MAX Scorpio (CF8) Preview

Some of the upcoming Scorpio (CF8) feature set is being blogged by attendees at the Adobe MAX conference in Las Vegas this week (maybe I'll be able to attend one of these someday, hopefully in Vegas, where my family resides). A couple of the more interesting tidbits: There will finally be a CFIMAGE tag for image manipulation. It will support some 40 functions or so, supporting resizing watermarks, CAPTCHA, and basic drawing functions to name a few. Some people are thrilled, although there have been thir-party-solutions available to do this for years. I have personally never built a system with this requirement, and I have been using CF since version 2. ColdFusion .Net Integration - Scorpio will provide much better integration with .NET making it easier to leverage MS Office products. You can interact with .NET now by using web services, but this new feature will allow you to use messaging, COM and a new service called Runtime Unification, which will allow you to invoke .NET components either locally or remotely (.NET runtime on different server). This will be sweet for those of us who work exclusively in Windows. It may also prevent some mindshare from leaving for the BlueDragon camp. Server Monitoring - There will be a built-in server/performanace monitor which will provide out-of-the box many of the capabilities which are currently provided by third-party products such as SeeFusion or FusionReactor Ben Forta has been asking CF developers for the past few months what they would like to see in a CF IDE. We may see an IDE for CF developers that has the spit and polish of FlexBuilder, including an interactive debugger, which is top-tier in my book. All of this doesn't seem to bode well for third-party CF tool developers who have invested a lot of resources to fill these niches.