More Tidbits on ColdFusion 9

Posted on September 26, 2008 at 8:28 AM
Related Categories: ColdFusion

Sean Corfield covered the keynote at the Wee Dram of Scotch conference yesterday, where Adam Lehman talked about some of the possible new features in ColdFusion 9. To quote Sean:

He said that Adobe is considering how to expose all of the "services" inside CF as SOAP and AMF remote services. The idea is that it would allow clients to access the engines that drive CF's query, mail, document (PDF), imaging, charting, Exchange services etc. They are considering making AS3 libraries available that would allow Flex developers to easily call any of these services directly, making CF the back end of choice because of the rich functionality it adds to Flex. An interesting approach. He also said they are considering integrating BlazeDS more deeply into CF, not like the current optional LCDS Express install, but as a core part of CF which would open up the possibility of direct message handling via CFCs as well as potential improvements to AMF performance (since it would be tightly integrated with CF).

The key point here is that Adobe is, potentially, looking at ColdFusion as the "hub" for a lot of development for a lot of different platforms. If core CF services (such as querying, mail, image manipulation and so on) are exposed as remote services, you can have PHP or .NET or J2EE applications calling these services. Interesting idea, though most other platforms have libraries which do many of these things, and do them natively. That may not be the case for everything (particularly AMF-based querying) and for every platform (Ruby and Perl don't, for example), but I think that developers who primarily code on these other platforms would say "Why use CF when I can grab a native PHP/.NET/J2EE library which does this for me?"

Exposing CF functionality as a series of AS3 libraries really does bind (pun intended) Flex to CF much more closely. That's definitely a good thing, as it increases the capabilities of Flex and keeps development strong within the Adobe family, while the more general Web services exposure of core CF services makes it available to other platforms.

And I'd personally love to see BlazeDS integrated deeply in to CF. It would make for faster, easier application building in CF and really help promote the use of the platform for data synchronization in rich Web applications. BlazeDS and LCDS is really nifty stuff, but it's a bit of a pain to configure, and there are some issues with CF object marshalling and management which need to be addressed. Deep integration of BlazeDS in to CF would knock down those two major barriers, and give the platform another needed bost.

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