Picture yourself in a hotel lobby in Washington, DC, clutching a laptop bag and a suitcase, surrounded by about a hundred other people with similar luggage and appearance. You've just checked in, and you're flipping through the conference guide to get your bearings and making last-minute changes to your session choices.

It's a vibrant atmosphere. Upstairs, the exhibition area is filled with people crowding around demonstration stands, and every tee shirt seems to have a high-tech message.

The Second Allaire Developer Conference ran November 5-8 and attracted over 2,700 attendees, more than double last year's attendance. The major ingredients packing the schedule were keynote speeches, in-depth sessions, hands-on training, panel discussions, special interest groups, sponsor presentations, an exhibition area, and birds-of-a-feather sessions. This mix, combined with the enthusiasm of the Allaire developer community, created a very exciting and stimulating atmosphere.

Keynote speeches from Allaire began two of the conference days, and sessions ran all day in parallel. Time between sessions was taken up with coffee and networking. Sessions were organized along these tracks:

• Application Development
• Solutions Development
• Server Management
• Technology Integration
• Best Practices

Dry ice, techno music, laser lights, and strobe lights all contributed to the youthful and enthusiastic atmosphere. With pressure on Allaire's stock price in recent months, many attendees seemed to be seeking reassurance. The message from David Orfao was clear: Wall Street can worry alone for now; Allaire is focusing on getting the right technology in place to make 2001 a fantastic year.

Jeremy Allaire reinforced Allaire's three technology pillars - Web application servers, visual tools, and application frameworks - with product demonstrations. Allaire's major goals are mass adoption of their technology through low prices, ease of use, and accessibility - hiding complexity and making it readily accessible.

Web Application Servers Pillar ColdFusion
ColdFusion 5.0 is due out in the first half of 2001. Some features developers can look forward to are:

• User-defined functions: It will be possible to create your own functions and include them in a CF page. This is a significant and frequently requested feature.
• Querying queries: With the tag CFSQL, it will be possible to create SQL statements that query existing query result sets. This means you'll be able to draw all the data you need into memory from several data sources, then extract just those pieces you need at given points in your application. Major advantages here are (1) performance improvements - an entire product catalog can be drawn into memory at start-up, and the ap-plication can access all the data it needs in memory rather than going back to the database each time; and (2) the ability to query two database result sets and combine them with SQL joins.
• Partial page output: In CF 5.0 pages will be streamed to the browser. At present, the CF server creates the entire HTML page, then passes it to the browser. In CF 5.0 pages will be streamed as they're generated.

JRun
JRun was demonstrated briefly. JavaServer Pages (JSP) editing features of JRunStudio were demonstrated, as was JRun's built-in WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) gateway. You can use this gateway on your development workstation to build and test WAP/WML applications. Of course full WML support is being included in JRunStudio, too.

Harvest
Harvest is Allaire's Web system administration tool. Allaire wants to duplicate what they've done for developers - make development of Web applications simpler and make the lives of Web system administrators easier. Harvest supports the creation of CAR - ColdFusion Archives - files that can store everything required by a ColdFusion application, from databases to CF pages to application settings. These archive files can be en-crypted and protected with authentication keys. The first advantage to creating a CAR file is that deployment of a ColdFusion application is now simple. You take a CAR file, and Harvest knows how it should be unpacked and deployed. This feature is available in ColdFusion 5.0, and the CF administrator can schedule automatic creation of CAR files.

CF 5.0 also includes a new ad-ministrator section that monitors the health of applications. Suppose, for example, that a file required by the application is accidentally de-leted. The monitor indicates that the application has a problem, and the administrator can respond. The typical response might well be to restore a previously archived version of the application.

Neo
Neo is part of the pharaoh initiative, the next-generation Web application platform from Allaire. CFML pages will run on a Java engine. The demonstration consisted of a server that had both the Neo engine and the ColdFusion server running. A simple application to calculate primes was executed on the ColdFusion server and took about 12 seconds. The very same CF page was executed on the Neo engine and took about 4 seconds. This is an astonishing improvement in speed. How is it done? Well, JRun already runs Enterprise JavaBeans and servlets. Servlets can be created from JSP. So Allaire's approach is to translate a ColdFusion page into a JSP page and allow JRun to take over and create the servlet from that JSP page. This approach is brilliant because it gives Allaire the ability to take advantage of Java as well as to shield the developer from the complexities of Java - even from the complexities of JSP. Because Neo is based on JRun, an immediate and powerful contingent side effect is that applications are isolated in memory.

Visual Tools Pillar
The visual tools pillar of technology for Allaire was reinforced with demonstrations and an announcement that Allaire has acquired Kawa - the Java IDE (integrated development environment) from Tek-Tools (www.tek-tools.com). A brief demonstration was given of Kawa in which an entity bean was created simply by completing a step-by-step wizard. Kawa generates all the Java code stubs.

Web Application Framework Pillar Spectra
Spectra is Allaire's offering on the Web application framework pillar of technology. It's an object-based de-velopment environment that provides services such as content management, syndication, workflow, personalization, and data abstraction. Spectra 1.5 is due out early in 2001, and some new features were demonstrated. Allaire also announced their next Spectra release, code-named "Dharma."

Summary
Allaire is continuing to focus on developers. Their goals of ease of use, accessibility, and mass adoption continue to be met by solid development tools and Web platforms. This year promises to be an exciting year for the company. They've successfully embraced open industry standards and built them into their products. Java is now central to Allaire's technology offering, but they've succeeded in making it central without alienating the strong ColdFusion development community that's accustomed to developing Web applications with CFML. With the price point for server products well below that of most competitors, Allaire is poised to in-crease its presence in the Java server, Web application server, and visual tools markets.