As businesses become more sophisticated in their use of the Internet, a single web site in a single language is becoming less common and the trend is toward multiple languages and often to multiple, regional and/or branded web sites. Supporting multiple sites (multiple domains) on a single code base is known as "multi-tenant" architecture. Multi-tenant and multi-lingual web platforms present a number of interesting challenges.

I've helped build two such systems, a content management system at Broadchoice and more recently a dating platform at World Singles. In this deep dive, we'll look at the pros and cons of many of the decisions my teams had to make as we faced and overcame a variety of technical challenges. We'll cover different approaches to web, application and database infrastructure, authentication and security, skinning, content management in multiple languages, and more!

Software development has cycles. In the 1980's, functional programming languages were "hot" but somehow they never became mainstream. Instead, object-oriented languages took over the mainstream and that has shaped how most of us program today. However, functional programming languages have started to get more attention recently, partly because Moore's Law has begun to stall and instead of chips continuing to get more powerful, we are moving to multiple cores - and we need to take advantage of concurrent processing in order to leverage those cores.

Functional programming languages focus on immutability of shared data and higher order functions. The former makes concurrent programming much easier and the latter allows for small "pure" functions to be easily composed into sophisticated algorithms. In addition, the nature of functional programming allows for much easier testability - in the absence of side effects.

In this session, you'll learn about some functional programming languages that are making waves these days as well as some techniques you can apply to solving your own problems in a way that's easier to test, easier to reuse and easier to leverage concurrency.

Reviewing what's available in the Open Source world for CFML

I thought this might be a bit of fun to post. It's a short "What's Hot in CF?" preso from the "day zero" meeting prior to MXDU 2005.

This was a sneak preview of several features in CFMX 7 during the early prerelease cycle, presented at the Fusebox 2004 conference.

Not to be confused with the similarly named "Enterprise Integration with ColdFusion" talk from CFUnited of the same year, this presentation looks at different patterns of enterprise application integration and shows how ColdFusion can help. It covers some EAI design patterns, compares and contrasts different types of integration, and provides a number of important caveats / gotches that need to be addressed when dealing with remote systems.

This is an introduction to Mach-II from 2004's "CFUnited" that also covers Macromedia's internal use of the framework on macromedia.com.

See how ColdFusion use has grown within Macromedia and how it was used as an enterprise-level integration layer. Not the same as the similarly named "ColdFusion Enterprise Integration" talk from MAX 2005!

This is an updated version of my "Comparing Application Frameworks" presentation that now covers ColdBox as well as updated versions of Mach-II, Model-Glue and Fusebox.

We're starting to see a lot of interest in event-driven programming because Flex demands it, AJAX uses it to some extent and some popular application frameworks use this approach (ColdBox, Mach-II, Model-Glue). This talks looks at expanding this technique to other aspects of ColdFusion programming. If Flex looks alien to you, this talk should let you get your head around the techniques in a familiar environment, helping you get ready for Flex. This is the original version from Scotch on the Rocks 2008. An updated version was given at MAX 2008.