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As I write, the CFUnited 2008 conference is underway in Washington, DC. This morning's keynote from Adobe brought out some really great details about ColdFusion 9 and how the new ColdFusion / Flex / AIR integration will play out. I am not present at CFUnited this year, but I have compiled some of the details. If you are a Flex / AIR developer who hasn't considered ColdFusion - you might want to reconsider upon the release of ColdFusion 9.
Disclaimer: All of these details have been compiled from blogs and from people who are currently at the conference - there is a possibility that there might be some things that are inaccurate.
Hibernate Baked In
From what I have seen the hibernate support in ColdFusion 9 is great. It seems as though the developer creates a CFC with the needed details, and ColdFusion automatically generates all of the hibernate XML behind the scenes. In addition, ColdFusion will create the needed tables and columns from the cfproperty values for a CFC.
AIR Integration
One of the more handy things announced was the integration of a new package of ColdFusion integration classes in Flex / AIR. For example, in AIR you can reference ColdFusion datasources and perform queries on those datasources. In addition AIR will detect if you are online or offline. If you are offline, it will store the queries in the embedded database, and when you go online again, it will automaticall sync with ColdFusion.
Free for Academic Use
UPDATE:I forgot to mention this in the initial release of this article.
ColdFusion will now be free for academic use. Many of you know that recently finished a few years working for Georgia Tech, so I truly see the value in this. In addition, the hope is that it will make ColdFusion adoption more prevalent in higher-education web design and development programs.
Language Updates
In addition to the previously mentioned updates, there are many language updates including a much needed LOCAL variable scope (you can say goodbye to 'var' if you want). However, from what I can tell, none of these changes should break already existing applications.
CFML Advisory Committee
In addition to all of these updates, Adobe announced the CFML Advisory Committee that will be composed of Adobe developers, Railo developers, and community members. This committee will be headed up by Sean Corfield:
Release Date
There is not a definite date for ColdFusion 9 - although we do know it will be sometime in 2009.
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I am very excited about Hibernate finally making its way into CF, I have been using Hibernate for years as the back end of Flex applications and its ease and power will definitely be a plus to the CF world.
I totally agree. This will bring a unified ORM solution to a lot of developers who haven't used Hibernate before. I think this is a great addition.
Thanks man.
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Personally, I can't believe that you don't make CF free and charge for support. You're certainly not encouraging take up.
Thanks for this details about such an conference.
Tom
Dan: CF is already totally affordable and a bargain if you consider the time (money) it actually SAVES you. I can't believe that people clamor from the masses that it should be free.
I wonder when the calendar functions will be updated for other languages...
We need to implement drop-down lists which include the month names. This is easy in English, but for all other languages the month names need to be stored in a structure or whatever and then extracted.
Well technically CF is not entirely free for academic use. You can use it only in relation to teaching CF, but not for production usage by academic institutions.
David: I would argue that if we look at it from a software architecture perspective, CF's lack of support for best practice software development has probably been costing companies/developers more time and money than it has saved with its faciful tags/widgets such as cfform or cfgrid, which IMHO most wiser developers who cares about standards and extensibility would stay away from in the first place.