The new version will include support for printing HTML documents, banded reporting, rich tag-driven forms for data entry and data management, new support for styles and themes for a consistent look and feel, the ability to easily generate PDFs, and “a big suite of extensions for [Macromedia] Dreamweaver,” Gruber said.
Man people still use CF? Geez, I figured only people from Indiana who work at banks would be crazy enough to keep on using this language no matter how easy it is to pickup. Go figure.
By the way is there any open source CF server implementations around or do you even need a server for it?
ah, bite me. heh.
There’s no open source CF, no. It does run on linux, though (as well as solaris and NT and IBM mainframes). If you want to learn CF, you can get the developer edition for free… it’s like a 5 connection license or something that you can run on a windows 2000 or xp desktop… not sure if there’s a linux developers version or not.
This new version will be very slick. The ability to generate your choice of flashpaper or PDF on the fly will make some parts of my job incredibly easy… especially if I can just throw a source document on the server and have it convert that, too. Have you looked at FlashPaper, Paul? It’s a bloody dream come true. Imagine webpage-embeddable PDF documents that load instantly and don’t have to launch a seperate application, and that won’t crash your browser half the time… and they can be made from anything that can be printed, because like distiller, it’s just a printer driver.
And converting all the cfform functions, particularly CFGRID, to flash instead of java will be great. CFGRID is incredibly useful, but it’s such a pain to work with because it’s a java applet and the code is a bit clunky.
And then there are the reporting functions… they’ve always been fairly useless, but the new version revamps them completely and now it should be very interesting what we can do with them.
BlueDragon, an alternative server implementation:
http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/index.cfm
wow, cool. I didn’t know about that.
I wonder what Macromedia thinks of that.
Too bad we can’t use the free version… no support for MSSQL
Quite a few people actually… Asside from being a very easy language to learn, it’s a very powerful server – has been since well before it was a J2EE implementation, including a ton of bundled features like Verity indexing, email, http, ftp, ldap, xml, webservices, etc, etc. and supporting both C/C++ and Java (and COM and CORBA) for creation of additional features (CFX tags and user-defined functions) which could not be created with the tools native to the language. The framework I built includes several almost pure Java functions at its core, although the vast majority of it is written in CFML and lets me easily perform a lot of rather complex tasks like automatically associating the maxlength validation on form fields with the character_maxium_length of associated database columns using JDBC. Believe me, ColdFusion only appears simple or limited to the uninitiated. Macromedia continues to improve it every year, and its popularity and its market share are still growing.