Macromedia Adds Mobile Support to ColdFusion

Macromedia's "very significant" ColdFusion MX 7 release enables developers to build Internet applications for the mobile user.

Macromedia Inc. announced the availability of the next version of its ColdFusion MX server, with new support for mobile devices and rich forms, and new reporting and printing capabilities.

Dave Gruber, product manager for Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7, formerly code-named Blackstone, said the new version enables developers to build Internet applications for the mobile user, including the ability to support SMS (short message service) text messaging.

"ColdFusion MX 7 is a very significant release of ColdFusion, probably more significant than any since it was released 10 years ago," Gruber said. ColdFusion can now be used to serve devices outside the world of HTTP. It has a new gateway to the Internet with mobile devices, for SMS, instant messaging JMS (Java Message Service), serving all Internet-connected devices.

The new release also has features for developing online forms without having to code presentation-tier logic. ColdFusion MX 7 enables developers to take Web content and transform it into printable documents in Macromedia FlashPaper of Adobe PDF formats.

"This solves one of the key chronic problems of being able to print Web content," Gruber said. New tags in the product enable ColdFusion to wrap a document with HTML, he said.

ColdFusion takes content, "formats it and dynamically displays it for the user, "Gruber said. "It can save developers up to 75 percent of the time it typically takes to do the coding."

Meanwhile, the new business reporting features in the product enable developers to create structured business reports. "This is another chronic problem, the structured output format issue," Gruber said. ColdFusion MX 7 has a "full-featured business reporting capability" that allows developers to quickly create classic reports, including sales reports and others, and allows output directly into PDF, FlashPaper and Microsoft Excel.

ColdFusion runs either as a stand-alone application server or atop J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application servers such as Macromedias JRun, IBMs WebSphere and BEA Systems Inc.s WebLogic.

"ColdFusion applications can run as pure Java applications," Gruber said. "And we let the ColdFusion applications look and run like any Java application."

The new version also features new deployment capabilities, Gruber said. With the ColdFusion Enterprise Edition, users can create multiple instances of ColdFusion on a single server. "We saw the opportunity to enable people to create, all on the same device, virtual clusters, and they can fail over on the same device," he said.

The ColdFusion MX 7 Standard Edition runs $1,299. and the Enterprise Edition runs $5,999.

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