cfmldeveloper upgraded to CF9

May 30

Last night I just completed upgrading cfmldeveloper.com to ColdFusion 9. For those that do not know cfmldeveloper.com is the FREE ColdFusion hosting service that I run for developer. Recently rebranded from cfdeveloper.co.uk.

What's new in ColdFusion 9

ColdFusion 9's list of new features is quite long, so I'll just mention a few items that I find most interesting. For a complete list of new features, go to Adobe's site.

One huge addition in ColdFusion 9 is the incorporation of the Java Hibernate object-relational mapping (ORM) library. ColdFusion abstracts much of the complexity of Hibernate away and offers a simple API to allow the loading and saving of CFCs to a relational database. This makes object-oriented development even easier, as you can build an object model without thinking about the database at all, and let Hibernate translate that model into a schema automatically. By providing nested transactions and hooks into the Hibernate event model, you can build robust domain models very quickly.

The next feature is sure to be a favourite of anyone who has spent many hours building "export to Excel" logic in applications. Sometimes it is the simple approach of creating an HTML table and letting Excel convert it; other times, it is the much more tedious option of using Apache POI to build up worksheets and formulas. ColdFusion 9 includes the new cfspreadsheet tag, which finally puts an end to this chore. Along with the tag is a large set of functions to allow virtually any manipulation of a spreadsheet. These functions can be saved in Excel or OpenOffice format as well.

There are a lot of new goodies I could talk about, but here is a quick list:

|> Server API for SOAP and AMF (allowing remote use of core features such as charting, PDF creation, and email from Flex or other external systems)
|> Huge set of Microsoft SharePoint integration functions to leverage an existing SharePoint deployment
|> Seamless support for the Java portlet specifications, making integration with things like Liferay a breeze
|> Addition of Apache Solr to supply search services (a worthy replacement over Verity)
|> Addition of Ehcache to supply page and page-fragment caching, along with cache statistics and other cache manipulation functions
|> Big performance improvements over ColdFusion 8 and ColdFusion 7.

ColdFusion Builder

The next item isn't actually a feature of ColdFusion 9, but it's worth pointing out. Adobe has built a dedicated IDE for ColdFusion development called ColdFusion Builder. Back when ColdFusion was run by Allaire, there was a tool called CF Studio or Homesite. When Macromedia acquired Allaire, it dropped Studio development in favour of its Dreamweaver tool. Since then, many people have used Dreamweaver or migrated to the CFEclipse plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. Thankfully, Adobe has now released ColdFusion Builder, which is built on the Eclipse platform and offers tight integration with their Flash Builder tool for building Flash and Flex applications.

ColdFusion Builder offers a useful and predictable set of tools, which include code completion, server management, debugging, templates, snippets, etc. And since it is built on Eclipse, the world of Eclipse plug-ins is open; it includes things such as Git or Subversion integration, Mylyn, ANT, Maven, etc. ColdFusion developers have been vocal about wanting a real IDE from Adobe, so it is nice to see that Adobe is listening.