cf.Objective() Sunday Keynote: Ben Forta

Good news. Adobe hearing from customers that they are feeling confident with CF and happy with the direction.

Developer Productivity: CF has been, and continues to be, way ahead of anything in the space in ease of implementation. What other technology has the ease of cfquery -> cfoutput.

Integration: Again, CF has had this going for it for several versions. ColdFusion 8 just adds even more points of integration. (A lot of it!)

AJAX Support:

• Makes consuming CFCs for AJAX clients super easy.
• ColdFusion AJAX Wizard (Similar to FLEX wizard) in Eclipse.
• The AJAX debug panel I talked about the other day... Turns out you can use it to debug your existing AJAX projects. {big applause]
• New JSON functions: isJSON(), serializeJSON(), and deSerializeJSON() [Love it!]

ColdFusion Debugger: There will be an actual debugger built in Eclipse. It has breakpoints, watch expressions, ... Ben says, "It's a full debugger". It looks really nice, you can actually run the code to be debugged from within Eclipse or from any other browser. [big applause]

Flex:

With Flex and CF and Flex Data Services, you can solve the problem of two people editing the same data. He shows a demo of two browser tabs with the same edit form. He changes the data in an input without even leaving the field. Then in the other tab, he changes the value in that field and saves. Back in the other tab, there is a prompt waiting. The prompt tells the user about the conflict and gives them a choice how to resolve it.

This currently requires you to write "assemblers" (can be a CFC). These CFCs have to conform to a specific API.

Now there is a wizard in Eclipse to create the CFCs for you.

In ColdFusion 8 this will be even better

• You will now be able tell LCDS (formerly FDS), via a gateway, about records that are altered outside of the Flex/LCDS loop.
• The assemblers can return queries directly from the fill function without converting each row to a VO.
• Assemblers can use structs instead of CFCs. The structs can contain type info for Flex to use to identify the AS object type.
• And the FDS integration will also be improved. Easier installer. Better CF integration. And there should be better performance.

AND ... ColdFusion 8 will be available mid 2007.