This last Friday I attended the ColdFusion track at the Dallas Techfest. I went with a coworker and ex-coworker specifically to see the ColdFusion 9 preview. It was a good presentation that I must admit I’m a little excited about.

For me, this is the most exciting ColdFusion release in a long time. In my eyes ColdFusion, with the version 9 release, is well on its way to becoming a programmer’s language. Allow me to elaborate.

I have a programming background in C/C++. In fact you could call C++ my first love of sorts. When I got into web-based development my first exposure was in ASP classic, and although I consider it clunky, it was programming to me. PHP was my next web scripting langauge, and is to this day my favorite web-based language to work with. I develop with ColdFusion for a living, however, and have always maintained a love/hate relationship to it with all of the tag-based commands and such. Yet this tag-based concept is a strong selling point for most CF developers… something I never really understood.

ColdFusion 9 sets out to bridge the gap between the scripters and the taggers. Finally. Let’s start with the fact that CF 9 will finally have full language support in CFSCRIPT. About time! Yes, you can now create components, throw exceptions, and do queries in CFSCRIPT without writing hand-spun custom function wrappers.

The next exciting feature for me is that components are getting more OOP goodness. Actual constructors for initializing components, as well as a supposed “strict” mode on CFCs to force CF to compile them as POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). I can only see this as a performance benefit, as the current cost of calling a method on a CFC involves instantiating a compiled Java class… for EACH method!

Other notable features includes a true ternary expression, new language support for the Hibernate ORM library, and more. Looks like a good release!

Cheers, and happy coding!