For those of you still unaware of the news, Macromedia has highly publicized the impending release of its next major version of ColdFusion, which is codenamed “Blackstone”.

You can read more about it here: Macromedia ColdFusion to Get Feature-Rich Upgrade.

Upgrading from CF5 to CFMX might have been somewhat painful for some, due to the slight differences in behavior between those two versions of ColdFusion. Architecturally, you might compare the leap from CF5 to CFMX to the leap Apple recently made from OS 9 to OS X. With both technologies, considering that the new architecture is completely different from the old architecture, it truly is amazing that the new is as backward-compatible as it is. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still bumps and headaches along the way.

Now that that time has past, we can resume our normal schedule, where a major upgrade introduces lots of great new features without necessarily breaking existing code. This is exactly what Blackstone looks to do.

Many people are excited about the built-in support for enhanced HTML forms, PDF generation, and enhanced report graphics. I certainly am excited to see these new features and will undoubtedly use them extensively. However, I am much more excited about the newly-opened doors that the promised ColdFusion system gateways will provide. In Blackstone, you will be able to build apps that use more than just HTTP to communicate; you could use instant messages, text messaging, FTP, SSH, and more! This is particularly exciting since I’ve dabbled with such functionality in the past, but had to use really convoluted methods to accomplish it.

The continued enhancements to ColdFusion by Macromedia are making ColdFusion developers more and more capable of writing very powerful apps in a very short period of time, making ColdFusion a platform that is beginning to stand out from ASP, PHP, and others ever more as its development progresses.

Macromedia, you have my kudos.