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.