I just presented Blackstone to CFUN. The only adjective that I think adequately describes the atmosphere in the room is “intense”. I was given 40+ minutes to talk and so had to scale back the content and also talk and demo really quickly. The crowd of over 500 loved everything they saw, spontaneous applause throughout, and then a standing ovation when I was done! Incredible, the general consensus seems to be that Blackstone is right on target, and has nailed the features that users want.
As promised, I did demo one new feature at CFUN, something not shown previously anywhere else. That feature is the introduction of event driven gateways to ColdFusion, essentially allowing events other than HTTP requests to trigger ColdFusion processing. The example I gave was dropping a file into a folder (maybe via an FTP upload), the act of which fired an OnAdd method in a CFC to be invoked, and the code in that method read the file and updated a database with its contents. I discussed other possible gateways, including listening to sockets, responding to database changes, firing asynchronous CFML processing, and more. This capability radically changes what ColdFusion is capable of. I think it will take time for the idea (and its potential) to sink in, and many will comment on this in the near future.
I did not catch all of CFUN, I drop-shipped in for the last half day, but what I saw was incredible, and the buzz was phenomenal. CFUN has become the premier CF specific event, and Michael Smith and his team deserve all sorts of praise for their hard work in pulling it all off yet again.
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