what do I know

Well, let me start out by saying, I’ve always hated the <cfform> tag. I found that it always polluted your client-side code and provided little benefit other than some crappy CF validation via form input naming convention. With that said, after seeing Sean Corfeild’s presentation today … I will definitely use <cfform> from here out. Again this may be the buzz of seeing the product demos, but wow (with a capital World).

So the talk started about with Sean showing us how native JSON support will now be available in Scorpio. At a very granular level you have functions to validate JSON and handle marshalling for JSON. Then he went into the coolest S I’ve seen thus far at the conference : data binding using <cfform>. OMFG, you can bind to any of the following:

• variables
• a CFC method
• any JavaScript function
• any URL returning JSON

So you may be asking yourself, what else do I have to do to use databinding and have fun AJAX stuff work on the screen? The answer is, for most basic cases, nothing. Let me repeat, nothing. Tyler begin your criticisms now, because I’m sold. Everything is written for you to allow dynamic binding to cfform elements using AJAX. Tons of work has gone into completely redoing the rendering tools available in ColdFusion. The YUI and Ext JS libraries have been fully integrated to provide RIA elements w/o using Flash, if you want to use them. Below are a few of the changes Sean brought up:

• <cftextarea> now supports rich text editing switched on and off via an attribute
• Form fields can have an “autosuggest” attribute which will allow static or dynamic population of a div which will show a subset of a list as you type
• A tag has been created for standardizing tooltips, <cftooltip>
• <cfgrid> and <cftree> are now based off of YUI widgets
• Ability to use tags like <cfajaxproxy> and <cfajaximport> along with JavaScript code to emulate ColdFusion functionality via JavaScript code
• Built-in debugger to distill and report on AJAX traffic
• Addition of <cfmenu> for cascading menus
• Addition of <cfwindow> to create dialogs using DHTML which can be modal, movable and resizable based on dragging the mouse
• Every cfform element is fully accessible via css
• Addition of <cfdiv> and <cfpod> for creation layout elements
• Addition of layouts : Tabs, HBox, VBox, and Border all of which look really cool.
• CFCs can be hit directly and JSON marshalling is handled automatically for methods.

I will admit, the client source code was a disaster as expected. They said once the produt hits its release, a lot of cleaning up on the code generation would be done. With the functionality these new tools add, I’m willing to sacrifice a little bit of control finally.

• cf.objective() 2007 : Top Secret Scorpio!
• cf.objective() 2007 : Top Secret Scorpio!
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