The CFUnited 2007 keynote was started by Michael Smith, followed by TIm Buntel and Ben Forta.

ColdFusion 8: 8 Reasons You Want It Now!

1. Making applications is even easier. Now comes with Eclipse plugins and wizards, and a server monitor. So this goes beyond the power of the language; now the server itself makes it easier to do development. For instance, there is now step debugging. This all works well with CFEclipse. Also will work well in Flex Builder. The server monitor is useful too; it isn’t just for admins. Developers can use the server monitor to see what pages or queries are running slowly to diagnose your app before you even deploy it.

2. Have confidence in production applications. Server monitor and API are accessible, you can develop some of your own monitoring or administrative functionality. ColdFusion 8 is very backward-compatible. Can upgrade with confidence.

3. It runs in more places. Can run on Mac OS X (Intel), VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server, 64-bit Solaris, JBoss. Regarding virtualization: It may seem unnecessary for it to support that, but it has been optimized to support the virtualization environment.

4. Your users will be happier. Much better support for Flex and AJAX. This allows us to build much more powerful and more intuitive interfaces and applications for our customers. Reporting and PDF applications, on-demand presentations, image support. These are NOT wrappers around Java classes that do image manipulation; the image tags are using Adobe’s own technology.

5. It’s nice and secure. Multiple Admin accounts. So you can set up multiple accounts (for either ColdFusion Administrator or RDS) that have only the access you have set up. Sandboxes can also be bound to particular user accounts. Dreamweaver and even Eclipse with the new plugins will benefit from this security because they use RDS. Stronger encryption is now in place, for free.

6. CFML Evolution. JavaScript operators! No more “GTE” as an operator! Argument collections, which makes conditional arguments, i.e. for CFMail, much easier to do. CFC interfaces. Many added file handling functions that are more efficient. No more tricks and games to manipulate/read large files without bogging down your server. For instance, line-by-line reading. Array and structure creation. CFC serialization. So the language is just continuing to evolve and be more powerful.

7. Plays well with others. ColdFusion has always played well with others in some ways, but maybe not the .NET world so much. Now plays well with .NET, Exchange Server. Added support for RSS/ATOM. Data synchronization and improved Flash Media Server support. So ColdFusion can be effective as a back-end technology that can connect various disparate systems. ColdFusion isn’t just about webpages anymore. ColdFusion can act as a hub between numerous back-end and numerous front-end systems.

8. It’s fast! Really, really fast! Overall server performance. Without making any changes to your code, your application will experience improved speed! The Adobe team analyzed customer code and reviewed the bottlenecks. Made many changes to tag code to improve performance.

For instance, structure manipulate code has DOUBLED in speed. List manipulation and CFSWITCH/CFCASE have TRIPLED in speed. CFParam has basically gone 30 times faster. Date functions are 5-6 times faster. RegEx functions are over twice as fast. IsDefined() is 50% faster. CFC creation (which is known to be exceptionally slow) is around 10-30 times faster (depending on if you compare CFMX6 or CFMX7). Real-world comparison: BlogCFC performance improved by about 40% (255 to 355).

It is very evident from these numbers, then, that ColdFusion 8 is worth the upgrade. Will make your existing apps much, much faster. And we haven’t even touched on stuff like CFThread and how your apps can benefit from that. Also consider how this will save your organization money. Apps are slow and need to upgrade to faster server? Upgrading to ColdFusion 8 may even be more cost-effective!

The release date of ColdFusion 8: Soon. They wouldn’t tell us, but that’s okay.

Flex, Today and Tomorrow

There are apps out there today that we can look at to see the power of Flex. There is a word processor out there, race tracker, Adobe-specific apps (around 15 projects). The ColdFusion monitor in CF8 is in Flex.

Of course, it sits on top of the Flash Player. Expect 90% saturation of Flash Player 9 by the end of the year.

Flex is now open source. Public bug database and roadmap. The open source project will be fully up and running by the end of 2007. Once it is free and open source, makes it difficult to argue implementing it in your company. Low barrier of entry.

Public betas of Flex 3 are available now. Expected that final release of Flex 3 SDK and AIR 1.0 final releases will be available on or around MAX 2007 and the start of 2008.

Why Flex 3?

1. Improvements for designers and developers working together.

2. Hybrid desktop/internet applications with AIR. Cross-OS application engine. Online/offline functionality. Makes it easy for a customer to stay connected to what is going on in their server app without having to create a webpage that they have to browse to. Special AIR-enabled features in Flex.

3. Working with data with advanced DataGrid and charting improvements. New list and data effects. Flex Builder has web services introspection to make it easier to get your app running.

4. Platform evolution. Improved caching of Flex libraries. This will make load-time of applications significantly faster, potentially. Also has improved JavaScript/Ajax wrappers. So the HTML and Flex components of your applications can speak to each other more easily. Flex Builder has improved compiler performance.