Virtual CFUnited 2008

WORK IN PROGRESS

Thanks to Adobe, and their Connect product, several of the CFUnited presentations are online. I thought it would be easier for everyone if I just listed them for reference.

Keynote - Ben Forta & Adam Lehman

Highlights

• Confirmation that AIR was central to the development of ColdFusion 8
• Pride in the new open-ness to the bug reporting and feature request systems
• CF9 is called Centaur, will advance CFML and will improve both integration and the developer experience
• Adobe has recognised that the problem facing CF customers (and the industry) is the lack of developers. Therefore, ColdFusion (and training materials) will be totally free for students and faculty for academic use, similar to FlexBuilder
• A CFML Language Advisory Committee has been formed to define rules and guidelines for CFML now and in the future
• A sneak-peak at Centaur (CF9)
• UDFs and CFCs via CFSCRIPT (which is looking like C++ now...)
• LOCAL scope now pre-defined (no more cfset var local) and you don't have to predefine your local vars
• introduction of CFFINALLY (post CFCATCH) and CFCONTINUE
• yet another way of creating objects (new keyword),
• implicit constructors to shorten object creation,
• implicit getters and setters inside cfcomponent based on cfproperty,
• new Server.cfc file to run things on server start and server end;
• ColdFusion/AIR integration to be made easy by CF9;
• A look at the CF9-AIR sync/integration. It's temporary code, but shows what they're thinking about. Much more automatic in terms of online/offline database transactions.
• Object Relational Mapping will be implicitly included in CF9 (like Hibernate). This involves creating an instance of an object, setting properties then letting CF take care of the writing of that 'CFC' to the database. This is as simple as <cfcomponent orm="true" datasource="cfartgallery"></cfcomponent> It uses the CFC name to work out the table name. Remember: implicit getters and setters (which can be seen on a dump, even though they don't exist!).