<CF_HEADLINES YEAR=“2004”>
Sean A Corfield
Director of Architecture
Macromedia, Inc.

What Was Hot In 2004?
...and why you should care!
Let's look at half a dozen hot blog topics from 2004 and see why they're important to ColdFusion developers

ColdFusion MX 7 aka Blackstone
DUH!
“Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 is the most significant release of ColdFusion since its inception ten years ago.” – macromedia.com
If you missed all the buzz and hype, you must have been living under a rock for most of the year!

Object Orientation & Design Patterns
“We need to plan for a world in which OO competence is key to survival.” – Hal Helms, May 2004
CFMX 6.0 introduced CFCs; CFMX 6.1 made them usable
OO was alien to most CFers in 2003 but bloomed in 2004 and design patterns for CF became a hot topic
CF developers are serious – serious developers tackle serious enterprise systems, driving CF forward

The Blogging Explosion
Many new “must read” blogs came online in 2004...
Macromedians Tim Buntel and Damon Cooper
Mostly Blackstone – providing great insight into the product & the process behind its development
Doug Hughes, Jared Rypka-Hauer, Joe Rinehart, Matt Woodward, Paul Kenney, Simeon Bateman, Simon Horwith and many others
Mostly OO & Design Patterns

CFEclipse
Dreamweaver or ColdFusion Studio?
CFS is very code-centric but no support for CFCs
DW supports CFCs but is seen as design-centric
Neither support CVS or Subversion
CFEclipse builds on Eclipse
Very code-centric, great support for CFCs
Excellent CVS support
Free, Open Source
No RDS support

Application Frameworks
Lots of talk around new frameworks
Tartan
ColdSpring
CFHibernate
Lots of activity around an existing framework
Fusebox & Team Fusebox

BlueDragon.NET
Right or wrong, it generated a lot of interest
Is it just a stepping stone from CFML to ASP.NET?
Is the platform lock-in worth the .NET benefits?
Can you depend on a small vendor that is playing catch-up?

Conclusion
2004 was a very exciting year for ColdFusion!
ColdFusion programmers are growing, learning, sharing
Skills, tools and platforms are all expanding
These trends should all continue – what will 2005 bring?

Questions & Answers
Sean A Corfield
Director of Architecture
Macromedia, Inc.
scorfield@macromedia.com
sean@corfield.org
http://corfield.org/