Mr. Tim Buntel, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ColdFusion at Adobe and Mr. Monish Sood, Director of Marketing with ColdFusion web host, HostMySite.com were kind enough to help us learn more about the new release, it's features, and how to get started with a free beta account.

By Derek Vaughan

The wait is over and the latest version of ColdFusion has just been released in beta. Code named ‘Scorpio’ (the eighth sign of the Zodiac) during the development stages, the new release is officially named ColdFusion 8 and has just recently been made available for free trial beta accounts through select ColdFusion web hosting providers.

First the basics - the new beta release has been available since May 30, 2007. At this point the full commercial release of ColdFusion 8 is anticipated to be in a couple of months. Adobe hasn’t set a specific date yet, as the company is leaving a bit of time to react should they discover anything through the public beta. According to the company that puts the estimated delivery of the full releases at pretty much dead center of the calendar year.

When asked to distill the key features of the new ColdFusion 8 into a brief statement, Mr. Buntel stated, ”The tip of the iceberg on new features is already a pretty long list. I think if I had to say one thing about the release, this is Adobe ColdFusion. ColdFusion 8 shows what happens when you inject ColdFusion with Adobe’s DNA.

It’s really about making this great experience for the application user, with a whole slew of new features: PDF’s, rich Internet applications, and multimedia presentations - simply a much more meaningful experience for users. There is also a lot more integration in the enterprise. We’re Doing for .NET what we’ve done for Java in the past. Plus Exchange integration. Then also enhancing the developer’s experience.”

One feature that’s getting considerable attention is the ability of ColdFusion 8 to invoke .NET components directly from ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). This is true for both local or remote .NET components. According to Adobe the new feature works much like cfobject/CreateObject for java.

Here’s how Tim Buntel describes it: ”There are organizations that have both java and .NET development work going on, whether through acquisition or size or different divisions or different areas of the world. ColdFusion has been in a great position over the years to build an application with ColdFusion, if you were doing java development as well – no problem. ColdFusion can take advantage of those java assets within the ColdFusion language for it’s own application. So now we’re able to do the same thing for .NET. If some group in your organization is writing a specific piece of business logic in .NET – up until now the ColdFusion application couldn’t take advantage of that development work that the .NET team was doing – except maybe with SOAP services – but there were some issues with that. Now your ColdFusion team can leverage that business logic that the .NET team developed within ColdFusion in a much easier and efficient way than you could have with web services.

For the .NET guys the important thing to them is that they don’t have to change their code. The primary way today that you would bridge java and .NET would be with .NET remoting – but that would require the .NET team to change their .NET. They would actually have to compile .NET assemblies to use remoting, but they don’t want to have to do that. ColdFusion 8 will allow you to access .NET directly from ColdFusion without the .NET team having to do any additional work. We’re unique as a java into .NET bridge without using either web services or .NET remoting.”