Adobe Delivers Beta of ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder IDE

ColdFusion 9 is the soon-to-be generally released latest version of Adobe's development technology for building dynamic Websites and Internet applications.

Adam Lehman, product manager for ColdFusion, said it increases developer productivity, integrates with complex enterprise environments and delivers rich and interactive experiences for users. ColdFusion Builder is a new Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) used for rapidly developing ColdFusion applications, he said.

"When we asked our customers what they wanted, they said a true IDE," Lehman said. "We've had editors and other things to help developers, but people said they wanted a true IDE for ColdFusion and we're delivering that in conjunction with ColdFusion 9."

ColdFusion Builder is a new development tool that provides a unified, customizable and extensible development environment to code applications, manage servers and deploy projects, Lehman said. ColdFusion 9 includes debugging tools, remote support and custom code generation, a customized development environment and support for applications built with ColdFusion 7 and 8.

Also, because many redundant tasks are automated with ColdFusion Builder and the product fosters code reuse, developers will become more productive, Lehman said. In addition, as ColdFusion Builder and Adobe Flash Builder are Eclipse-based, there is deep feature integration and enhanced workflow to generate client and server code. As a result developers can more simply create rich interfaces and applications with ColdFusion server-side logic, Adobe said.

Meanwhile, ColdFusion 9 accelerates the development cycle by reducing complex and powerful business logic into a few lines of code, Lehman said.

ColdFusion 9 applications easily access data from existing enterprise infrastructure including Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office files and portlet standards, he said. Also, new ColdFusion 9 features include an Adobe AIR application for managing multiple ColdFusion servers from one location, helping to save performance time and reducing redundant tasks, Adobe officials said.

ColdFusion 9 also offers local and remote database synchronization with Adobe AIR, improving user satisfaction by enabling them to use an application regardless of Internet connectivity, the company said. Additionally, deep integration with Hibernate’s object relational mapping (ORM) provides developers with database independent applications, Lehman said. Combined, the new features can enable faster development and deployment of Web applications.