In case you missed it earlier this week, Adobe has recently released ColdFusion 9 beta on Adobe Labs and ColdFusion Builder on Adobe Labs. I was lucky enough to catch a presentation of the new features at last night's DC Flex User Group by Adam Lehman (CF Product Manager), and I have to say, it certainly looks intriguing and very promising.

Here's an informative "What's New in ColdFusion" article by Ben Forta:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/coldfusion9_whatsnew.html

Here's an informative "What's New in ColdFusion Builder" article, also by Ben Forta:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/cfbuilder_whatsnew.html

Here's a series of videos demonstrating some of the new features:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion9/videos/

The short list of new features follows, but be sure to read Ben's article and watch the videos to see full details:

ORM
ColdFusion now supports Hibernate object relational mappings natively. ORM can get pretty complex, but it can also be extremely helpful in rapid development. ORM can enable the application server to manage data connections for you. You can create ORM entity CFCs, and have those generate the database and service layer (including corresponding actionscript objects). Or, vice-versa, you can point CF Builder at the database, and have CF generate CFC entities, services, and corresponding actionscript objects directly from the database structure. This can be a huge time saver when used properly.

New Server Manager AIR Application
ColdFusion now has the "ColdFusion Server Manager" AIR application that can allow you to quickly and easily monitor and administer multiple CF instances from a single interface, complete with monitoring and desktop alerts. The services used to power this AIR application are also exposed as services that you can consume in your own applications.

ColdFusion Builder IDE
As I mentioned earlier, CF is getting a new Eclipse-based IDE that will enable seamless development between Flex and CF projects. You can read more about CF builder in detail here.

Executing Code on Server Startup
This is a handy feature, but I have to admit, I was surprised CF took this long do catch up here.

Working with spreadsheets
CF can now natively read, create and update spreadsheets and treat them as CF querries. This works with Office 97-present, and with OpenOffice documents. This can be very handy if you are parsing uploaded spreadsheet documents (offline data collection).

Caching and Virtual File System
CF pages (or parts of pages) can now be cached on granular levels or maintained in RAM, thus enable faster application performance.

Although most of my recent server side development hasn't been CF, I've invested years of my professional career in CF development, and I'm still a huge fan of CF. It is an extremely powerful tool, and is hard to beat for rapid development and reporting capabilities. In upcoming posts, I will explore some of these new features, and show their integration with an Adobe Flex front-end.

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Andrew Trice
Principal Architect
Cynergy Systems
http://www.cynergysystems.com

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