Rushing to Judgement

As any good DFWCFUGer (or anybody who reads Dave Shuck's blog) knows, Ben Forta will be in town tonight to talk about the new features in the upcoming release of ColdFusion 8, or Scorpio.  When I heard that Ben was coming to town, I asked if he'd be able to make a stop at my client downtown.  He had time in his schedule and was gracious enough to make a stop and tune up for this evening's presentation (which I will also be attending).

In a nutshell - make sure you attend tonight, even if you're getting the "its five o'clock and I really just want to go home now" blues.  We've all read about the "big ticket" items in Scorpio - you know, <cfimage> and its associated granular functions, AJAX widgets, and big improvements to server monitoring, debugging, and administration (as well as a host of other "big deal" type items).  While I am excited about this stuff, its already known to me and wasn't a big surprise when Ben started to explain the details.

In my opinion, what's even more interesting than the big ticket features are the sheer number of small yet important changes in Scorpio.   For example, we can now use javascript-style operators and javascript-style implicit array and structure creation.  One of the things that's always annoyed me about CF is the need to use EQ, NEQ, etc.  It always felt like amateur hour with that stuff (I know that's probably a personal problem).  As of MX8, we can start using javascript-style operators like normal people.

File I/O gets a noticeable set of upgrades.  I've worked with <cffile> many times in text processing and always found it to be slow and kludgy to do what I needed.  How about something like this:

<cfloop file="myfile.txt">do some stuff ...</cfloop> 

Are you kidding me??  That's right, we don't have to load the file into a buffer ahead of time, and what's more, we also get a slew of new file functions to play with, so that we have the ability to control things at a granular level.

CFC's are now fully serializable.  We can use query caching with <cfqueryparam> (!!).  We get to write our own multithreaded CF code with <cfthread>.  We get native RSS feed consumption and generation.  And so much more.   The group threw many questions at Ben and he responded to every one with a favorable answer for CF - if it isn't in there in 8, they're probably working on it for 9 already.

Like I said at the start - in a nutshell, don't miss tonight's meeting!  There's no question in my mind that Scorpio is the best release of ColdFusion to date, and I think that it has the potential to redefine ColdFusion's standing relative to other technologies in our field.