Over on the CFUnited blog, Liz has posted the first 8 sessions chosen for the RIA track. They're a great set of topics, but there are five that we (Liz Frederick, Simon Horwith, and myself) all agreed formed a great series of topics for ColdFusion developers looking to build Flex and AJAX RIAs. If you're looking to learn more about this, here's how the five fit together.

These summaries aren't the presenter's abstracts: they're my understanding of the abstract submitted.

Simon Horwith's "CF Software Architecture for Web 2.0"

Simon's session starts with the foundation, showing "best practice approaches" for using CF to back Flex, AIR, AJAX, and LCDS apps.

Jeff Tapper's "Flex 3 and ColdFusion"

Overview of the ColdFusion/Flex technology via AMF/ RPC. Basically, how the two talk, what RemoteObject is, and how to have CFCs and AS3 Value Objects map together. Jeff's presentation builds on Simon's, showing the tech ins and outs of having ColdFusion and Flex communicate.

Joe Rinehart's "From ColdFusion to Flex: Model-View-Controller"

Now that folks of seen how the technologies talk (Jeff) and how to build the backend (Simon), Joe's presentation is about how to build the Flex (or AIR) frontend of a RIA. It's presented using correlations between how many ColdFusion developers already build HTML applications (using MVC) and how MVC can be done in Flex.

(I will not refer to myself in the third person.)

Matt Woodward's "Real World Flex and ColdFusion"

We've seen how they talk (Jeff), architecture for backend (Simon) and frontend (Joe), now Matt puts it all together, building an app with Flex components, Flex events, and an Object-Oriented ColdFusion backend.

Raymond Camden's "Ajax and CF"

Matt and Joe have rambled on about Flex, and now Ray will show how to use ColdFusion backends to power Ajax applications.

Conclusion

For the RIA track, we've got a great progression of sessions for developers looking to jump into building ColdFusion-powered RIAs.

Experienced RIA developers won't be left out: I can't wait to see Robi Sen talk about his take on continuous integration and testing with Flex (something I do, but not 100%), Rob Gonda on security, and Sandy Clark on accessibility.