On Tuesday night the UKCFUG had the pleasure of Ben Forta, Mr Evangelism at Adobe, coming over to give us all a run-down on the latest news in the ColdFusion world, and what’s up and coming in the long awaited next version of ColdFusion, Centaur (or 9 as it will more likely be known).
After a late-in-the-day, but necessary change of venue we had 140+ ColdFusion developers descending on the Sway Bar in Holborn, London (also the future venue of the London leg of “Scotch-on-the-Road“). From mine and Nik’s memory we reckon this places this single meeting in the top three in terms of attendance (and that’s a history going back around a decade). This goes to show, that while we might not be the most communicative or vocal community, there are a lot of us, and interest in the platform is still high.
Starting off, Ben talked about the features that are still not a well known fact in the current ColdFusion 8. This focused largely on the built in LiveCycle Data Services and the related Flex integration, but a load of people present honestly appeared to not realise this stuff was built into the product.
After a short break, Ben then moved onto the main event, a preview of ColdFusion 9 and the new ColdFusion Eclipse based IDE, Bolt.
Nothing in either of these products,from what I recall, was described as definite but there were a number of notable features that appeared to get people excited. First up was talk about being able to write CFML as CFSCRIPT across the board (CFC’s and all), and then was coverage of the ColdFusion Exposed Services Layer (CFESL) which basically allows third parties to directly call services built into ColdFusion, such as PDF generation or database querying. This single feature provides a whole load of opportunities for developers - for instance, you could have a dedicated PDF generation server called by other servers, or even generate those documents directly from a Flex app without writing any CFML code.
Then Ben went onto talk about the new built-in ORM based on the Hibernate persistence framework. This is a long awaited addition to CF, with the community having had to roll their own versions in the past. Again, details were sketchy, but from what we understand you can create a CFC based off a database table, and a whole load of magic happens in the back end which allows you to query and interact with your database without having to worry about any SQL.
Finally, Ben talked about Bolt. Bolt is the completely new IDE for ColdFusion. Bolt is essentially an Eclipse plugin, allowing elements of CFML code completion and insight. Additionally there were features around code generation and wizards, all of which are aimed at making the CF developers life easier - the underlying ethos of the ColdFusion product.
All in all it was a fantastic night for all, with free drinks and nibbles supplied by Hostway and Adobe (who also provided some raffle prizes for a few lucky attendees.
We’re busy planning the next UKCFUG, so hopefully we’ll see you there!
EDIT: For those of you that were after the files that Ben was using for the demos - the code can be found here. Beware - it's 400Mb (!)
