On a cold and rainy night in May, 3 brave individuals from Adobe stood in front of the group of devoted ColdFusion coders ready to take feedback on the future direction of ColdFusion. There were several topics thrown out that ranged from viewing log files to letting ColdFusion script control Adobe InDesign products.

Maybe I was expecting something major, that one idea that I talked about later in the bar. The wow, what a great idea. For me, that didn't happen. I did come away with the fact it is a business. If Adobe can't sell it then they aren't likely to spend development dollars. That wasn't really a shock but more of a dose of reality.


Out of all of the many ideas suggested, these are the 4 things that I care enough about to write up:

• Video - something to convert videos to flv or mp4, scale size, add chapters every x minutes, create thumbnails. Having a player would be nice and simplify deployment. cfimage for video.

• Application level trust cache - simply would let us set/clear the trusted cache at the application level. I know you can clear the cache by file and I have no idea of how hard this would be for Adobe to implement but ColdFusion is about saving time and this would save us sometime. Nope - I don't think they could make a dime off of this.

• Log files - parsing the log files in CF admin could stand some improvement. Something like Flogr for example. Yep there are filters but flex makes it much easier to navigate.
  

• PDF Form creation - by able to dynamically create pdf forms.

If you were there and I missed something other than AS3 that you think was important, post a comment.



Related Links:

http://www.brianmeloche.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/5/10/Overall-review-of-cfObjective-OpenBD-CF9-BOF

http://www.briankotek.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/5/6/cfObjective-2008-and-the-Future-of-ColdFusion

http://www.numtopia.com/terry/blog/archives/2008/05/i_want_my_cfvideo.cfm