Thursday, December 18, 2008

Centaur language features welcome

Well as new ColdFusion Centaur is in the forge being crafted by Adobe developers with all sorts of goodies I rub my hands with glee. I'm really happy to finally see you will be able to define components in cfscript! Also getters and setters making the fold which are well overdue! Will be interseting to see how much closer they make cfml and cfscript since for a long time cfscript has been left out in the cold.

Bolt out of the ColdFuion blue comes a new IDE which I hope will kick ass when developing apps. Adobe did a great job with the Flex IDE and I'm expecting the same developer benefits to come availialbe to ColdFusion. Yeah we've had CFEclipse which really leveraged Eclipse developer features but never cut the mustard for me. For too long Dreamweaver was really the best CF editor and it wasn't a good editor for developing applications. So I'm wishing and hoping that Bolt will be amazing!

These are great features but they are so overdue it is not funny. I'm almost certain if we had an IDE and the language features in this release in 6.1 ColdFusion developers would be developing very differently today. Perfect example is the poor cfinterface tag which seems to constantly underfire. Though it's not that the concept of interfaces is bad and I really like them. Just that there is not enough development tools to support it in current shape of CF but if we had some more language features and tools to hook into them I doubt there would the debate there is. Though as the saying goes "Better late than never..."

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