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About the Author
Kai Koenig
Kai is a New Zealand-based Solutions Architect. Originally from Germany, he is the co-founder of Ventego
Creative, a web consultancy specializing in Adobe technologies. Kai posts regularly to his blog, Blog In Black.
What's New in ColdFusion 9?
The ColdFusion 9 beta is finally here, and there’s plenty to get excited about. If you’re up to a challenge, test your knowledge of what’s new in ColdFusion with our quiz! What’s more, there’s a freebie up for grabs for the first 200 quiz contestants who enter their details—a ColdFusion evangelist’s kit, full of everything you need to know about what’s happening in the world of ColdFusion.
ColdFusion and the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) in general have recently gained significant traction, with not one but two alternative engines garnering interest from the open source community; now, interest is growing more, with the next generation of Adobe ColdFusion—formerly known as Centaur— made available as a public preview release. This pre-release version of ColdFusion 9 has unveiled a very interesting set of new features.
Among these are improvements to various tags, the CFScript language and the overall syntax and coding style, the PDF subsystem, and Ajax components. Probably the two most publically discussed and awaited features are the ColdFusion IDE ColdFusion Builder (also known by its codename, Bolt) and ColdFusion 9’s new ORM (object-relational mapping) system. We’ll be taking a look at some code examples—if you’re keen to follow along, you can grab all these here, and view demos in action. Let’s dive in!
Caution! The features described in this article and all code samples are based on the ColdFusion 9 pre-release version available on Adobe Labs at the time of publishing. Please understand that Adobe might change or even remove features of pre-release software at any time—so some features in this article may be dropped from the final release.
A big kudos goes to Kay Smoljak for contributing the sections and examples on ORM and Ajax features to this article.
ColdFusion Builder
Let’s start this article off with a look at one of the most visible features of the upcoming ColdFusion 9 release: ColdFusion Builder. Although ColdFusion Builder 9 is a stand-alone product and separate from the ColdFusion 9 server product itself, we think it’s one of the most important moves Adobe has made in the last few years. ColdFusion veterans might remember back to the good old days of Allaire’s ColdFusion Studio, which was the last commercially available and dedicated ColdFusion IDE.
ColdFusion Builder has been created on top of Eclipse, the well-known development framework that powers dozens of popular IDEs. Adobe’s made good use of Eclipse in the past—Flex Builder (now called Flash Builder) and Flash Catalyst are both Eclipse-based tools.
The IDE presents itself with a typical Eclipse-like workspace consisting of various views. In the figure below, you’ll see a common development setup comprising a project navigator on the left, code views in the center, and multiple helper views such as outline, RDS database and file server views, and log file access to the right.
It's possible to set up multiple servers in ColdFusion Builder so that one could directly interact with development, staging, and production environments. The code views also offer toolbars for quick access to commonly used ColdFusion tags, HTML, and CSS features.
ColdFusion Builder includes a line debugger, which developers already working with Eclipse will become familiar with in a very short amount of time. It’s a feature Adobe had already introduced in ColdFusion 8, but now springs to new life with a dedicated IDE catering for the debug process. Here’s the debugger in action.
The third set of features we’d like to introduce here are the extremely helpful code and content assistance, together with syntax checking. Any good IDE should include syntax highlighting and code completion as a matter of course, but Adobe has added useful support for instantiating ColdFusion Components (CFCs) and introspecting CFC methods, which you’ll see in action in the figures below.
ColdFusion Builder also provides an ongoing syntax analysis of your code by parsing the files right there in the IDE. This feature alone provides a massive boost in productivity—there’s no more need to run the page in the browser anymore to see if there was a syntax error in the ColdFusion code.
Of course, there’s more to ColdFusion 9 than a shiny new IDE. Let’s move onto some server features and practical examples.