News and Tidbits on ColdFusion 9 (aka Centaur)

I just came across two blog posts which highlight some probably and some possible features for the next version of ColdFusion. My friend Adam Lehman (on Adobe's CF team) made an interesting post about the process that Adobe uses to develop new features for new versions of their products. It's a really interesting read, and the Synchronous Development process they use sounds quite interesting. You can't get the full details on that process from the SyncDev Web site because, well, their business is to sell consulting services. The key process idea of "Sell, Design, Build" (rather than "Design, Build, Sell") is a really interesting one as it ensures that your customers (and people you want as your customers) would actually want to buy your product before you ever build it. That's pretty powerful stuff for ensuring that your customer base will actually go out and buy your product. This is especially true of software, where versions above #4 tend to be about adding "nice" features when the product has already solved the core problems it was meant to solve or where the product has a free (often open-source) alternative.

While Adam doesn't talk about anything that hasn't been announced elsewhere, it's an interesting and valuable read to understand not only Adobe's product development process, but where the ColdFusion team, specifically, is coming from in determining the product's future.

Brian Rinaldi has put together a much more extensive look at all the public knowledge about ColdFusion 9. From process improvements to actual feature descriptions, his overview is a great read for anyone interested in the next version of the product and the language. I found it particularly interesting that it appears that Adobe has not gone the route of the Active Record pattern with their Hibernate integration, which I think may not save developers a ton of time but will instead allow for more flexible, robust uses of Hibernate from within ColdFusion 9. Hibernate is going to save developers a lot of time as it is, so I don't think there's a big loss in productivity by not going the Active Record route. (Implicit getters and setters will be a huge time saver, however.)

The big unknowns are the "management features," as they're sometimes called. Those are the easy-to-grasp, sexy, obvious features which make it much easier to sell a product upgrade to managers. This could include a real ColdFusion IDE, or audio/video management tools, workflow and BPEL engine integration, or who knows.

We'll know a lot more by the time MAX is over at the end of November. I'm looking forward to the time we'll finally get to play with CF9!