what do I know

WWBD. This is literally the shirt a bunch of us wore while Ben Forta gave his talk. I think it was meant to flatter and mock … that being said, there were a bunch of us and I’m a follower. In any case, Ben went over the newly released facts for ColdFusion 8 today. The biggest of all of them was a confirmation that the release date was truely MID 2007, so probably June or July.

Unbeknown to Ben, he revealed a feature that everyone had been showing all weekend, the CF AJAX debugger… We were a little confused about what was going on, but he explained a little more about it and I guess it was cool. He basically showed us that when using the <cfform> tag and its AJAX capabilities, ColdFusion loads its own DOM into the browser via a <script> include. If you want to add custom messages to their AJAX debugger, you can do so through their DOM.

Ben also reviewed the current capabilities of the ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse. He showed a wizard to build modular window-based Flex app within Eclipse and then revealed a way to do the exact same application using CF and AJAX in a wizard for Eclipse. I had never seen the ColdFusion extensions for Eclipse, so it was cool to see how some of the “out of the box” applications have been created.

The coolest part of the talk, in my opinion, was when Ben revealed that they’ve integrated the CF Debugger into Eclipse’s default debugging perspective. You configure Eclipse to listen to the remote debug port on Scorpio and then when a request is made to the ColdFusion Server while you have that code open (in debug mode), Eclipse will begin the debug process. Watch expressions, break points, and all the fun goodness that we know for Java is said to be supported. We’ll see if this includes hot deploy of code during debugging like we can do in Java.

The final feature Ben revealed was that FDS can now be installed within the same application server context as ColdFusion to increase performance. I haven’t done any CF/Flex integration, but this will definitely make it easier to mess with later if I want to. He said the install process for CF8 will even ask you if you want to install it. Pretty cool stuff.

• cf.objective() 2007 : Top Secret Scorpio!
• cf.objective() 2007 : AJAX Integration With Scorpio! - Take that JSF!
• cf.objective() 2007 : Real World SOA: Building Services with ColdSpring and Transfer
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