By Peter Bell

The Future of ColdFusion: Adobes CF United Keynote

Posted At : June 18, 2008 9:18 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: ColdFusion, conferences
Ben just made two great announcements at CF United which will definitely help with the evolution of ColdFusion . . .

Firstly, ColdFusion will now be completely free for Academic use. The goal is to help to build the size of the community by making it easier for Universities to teach CF.

Secondly, a CFML Language advisory committee has been formed to help to define the rules and guidelines around the use and evolution of CFML. The initial members of that team are:

  • Sean Corfield (Lead)
  • Ben Forta (Adobe)
  • Sanjeev Kumar (Adobe)
  • Gert Franz (Railo)
  • Ray Camden
  • Rob Brooks-Bilson

I think this is a great step forward, allowing Adobe, Railo and the rest of the community to work together to agree a standard implementation of ColdFusion. Obviously there will still be issues to flesh out in terms of what does and doesn't go into the standard spec and how early additional features in new releases of Adobe/Railo get shared, but Ben mentioned that Railo and Adobe were both working on some overlapping features for the future, so hopefully if Adobe is working behind the scenes on some of the features that Railo has announced (such as Hibernate, caching or clustering), we won't have to wait a couple of years for the syntax to normalize between the engines. That said, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in terms of co-opetition between Adobe and Railo.

More later!

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Ah I wish I could be there :)

Sounds good - a bit concerned about no Open BD and Smith. Regardless of the history I'd hate to see the community fork...
# Posted By Jim Priest | 6/18/08 9:47 AM
This can only be good news.
Looking forward to your thoughts on how (say) Hibernate could work : <cfcomponent type="orm"/> goes away and builds the whole VO/DAO/Gateway stuff for you ?
# Posted By Tom Chiverton | 6/18/08 9:51 AM
@Jim, well we'll see how it plays out.

@Tom, pretty close to what Adam is demoing. The CFC is used to gen the hibernate XML
# Posted By Peter Bell | 6/18/08 9:55 AM
This is a very courageous step forward by Adobe which I applaud.

I wonder if Gert from Railo will be able to bridge the dived between New Atlanta and Adobe?

But then again, what would Sean think about this??
# Posted By AJ Mercer | 6/18/08 10:05 AM
"bridge the dived between New Atlanta"
OpenBD had a lot more value to me before a more open CFML engine (Railo) came along with less restrictions.
# Posted By Tom Chiverton | 6/18/08 10:08 AM
This is really great news! Referring to ORM, I really hope that an ORM implementation sticks to the JPA spec and does not pick a vendor (aka hibernate). If the solution sticks to JPA then you could extend it to choose an implementation (eg. <cfcomponent type="orm" impl="hibernate">). This would allow for other vendors to have plugins (toplink, etc.).
# Posted By Rich Kroll | 6/18/08 10:35 AM
God belss Adobe. I'm about to E-mail someone at my Alma Mater and try to convince them that they really do need a ColdFusion class for their web major.

~Brad
# Posted By Brad Wood | 6/18/08 11:16 AM
@Rich - Hibernate is what the JPA standard was built around. Besides, let's face it, Hibernate is the de facto standard for ORMs in the Java world.
# Posted By Andy Powell | 6/18/08 12:04 PM
@Andy - The JPA standard did look at hibernate for many great ideas, but directly tying to an implementation versus a specification only limits choices. Hibernate is a very popular ORM, but there are other ORM solutions, as well as tooling to support them. This would be like creating a datasource, but you could only ever connect to MSSQL since it is the 'de facto standard'.
# Posted By Rich Kroll | 6/18/08 1:06 PM
That's good news! Fire it up!
# Posted By Arleston | 6/18/08 1:06 PM
@Rich your comparison of Hibernate being the de facto ORM standard and MSSQL being a de facto standard doesn't hold water. MSSQL is far from the de facto standard in DB land. Granted, there are other tools out there, but when you talk ORM to 95+% of Java developers, their first thought is to Hibernate. Come up with a more convincing argument and maybe you'll sway me.
# Posted By Andy Powell | 6/18/08 1:34 PM
Between orm, air integration and language advancement (local scope, auto-accessors, cfscript components and more)... CF 9 is looking great.
# Posted By Dan Roberts | 6/18/08 4:33 PM
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