Back during the ColdFusion 8 beta, there was a contest held (just for beta participants) called the Best of Scorpio. The idea was to create something, anything, that helped showcase some of ColdFusion 8's new features. (You can find details on the winners here.) Unfortunately, Adobe was unable to hold the contest again this time around. I spoke with Adobe about this and volunteered to help manage a new round - which we are calling the Best of ColdFusion 9 contest. Best of all - it is open to anyone and everyone (whether or not you were a beta tester).
The contest begins today and we've got some stellar prizes lined up from Adobe. What kind of prizes? How about a ColdFusion 9 Enterprise license, a ColdFusion Builder license (when released), a Flash Builder 4 license (ditto), a set of CFWACK 9 books (ditto again), and even more on top of that? That's just for the grand prize winner. Runner ups (three of them) will get CFB and FB4. Not only that, each and every participant will get something nice from Adobe. We've actually got more prizes than what I've said here, but I'm keeping a few things secret for now.
So what are the details?
- The contest begins today and ends November 30 at 11:59PM CST.
- Your entry must be emailed to ray@camdenfamily.com.
- Entries will be judged by myself and multiple members of the ColdFusion Adobe Community Expert group. They will be judged numerically purely on how cool the individual judge feels the entry is. Yes - this is subjective - but with multiple judges I think it will be pretty fair.
- Your entry should be something I can run myself (so nothing tied to a database or other resource behind your firewall) and should come with installation instructions. Note - you can use a database - what I meant is - nothing tied to a DB the judges can't run themselves.
- Your entry should come with a short paragraph describing the submission and what it features.
- You must be able to license your submission so that others can look and play with it, but you can certainly restrict the license to just that, in case you want to build something for future commercial sales. Obviously if a new open source project comes out of this, that would rock.
- Judging will commence December 1st and end on the 10th. If a large number of submissions come in, that may change slightly.
So what kind of entries are acceptable? Anything. It need not be some new, large scale project. It can be small. It also doesn't need to be useful. By that consider the ColdFusion Maze code I did. While not useful in any way whatsoever, the code was fun and showcased some interesting math. The only real directive here is that you demonstrate ColdFusion 9 features. This can be anything from ORM to CFMAP to CFSPREADSHEET. The sky is the limit.
If you have any questions, please let me know below. Big thanks to Adobe for sponsoring this. I listed a "suggested" list of prizes which they not only agreed to but increased. (Tsk tsk, next time I'll just be more greedy!) Also thank you to Liz Frederick for the logo design.
Archived Comments
nice, I'll give it a try!
btw: is a cancel button really necessary nowadays? seems to me something of ancient times, hate it to push the wrong button and start again typing ;-)
nice, I'll give it a try!
btw: is a cancel button really necessary nowadays? seems to me something of ancient times, hate it to push the wrong button and start again typing ;-)
Just want to clarify - your post says 'nothing tied to a database', would it be acceptable to use Derby database?
@Scott: I will edit the post. I meant nothing tied to a DB behind your firewall. A DB is fine as long as I can run it.
Awesome idea. Best of luck to everyone -- can't wait to see what people do.
Ray, very cool! I have to put my thinking cap on and get to work.
I'm in, if only for Liz's promised "dinner date" for the winner: http://twitter.com/lizign/s...
I'd meant to ad a "haha" or a ":)" after my link... it sounds rather creepy without that, lol.
@Ray
Are there any eligibility rules? For instance, if you were a finalist in the Best of CF 8 contest but you did not win the grand prize can you participate again?
Yes, you can participate again.
Will the prices be handed out directly by Adobe? And if so, will it be as in most previous contests that prices will only be awarded to participants in the US (and perhaps Canada)?
If I can get my idea done in time I might submit it anyway just for fun - but it's also nice to know if the incentives apply to us in the "here be dragons"-parts of Adobes maps as well.
As far as I know, the prize goes to me, then to you. Adobe is donating it to me for the contest, therefore that removes some of the stickier legal issues.
This is pretty cool. The only sucky thing is that a lot of the stuff I am pumped about in CF9 are developer enhancements and it's a little harder to make a project that showcases inline structs as an expression :)
That's cool, Adobe should use you as a middle man for all their contests ;)
@Brad: Remember - it need not be a "project" per se. Again, it could be a demo of something. As long as it runs by itself then it's ok.
Couple of questions...
I attended the Flex/CF Roadshow last week in Chicago. I'm now attempting to deploy a flash/flex project to a 3rd party web host; however I ran into a situation. I uploaded the compiled objects to http://techsolutions-llc.co... , but continue getting an error invoking the cfc (apparently not found.) *Note: my development flex server location did not include the "examples" dir.
Found out that copying the objects to http://techsolutions-llc.co... had no issues running. So my question is: how does the swf know where to look for the cfc - would have assumed relative path to the compiled dir? This is the cfc added as a data service to the Flex project. Hopefully my question makes sense.
I know it's not much, but introduced myself to flex last week and am proud of my first flex app using CF9. Does this qualify for the best of contest?
Thanks - Tim
Tim - if you use the RemoteObject tag it is relative to the server root (I believe). I do not believe it is relative to the HTML file.
And ANY entry is acceptable!