So here we are, Monday afternoon after returning from the cf.Objective() conference. Overall the conference was a very worthwhile experience and it was interesting to take a peek into the professional ColdFusion development world.

Over the next few days I will be making posts about some of the seminars that I attended during the conference, but I would like to make a general observation about the big hype at the conference, ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio).

Although Scorpio has been available as a public/private beta for a while now, I wasn’t aware of all the new features in CF8 until I attended the keynote by Jason Delmore (Friday) and Ben Forta (Sunday). Both speakers are clearly well respected in the CF community.

My biggest issue with most of the new features in ColdFusion is that they are not truly innovative. Most of them have already been done before by other web application frameworks (like .NET or J2EE) or can be done with third party extensions. (for example, Server monitoring, code debugging, image manipulation, MS Exchange integration, .NET Remoting, all of which are new features of CF8 Scorpio) The really outstanding features are the ones you would expect (integration with Adobe’s own products), such as better integration with Flex (another Adobe product) and Flash.

I must admit that I’m surprised that the CF team chose to go down the route of integrating debugging in CF8 directly with Eclipse. It would make more sense from a business standpoint to integrate it with Dreamweaver but I suppose there is enough of a community push to override any business motivations. The CF Eclipse project is one of the best things that this language has going for it.

I also heard a rumor that CF8 will also support OO-Interfaces, which is another feature that is readily available in other frameworks… ColdFusion is just catching up. These guys really need to get something out the door that is truly innovative.