sneak peak at ColdFusion’s future

Ben Forta just finished his quick European trip (UK, Belgium and Netherlands) to present “a sneak peak at ColdFusion’s future”. I was lucky enough to see him twice: the first time at the European Commission in a meeting room packed of 80 developers, the second time in Brussels in front of 45 developers.

Both presentations started with a quick demo of BlazeDS data push and LCDS built-in conflict management: even if I’ve already seen this demo several times, it’s always nice to see the reaction of the audience. Will BlazeDS replace LCDS Express in Centaur ? No words on that yet…

Second part focused on Centaur and Bolt: I really loved the introduction tag line

” Advancing rapid application development
and turning developers into heroes. ”

Now let’s see what has been shown.

ColdFusion Exposed Services Layer (ESL)

This is a feature for non ColdFusion developers: you will be able to access, using your own language (PHP, .NET,…) and via SOAP or AMF,  integrated CF services without writing any CFML code! Those services includes Query Service, Mail, Generation and Manipulation of PDF files, Imaging, Charting etc…  Those ESL will be also available for Flex/AIR developers via CF-ESL.

For me It sounds pretty interesting to use the same services across different applications/languages instead of having to buy 3rd party extensions (when available),  no?

Local/Remote Database Synchronization (CF/AIR)

Centaur will be able to handle data synchronisation between an AIR SQLite DB and a ColdFusion datasource. It will make easier the development of Offline AIR apps using a ColdFusion backend. W00t!

CFScript Enhancements

Here you will find Explicit local scope for private function variables, implicit getters/setters (Yeahh!), Import & New keyword.

After seeing that I was wondering why Adobe did not decide to replace CFScript with ActionScript 3.0? If you were at MAX last year, you have probably seen this demo of server side ActionScript in Centaur… why maintaining another scripting language so close to AS 3.0? It would have made things easier…  Anyone agree with that?

ORM (Hibernate)

Centaur implements Object Relational Mapping via Hibernate: ORM provides Database vendor independence, caching, concurrency via a representation of your relational data in an Object Model. I’m not that comfortable talking about ORM so I will make that one a bit short. I can only tell you that Bolt has full support for ORM and generate all the code for you, even if we only saw a simple example

Bolt

Bolt is the new ColdFusion IDE: it’s an Eclipse plugin like Flex Builder, so people doing Flex development will be happy with the full integration. It has Server management, server monitoring, services introspection, code generation, etc… what is interesting also is that you can create extension for Bolt using CFML code! So you will be able to create plugins to do code generation in your favorite framework

I think that’s almost everything that has been covered. I was really happy to see some many enthusiastic ColdFusion developers… haven’t seen that for  a while And remember that those features are only a small part of what will be available in the release version.

A last thing to finish: if you don’t know yet Claude Englebert, the EMEA ColdFusion Product Specialist, don’t hesitate to get in touch with him for anything related to CF (events, User Group, promotion, support…)!

I know Ben Forta loves when people are playing with photoshop

Posted in AIR, ColdFusion, Database, Flex