Scorpio News

There were a few already known facts about the new version of ColdFusion, known as Scorpio. As the tour of user groups to promote the new version progresses we are beginning to see some interesting postings on various Blogs.

The first one I noticed was Dave Shuck's Blog which has a really comprehensive list of the new features.

Dave reports on the capability of the new <cfimage> tag which I personally asked for in CF6 and CF7 but was disappointed. I don't expect to be disappointed this time as the tag seems to do everything I want.

I was also concerned by the lack of  an upgrade for the KTML edit facility in the new Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox extensions which have replaced the Interakt Tools, which we made good use of. I need not have worried as a better and easier solution has bee provided by the new RICHTEXT="true" attribute on the <cfinput> tag.

Two new tags have been designed to allow easier construction of portal type sites. <cfpod> and <cfwindow> can be used to create panels that can be resized and moved around. Dynamic menus are also supported by the <cfmenu> tag.

If you want to read a file <cfloop> will now loop over a file.

The small number of architecture gurus will be happy by the introduction of the <cfinterface> tag which allows ColdFusion to implement object oriented interfaces.

To pass arguments to tags argumentsCollection can be used in most cases avoiding some need to create strange logic when different numbers of parameters are present.

Integration with other Adobe products is a major benefit in the new version. Adobe Acrobat Connect users will be pleased to see that presentations can be created easily with the new <cfpresentation>, <cfpresenter> and <cfpresentationslide> tags, while <cfpdf> allows access to the metadata within a pdf file, merge pdf files, generate thumbnails, and encrypt pdfs.

The facilities with pdf files are also enhanced to allow forms to be completed offline and submitted to CF8 for processing by use of the <cfpdfform> tag.

As far as the cold fusion engine is concerned there is now much better support for performance tuning, with real time monitoring and the ability to take snapshots of the server at points when problems occur. Its also possible to run CF8 in a virtual machine under VMware.

On Ben Forta's Blog Ben has added more snippets with the news of support for JSON in AJAX. Two new functions, SerializeJSON() and DeserializeJSON() make it easy to convert data to and from JSON which is generally regarded as the best way to move data to and from AJAX applications. In addition, CFC methods can now return data serialized as JSON by specifying returnformat="json".

Ben also tells us about another new tag <cffeed> which can be used to read and create RSS or Atom syndication feeds.

Regular Expressions get two new function too with the introduction of REMatch() and REMatchNoCase().

There are new security features in Scorpio, giving increased control and flexibility in managing ColdFusion Administrator Access and RDS access.

In his blog, Ray Camden reveals that CF 8 has a function that checks for the existence of an array element. There is no longer a need to use try/catch if you have arrays that potentially have null elements.

He also notes that there are new ways to create arrays and structs and that AJAX is going to be supported through a number of tags. For example <cfajaxproxy> will handle all the JavaScript plumbing to let you invoke any CFC method from JavaScript, and support for refreshing AJAX grid controls.

You can also create a Spry dataset in CF8.

Some people are worried by the new features and think they might be on the way out. But personally the <cfexcahnge> tag looks like it will make it possible to move into new areas of functionality, and Ian Smith has identified 9 ways for CF8 to rule web development.

The ColdFusion Muse has identified that Scorpio will support the standard set of operators we are used to seeing from other languages like "++" and "!=". He also says that <cfajaxproxy> allows you to instantiate CFCs from the client. This exposes the functionality of your CFC in your JavaScript.

Among the other good CF8 snippets I found in the blogs were:

• getComponentMetaData - lets you get metadata by passing a path of a CFC.
• <cfstoredproc> now supports caching
• query caching now works even when using cfqueryparam
• <cfftp> now supports sftp
• cfc serialization for session replication
• Flash form restrictions removed.
• Apache Derby, a 100% Java database, will be supported.

I can't wait.....