beta book to be available. If you’re not familiar with beta books, the idea is basically that you can download the unfinished pdf right now, as well as updates along the way before eventually getting the pdf of the final version. For a little more you can have the finished book shipped to you as well. I did this for an earlier book by the Pragmatic Programmers and was impressed with how it worked, and the lack of problems I ran into.

If you search Amazon for Javascript books, you’re going to have a hard time getting started. There are a few that stand out that I’ve been wanting to read though including Pro JavaScript Techniques by John Resig (the creator of jQuery), ppk on JavaScript, 1/e by the guy who runs Quirksmode.org and the bestselling Ajax in Action. The problem with learning “Ajax” most people run into though is that it’s so abstracted by your Javascript framework of choice that very little of what you script is actual Ajax. For that reason these three and the Prototype ones above (which although I haven’t read cover to cover, I’ve probably skimmed through half of while at the bookstore) look like great ones for someone looking to further their JS skills.

Back in January I mentioned a hReview plugin for WordPress that I’ve been using primarily for book reviews. But what exactly is hReview? According to Microformats.org:

hReview is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is one of several microformats open standards.

To put it in english, it’s a way of using semantic XHTML to write a review. The prime example is Cork’d a wine review site developed by Dan Cederholm. Take the sample code on the left. It’s from a review on Cork’d and illustrates the structure of an hReview (and also a vcard if you’re curious). The basics of it are shockingly simple and entirely based on the css classes. Almost all the class declarations in the sample code are hReview related and then then marked up via CSS to look stylish.

The benefits of hReview, as with OpenID and other microformats are yet to be fully realized. Technorati has taken a leading role in some Microformats as well as being one of the first to start a hReview, hCalendar and hCard search over at Kitchen.technorati.com. I can confirm it’s working with a search for ColdFusion turning up two of the books I recently reviewed. As a publisher or as consumer having a standard for this kind of thing is a godsend. If you’re wanting to learn a little more about microformats, Jason Allsopp recently released a book on the subject: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0. There’s two very comprehensive reviews on Amazon, as well as more evangelizing on Allsopp’s site. If you’re writing reviews, give hReview a try!