JaxFusion Blackstone Meeting Notes - 2004

Presented by Ben Forta on June 3, 2004 and notes taken by Steve Ayala of Recruitmax Software

See some here of the event!

Blackstone Goals

• Make new users more successful
• Give existing developers features they can really use.
• Help you make your users happier.
• Improve development reliability and options.

A Sneak Peek

   Data Entry Enhancements

• Making Forms Easier
• Build on top of XForms: According to W3C, XForms is "The next generation of Forms"
• <CFFORM... FORMAT="XForms"> can generate XForm code which can then be rendered or modified using XSL, for example.
• Begin starting to take the benefit of XForms without knowing about them.
• Find out more on XForms at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/
• <CFSELECT GROUP="Grouping Name"> GROUP attribute is an enhancement for making selects more scalable.
• Introducing Flash versions of some older JAVA Applet controls (i.e. <CFGRID>, <CFTREE>, etc...).
• Some examples include:
• Flash Forms using bindings between controls
• Nested Form Groups
• Beyond Flash form controls, generate complete Flash forms, providing:
• Form field interaction.
• Additional presentation options.
• A better user experience.
• True portability.
• Improve validation by:
• Synchronizing client-side and server-side validation capabilities.
• Improving client-side validation error messages.
• Along with other improved and clean validation.

The Printed Word

• Generating printed output
• New <CFDOCUMENT> family of tags:
• Simple creation of printable pages (PDF & FlashPaper).
• Page headers and footers.
• Section level formatting.
• Uses HTML/CSS for formatting.
• Syntax example: <CFDOCUMENT FORMAT="pdf || FlashPaper || RTF (maybe)" TYPE="pagebreak || header || footer" PASSWORD="pdf form authentication">
• Beyond programmatic print control, there is a need for a tree report writer:
• Ability to have more fixed ridged control over reports.
• Planned to be a complete report builder.
• Syntax example: <CFREPORT TEMPLATE="filename.cfr" FORMAT="pdf" QUERY="#myQuery#">
• .cfr is XML report template used by <CFREPORT> for display.

Sourceless Deployment

• Compile .cfm file into JAVA bytecode which can be distributed and executed without the original .cfm file being present.

Single Step Deployment

• Package your application and the ColdFusion engine into a single JAVA archive (WAR or EAR) and deploy as you would any other JAVA application.

Simplifying Using Multiple Instances

• Simplify the most significant advantage of ColdFusion Enterprise, support of multiple ColdFusion instances.

Dreamweaver Extensions

• New ColdFusion productivity enhancements to Dreamweaver, including:
• New wizards (example, login wizard).
• Access to user functionality previously only available on ColdFusion Administrator.

Lots of Other Little Goodies

• Lots planned many in process.
• <CFMAILPARAM FILE="Relative Path to Image" DESCRIPTION="inline"> - allowing true embedding of images into an email.
• <CFTIMER LABEL="output || all"> allows users to simply time execution of specific lines of CFML (or blocks) of code.
• Output description:
• Multiple
• Inline
• Outline
• Debug
• Invoke ColdFusion from JAVA.
• Administration API
• Expose a series of APIs that allow the programmatic administration of ColdFusion:
• Define data sources.
• Debugging.
• Many other options.

Notes by Steve Ayala