ColdFusion Builder Tour Notes (Part 1)

Presented by Adam Lehman
ColdFusion Product Manager
Adobe

March 23, 2010
NYU Medical Center
550 1st Avenue
New York, NY

Introduction
Adobe found that an IDE was more in demand than any other CF feature. It's something that always came up whenever they surveyed users. We didn't really have an official one since ColdFusion Studio since CFEclipse was from the community. Adobe saw IDEs as a way to attract new developers. It makes CF a legitimate, accepted language. A productive language needed a productive environment. Adobe is fully dedicated to this product as it has a rapid development roadmap:

• CB2 BETA by end of 2010
• CB2 = Storm
• CB3 = Thunder (will release before or at the same time as CF Server X)
• CFX = Link

Pricing
As expected, ColdFusion Builder sells for $299... the usual price for a basic Adobe product... same as Dreamweaver. It's worth every penny as there are a ton of productivity features packed into it. Additionally, FlashBuilder Standard is included with the buy. Both ColdFusion Builder and ColdFusion Server 9 are FREE for educational and non-profit organizations. Volume pricing and package deals are available.

ColdFusion Server 9
The most attractive selling point of the new version is performance. Without even converting to the new code, it's already 40% faster than version 8 and 6 times faster than version 7 right out of the box. CFCs also get a significant boost... 8x faster for creation and 3x faster for invocation. UUIC creation is a whopping 100x faster!

Office Integration
Previously, in order to get data from Oracle to an Excel spreadsheet, we would have to make a CF page with queries, save the output as HTML and open it up in Excel. CF9 allows us to go directly to Excel. Features include:

• generate PPT from HTML/CFM content
• create, read, update XLS
• XLS formulas
• visual formatting controls
• supports PowerPoint '97 through 2007
• supports OpenOffice.org

Productivity
The intelligence of the new code insight is a huge time saver because one previously had to open up Toad, SQL Developer or SQL*Plus to reference a table. Now, all of the fields show up as the query is typed in CFQUERY. It’s smart enough to pull them up even if the datasource is a variable! Other than CFM, the insight also works for SQL & JS. Tag Wizard allows users to display a form (for each tag) that contains all possible attributes.