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ColdFusion BOF Report

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Last night I moderated the “Meet the ColdFusion Engineers” BOF (BOF=”Birds of a Feather”, for the uninitiated), a panel discussion allowing MAX attendees to pick the brains of the ColdFusion team (engineers, QA staff, business decision makers, marketing folks, and more). Attendance started off a bit on the light side (hey, they were handing out free beer downstairs in the exhibit hall, tough to compete with free beer), but the room quickly filled until there was standing room only.
Lots of good questions were asked, including:
What will the Blackstone upgrade cost? And how will features be packaged and editioned? Answer: Sorry, we can’t discuss that yet.
Will subscription customers get the Blackstone update? Answer: Yes!
How can CFML code be executed asynchronously? Answer: Via the new CFML gateway in Blackstone.
Will Blackstone have a tag? Answer: That one is frequently requested, but it is not on the feature list yet.
Will ColdFusion support null? Answer: JavaCast() in Blackstone makes it possible to pass null to Java calls, but support for null throughout CFML is on the wish list, but not implemented at this time.
What application events are supported by the new application event model? Answer: OnApplicationStart OnApplicationEnd OnSessionStart OnSessionEnd OnRequestStart OnRequestEnd OnRequest OnError.
Will the new spell checking in Verity support custom dictionaries? Answer: That is not necessary, Verity (in Blackstone) performs heuristic matching against text in indexed data, and does not actually use a dictionary at all.
Can the Blackstone beta co-exist with CF5 or CFMX? Answer: Yes, absolutely, we designed Blackstone so that it can live alongside current versions, so there is no reason not to try the beta.
What must we do to use the Blackstone Beta CD provided to all MAX attendees? Answer: Install it, agree to the terms, and provide us with feedback.
There was lots more too, I’ll post more questions and answers as (if?) I recall them.

6 responses to “ColdFusion BOF Report”

  1. tony petruzzi Avatar
    tony petruzzi

    Here is a little feature queston.
    In Blackstone, will CFFILE=READ be able to return information about the file? List lastmodifieddate, filesize and what not? Currently I’ve written a bunch of functions to do this, but it would be a nice feature to add to Blackstone.
    As far as CFIMAGE is concerned. Why not just license the Allegad Image Component and throw it in there. Heck the guy already did like 99% of the work for you. Follow the lead of other big company and AQUIRE features.

  2. Ben Forta Avatar
    Ben Forta

    Tony, that is not there in beta 2, but there is still time … we’ll see.

  3. Ryan Guill Avatar
    Ryan Guill

    I was unable to make it to max this year, but maybe you could answer one of my questions: are they considering including flex in the devnet subscription?

  4. Ben Forta Avatar
    Ben Forta

    Ryan, not sure about DevNet, but they are making a developer edition available as well as a non-commercial license.

  5. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    I was unable to make it to MAX…How can I get my hands on the Blackstone Beta?

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