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:

CFML Advisory Committee

Release Date

There is not a definite date for ColdFusion 9 - although we do know it will be sometime in 2009.