CodFusion

So I've been at cfObjective this weekend and tonight Adobe had a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session on new features people would like the see in ColdFusion 9. I came in a little late and also didn't catch every suggestion, but here are the ones I took note of..

- An AIR based CF Admin tool to remoting control the server settings

- Faster loading of CFCs

- Application specific class paths

- Expand the AdminAPI CFCs to cover all the settings in the CF Administrator

- Support ECMA script. Basically, several people were suggesting writing Actionscript 3 style code inside CF. Some also suggested using typing in this as well. I'm not a hugh fan of cfscript itself. My view is that if you want your underlining business objects to be in a scripting language then use another language (i.e. Java) and leave the presentation layer to ColdFusion. Which, by the way, may leave some you to ask why use CF at all. Well, since the presentation layer is usually in HTML or XML. Having the underlining language that generates that code to also be tag based keeps you from having to escape syntax all the time like you see people having to do in PHP and other scripting based languages. As a further note, Sean Corfield also mention during this discussion that he has a project on RiaForga.org called "Scripting for ColdFusion 8" (http://scripting.riaforge.org/) which allows you to run PHP or Ruby code inside ColdFusion.

- Have a Customer Advisory Board for future product development

- cfVideo, a image to modify and brand video files like you can do with cfImage. Also a similar tag for sound files

- PDF form creation. This is actually a part of LiveCycle and I can't see Adobe incorporating that over.

- cfAnt / cfSVN tags, this was my suggestion. There has been an undocumented tag called cfAnt in ColdFusion for years. Adobe should take that out from the shadows. Ray Camden mention that that Rob Gonda has a SVN Abstraction Layer Service on RiaForge (http://svnservice.riaforge.org/). My point is that SVN can be used for many other things than organizing your code. For example, it can be a repository for business documents.

- Sharepoint integration

- Nested Transactions and also support nested transactions that hit different databases

- a JAR format for ColdFusion files and projects

- Have a Eclipse based CF Builder that is fully supported by Adobe. So have the code inspection and other features that Flex Builder currently has. Jason Delmore (the ColdFusion Project Manager) asked would we pay for this product and pretty much everyone said yes.

- Stop onRequest from messing up WebService calls and direct CFC calls

- Instead of having the <cfset var variablename logic. Simply have a local scope in your functions and methods. For example, >cfset local.variablename... This would be  nice since it will follow the scoping logic of the other variable scopes. Also, a few people would like not to be forced to have these variable creations at the top of their methods.

- Have per application trusted cache. This could be very interesting.

- Have a cachedUntilChanged in the cfquery tag

- Better internationalization support. ColdFusion is falling behind on this front.

- Integration with InDesign Server. A very nice idea where ColdFusion can be integrated into the publishing side of things.

- Hibernate integration