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In this blog entry I am writing a short recap of our first week of our Railo road show - 2008.Monday
The Lufthansa strike costed me some nerves and the meeting in Tampa. I anyway flew to Tampa and met some of the guys from Jagged Peak, the ones that build the Shop/Warehousing software Edge.

Tuesday
On tuesday I flew up to Detroit and presented at the CFUG in Lansing. Thanks Rick and Nick for organizing this meeting. There were around 15 attendees, amongst them John Farrar who wrote the latest CF8 book and is possibly writing a Railo one. The meeting went well, allthough I must say that in the meetings that last more than one and a half hour I need to introduce a break inbetween. I did that later and it turned out to be not that exausting. We all ended up in a pizza resaurant and talked about different things. I guess the new extension manager recieved a lot of attention. I'll blogpost more about it in one of my future entries.

Wednesday
After leaving Detroit, next stop was Washington/Baltimore. I first payed a visit to Matthew Woodward in the US Senate IT department. There I took him and his colleagues on a tour through Railo 3 and all the new video functionality. That seemed to have impressed them the most since they are working themselves on different video solutions. Jason Blum posted about Railo in his hungarian blogpost. Below you can read what he wrote in english (with courtesy of Jason):

ColdFusion has always kicked PHP's ass - Now, Railo makes it cheaper too! Yesterday Gert Franz from Railo generously swung by our office for a couple hours on his way up to Baltimore for his next step on the Railo 2008 US Tour. And I just have to say this guy knocked my socks off. First, a little background: Everyone knows the ColdFusion Markup Language is hands-down the fastest way to build secure, robust, fast, scalable and rich web applications. Sorry, PHP doesn't come close. (Ever notice how you'll meet lots of ColdFusion developers who used to use PHP, ASP or JSP. You'll never meet a PHP, ASP or JSP developer who used to use ColdFusion.) So why hasn't ColdFusion caught on in Hungary? I've been told it's because the relatively high cost of Adobe's ColdFusion licenses has prevented organizations from building up a community of ColdFusion developers. Well, that's about to change: You see, because the ColdFusion Markup Language was never patented, there have been a number of efforts over the years to open-source CFML parsing engines: BlueDragon, Coral, the Smith Project and others. And yesterday I saw a new addition that just knocked my socks off: These couple of guys at Railo in Bern, Switzerland, have cobbled together a very impressive product which they will be open-sourcing in November, in partnership with JBoss. Now, Gert gave me permission to share his slide-set here. But a couple highlights I just want to point out: Two layers of server administration: site-level and server-level make this a solid way to offer affordable and secure CFML hosting. Magic functions and implicit getters and setters. Everything is serializable. Built-in search engine Lucene does everything Verity did. You can share a "cluster" scope with any server in the world, over secure http web services. Seamless support for Amazon S3 (This is really cool!) Mind-blowing tag. I think I could build my own YouTube in about ten minutes. Check out http://www.myswitzerland.com/video/ Anyway, I'll be blogging more about Railo, but check out the slide-set. And try out the Railo Express Version, with nothing to install! Just download it, unzip it and fire it up.

If you are able to read hungarian here's the link phenotypical.com. If not, you can at least have a look at the slides I presented on that page at the bottom.

After leaving Matt and his guys I rallied to the hotel in order to check in so that I can make it to the Baltimore meeting in time. I just arrived at 6:00pm sharp! I had forgotten my cellphone in the hotel so I wouldn't have been able to call someone there if something went wrong on the way.
Anyway the meeting went really good and we covered most of the things I wanted to talk about (with a break inbetween :-)). Thanks Bob Clingan and Nick Tong for taking care of it. Mark Esher was there as well and he had some things to say about my visit as well.
Christian Ready, good friend of mine also has been there (and he was there on the next day at the Central Penn CFUG, and maybe he will be there in Philadelphia as well, so he somehow turns into a groupie...)

Thursday
On thursday I drove up to Harrisburg together with Christian Ready to visit the Central Penn CFUG. We were a cosy small group (including Mary Jo Sminkey, CFWebStore) so we could cover very many details. Thanks Mary Jo for taking care of it.

Friday
On Friday I left for Ontario/California to visit Luis Majano (author of Coldbox) and the Inland Empire CFUG. There were around 20 to 25 attendees amongst them people like Mike Brunt and Peter Amiri. I am very glad to see all those people in these meetings and I hereby want to thank all of you who have attended my pesentations so far.
Again in the Presentation and after it we talked a lot about the new Extension Manager and the possibilities it might bring to all of you that are offering free or non-free software.

So what's next
I am just sitting in my hotel in Seattle while writing this, where Michael Streit our CTO joined me and we met Malcolm O'Keeffe and Matt Levine from our american partner Blueriver. Seattle is really a great city. We finally get to see something of a city. Up until now it was only airport, highway and hotel. Today we will present Railo and Sava the open source CMS of Blueriver to the Seattle CFUG. Thanks Maya for organizing that. So everybody who is in the neighbourhood just come and meet us there.
Tomorrow follows Salt Lake City and then Denver, Philadelphia, New York (looking foreward to see you Peter) and finally we close our tour in Boston on August 11th. We have some additional meetings with several companies in order to keep us busy, but I must tell you up until now it has been a real pleasure. So if you find time to visit us anywhere during the rest of our tour, just come by. See you when we see you.