Adobe Eyes the Cloud with ColdFusion 9

Adobe Systems has announced the release of Adobe ColdFusion 9, Adobe ColdFusion Builder Beta 2 and a private beta of the new ColdFusion 9 in the Cloud that will run in the Amazon Web Services environment and enable more developers to access the power of ColdFusion as a hosted service.

ColdFusion 9, a development environment for building dynamic Websites and Internet applications, increases developer productivity, integrates with complex enterprise environments, and delivers rich and interactive experiences for users, Adobe officials said. ColdFusion Builder Beta 2 is the next build of the new Eclipse-based ColdFusion integrated development environment (IDE) used for rapidly developing ColdFusion applications.

Adobe made its ColdFusion announcements at the Adobe MAX 2009 developer conference held Oct. 4-7 in Los Angeles.

ColdFusion 9 accelerates the development cycle by reducing complex and powerful business logic into a few lines of code, Adobe said. ColdFusion 9 applications easily access data from existing enterprise infrastructure, including Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office files and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) portlet standards, Adobe said. New ColdFusion 9 features include an Adobe AIR application for managing multiple ColdFusion servers from one location, saving performance time and reducing redundant tasks, the company said.

ColdFusion 9 also offers local and remote database synchronization with Adobe AIR, giving users access to applications regardless of Internet connectivity, Adobe officials said. Also, deep integration with the Hibernate open-source project’s object relational mapping (ORM) provides developers with database-independent applications.

“The ColdFusion 9 beta program was very successful, and feedback on the new Eclipse-based IDE and its tight integration with the Adobe Flash Platform was overwhelmingly positive,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe, in a statement. “Today with the new cloud-based offering, developers and IT professionals can choose the best and most cost-effective method for their company when deploying rich Internet applications.”

Adobe is helping its customers move to the cloud with ColdFusion in two ways. New instance-based licensing with ColdFusion 9 enables developers to install ColdFusion 9 on virtual instances in the cloud environment of their choice to prototype, develop, test and host ColdFusion applications.

Secondly, an Amazon Machine Image of ColdFusion 9 is now available as a private beta, which uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) technologies to provide highly scalable, highly reliable, on-demand technology resources. For more information, go to: www.adobe.com/go/cf_cloud.

“We are excited to continue our relationship with Adobe to help extend enterprise-scale environments in the cloud to Adobe’s growing developer base. By providing the ColdFusion developer community with access to its flagship ColdFusion 9 solution via Amazon Web Services, Adobe shows its continued dedication and support for enterprise developers worldwide,” said Steve Rabuchin, general manager of developer relations and business development for Amazon Web Services.

Meanwhile, Alagad, a Chapel Hill, N.C., Web development firm, is collaborating with Adobe to help develop a cloud-based implementation of the Adobe ColdFusion software. The collaboration will enable customers to rapidly deploy and test ColdFusion 9 without installing or configuring the software on-premises. Alagad’s team worked with Adobe to create a private beta of ColdFusion 9 that can be deployed in minutes via Amazon’s EC2.

The Alagad team created an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of ColdFusion 9 containing the application, libraries, data and associated configuration settings, which is still undergoing testing. Once verified and registered by Adobe, the AMI will enable users to deploy a full version of ColdFusion 9 via Amazon’s EC2, Alagad officials said.

“Alagad’s knowledge of ColdFusion and the EC2 platform was a significant benefit as we developed our cloud-based strategy,” said Adam Lehman, product manager of ColdFusion at Adobe, in a statement. “This collaboration has helped us deliver ColdFusion 9 in the cloud, which offers the same benefits as an on-premises ColdFusion solution, while reducing investment in IT capital and time.”

In addition, Doug Hughes, president of Alagad, said, “We are excited to collaborate with Adobe to create an Amazon EC2 implementation of ColdFusion. Our hands-on experience with the software, paired with the success of our previous cloud development, helped contribute to the development of the ColdFusion 9 in the Cloud beta program. The two companies look forward to furthering the adoption and deployment of cloud computing.”