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User Interface Tags

These set of tags are really great, everything from the AJAX proxy CFAJAXPROXY to the updated UI Components (CFGRID, CFTREE, CFSELECT, and calendars) to new tags like CFWINDOW and CFLAYOUT, these UI enhancements will allow for ColdFusion developers to provided more interactive, richer experiences for their clients. I remember when version 7 was released and looking at Flash Forms and getting excited only to find out their were sever limitations in both what could be done with the UI and its performance. I think this new set of tags will definitely help to create a richer interface without the need for the clunky Flash Forms. I have heard a lot about these tags in the blog sphere, but finally seeing them in use in person shows their power.

CFImage

I know this tag and a huge set of functions has been talked about quite a bit elsewhere, but my take away from this is that there is a very robust image server within ColdFusion now. I have never really had to deal with any image manipulation in the past, so I'll be interested to see how this feature is used by others and in what context.

Improved File I/O

Ben Forta talked about this on his blog and probably the item I am most interested in looking at is the CFLOOP support for reading files by either line or x-number of characters (if I understood that part correctly). I know in my current and past positions that this feature would have been tremendously helpful in reading a large CSV files used to import data for initial system setup.

CFDocument

CFDocument will now support bookmarks and bookmark heiarchies as well as support for section page counts. These enhancements should help developers create better PDF documents that will not come out looking like the non-printable stuff was just scraped all the web page to produce the output.

Reporting Enhancements

There are a number of reporting ehancements as the product definitely moves out of a 1.0 to a more mature 2.0 version. Reports now have the idea of templates. The best comparison that could be made is how templates are done in Dreamweaver sites. Now, I'm not saying the functionality to do them is the same, but the general idea of their usage is the same. Now each individual report doesn't have to have the same header/footer/images in it to get corporate branding, these can be done in a report template and applied to that report. There is now support for conditional formatting of output based on data values. I'm guessing this is enhanced as I thought there was something like this already in the Report engine. Finally, the report, through use of the CFREPORT tag can now be outputted to HTML. What this means is that these reports do now have to be stand alone pieces of the system and can be instead used directly within the layout of an application, similar to that whole Flash Paper thing. Essentially, complex reports could be built and then run to produce as HTML to produce nice tables with all of the information needed. I think that feature alone will get more people using the Report Builder as that is probably much easier than trying to get all the information in the right spots and perform the aggregating functions in runtime.

Database Enhancements

ColdFusion 8 will have a new set of database drivers with native support for MySQL 4 and 5 as well as all the big players including SQL Server 2005. Also, nested CFTRANSACTION tags will now be allowed. This new feature definitely got me excited as there is nothing worse than using other peoples code that you need within a CFTRANSACTION tag only to find out that their code contains one as well. Also, the before mentioned CFDBInfo tag that will allow database introspection into tables, columns, indexes, primary keys, foreign keys, and some details on stored procedures. I'm guessing one of the first projects probably on RIAForge after the release of CF8 will be something similar to PhpAdmin for ColdFusion datasources. That would definitely be cool. Next, CFStoredProc will now support cachedwithin and cachedafter attributes and, as a result, query caching can now be used with CFQUERY's that contain CFQUERYPARAM. All good enhancements to the easiest way to access a database in any web technology!

Integration Enhancements

I don't know if I could add anything else to the integration enhancements talked about elsewhere. The one thing that stood out at me for the .NET integration is that there is supposedly no change needed to .NET assemblies for them to be accessed by CF8. Also, .NET DataTables will now convert to ColdFusion queries with relative ease (hoping so, now can we work on those pesky web services that return them too?). I did want to ask this at the meeting but forgot and that was if there were restrictions on the .NET version that can be accessed by CF8. Maybe someone will answer that here? Please? The Exchange integration looks really good. The ability to create Calendar items is good, but the ability to create Task items is even better. I can see a number of applications where these tags and surrounding functionality can be used and am excite to give them a shot.

One item that a lot of time was spent on last night was general PDF functionality, including forms. There are a number of things that can be done with the PDF manipulation set of tags:

• Obtain PDF metadata
• Extract PDF pages
• Merge PDF Files
• Encrypt files - sign/verify
• Protect files - password assignment
• Flatten files - compress them so they are smaller in size for final delivery
• Extract images and attachments

With the set of tags for PDF forms, one has to remember that this is used to set default data within the PDF form or to extract data form the PDF form, it does not create PDF forms. I think this confusing to some in the audience last night, but Adam and Tim did a great job of walking through where the division in effort would be between ColdFusion and the design/development of the PDF itself.

Server Administration

The server administration enhancements have been reviewed elsewhere, but these are some of the best enhancements in the package. User based administration is key for large corporate environments where multiple developers and system administrators may all need some type of access to the CF Admin functionality but weren't given it before due to the access to all approach before. The monitoring tools should be great in troubleshooting performance issues as well as planning for expandability. The memory usage introspection is great for this type of work and during load testing should really give a sense of what is going on within an application(s).

Overall, the presentation was great, the release looks like it is going to be pretty awesome, and I am excited to start using this as soon as I can. There are going to be a number of session at CFUnited this year, so I would suggest registering for that event as well as information at MAX in Chicago in the fall.