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.

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.

So we heard the keynote from Adobe ColdFusion’s product manager this morning about ColdFusion 8, aka Scorpio, aka cool F’ing S. I gotta say, it’s probably the buzz around the conference, but I think they’re finally starting to get it right. Below I’ve listed what they revealed about the product:

• <cfobject> can now be used to instantiate .NET classes given the DLL they reside in
• Integration of email and calendar events with Microsoft Exchange
• OS Support - Mac/Intel, Windows Vista, Windows Longhorn Server
• Application server support - JBoss now available
• Support for virtual environments - Virtual PC and VMWare
• Enterprise Server Monitoring - Snapshots of server state, robust alert system, thread management, memory usage monitoring, multiple server connections for monitoring. Hints were made at a potential Apollo app being used.
• Role-based permission scheme now used for built in authentication
• Intefaces added via <cfinterface>
• CFC serialization at least via JSON
• JavaScript operator support (e.g. - ++, –, <=, >=, etc) in <cfscript>
• Ability to pass attributes as a single collection to any tag
• Illuded to possible unified support in <cfscript> and tag-based markup
• SFTP support
• Integration of FIPS-140 strong crypto library based on RSA implementation
• Per application settings (e.g. - cfmappings)
• Native AJAX support via <cfform> (FREAKIN’ AMAZING, check out my next blogs!!!!)
• AJAX Debugger added which distills output from <cfform> output
• Something about data services, but it was just a foot note on a slide
• Java 6 support which was mentioned as an aside but confirmed
• FUll PDF integration - extract data, populate a PDF form, manipulation, thumbnail images from PDF snapshots
• Adobe Connect integration - ability to add CFML code to a Connect presentation
• Amazing image library and the addition of an image datatype - Ability to choose multiple algorithms for processing, fast as S.
• Addition of the <cffeed> tag for RSS and Atom feeds
• CFReporting updated to use Livecycle Reporting, whoever the F will use that.

The big announcement for the conference was <cfthread> which wasn’t that exciting considering what we’re doing with Java. Adobe went public with it though, so hurray…

Let me reiterate, Scorpio looks amazing. With the functionality they’ve introduced, CF has really started to catch up to other web-based scripting languages. The data binding functionality alone really get me siked up. Adobe Marketing (1), Brian (0).