Thank you, Allaire, for Sending Us a Clear, Positive Message!

The Allaire Conference, a gathering of developers all over the world once a year, is a way for Allaire to get its message out to the ColdFusion public. Allaire can let ColdFusion developers and business people know exactly where it's headed and announce new initiatives and plans. It's also a chance for developers to meet one on one with Allaire people and talk to them face to face, share their concerns.

At last year's conference, I got mixed messages from Allaire. I saw that Allaire was pushing Spectra strongly, but Spectra was still so early in development that it was hard to see where it fit into Allaire's business platform. The technology was just not mature enough to get a real sense of the product, and Allaire was very new at teaching and using it.

And what of ColdFusion and JRun? The sense I got when speaking with developers last year was a feeling of fear. Would JRun's Java base supersede the knowledge of ColdFusion they had built up already? Would they have to learn Java as well? What did this change mean to them as developers?

Allaire had also grown in the meantime, making it harder to keep the same close relationship it had always enjoyed with its developers. And I can honestly say that this year was one of growing pains for Allaire, where it got many complaints in the developer community that "Allaire is abandoning the people who brought it to where it was. It's only interested in big businesses, not independent shops."

At the same time, the ColdFusion community was growing and strengthening itself. This year we have had not one, but three unofficial developers' conferences in addition to the Allaire Conference: an eCommerce Conference in February, CFUN2k in July and a Fusebox Conference in September. There is a growing sense of shared community and brotherhood among ColdFusion developers, and I believe that will only continue in the coming year.

But at this year's Allaire Conference, I have seen signs of change, and change for the better. Allaire seems assured, in charge, being clear about where it is going with JRun and ColdFusion, and showing a desire to work with the community, not just with big businesses. Now I know that JRun and ColdFusion will still be different products, and ColdFusion's syntax will not change radically. The message Allaire was sending this year was: "Do not be afraid of these changes; they will not make you obsolete. You do not need to learn Java if you aren't ready to. You do, however, have the option." This was a message that developers badly needed to hear.

Let me tell you about some of the great new features that Ben Forta announced for ColdFusion 5.0. The one that was cheered most loudly was the addition of custom functions. Yes, that's right, no longer will you have to use Michael Dinowitz's article, Custom Functions (Part I), to "finagle" a custom function: you will be able to program your own function in ColdFusion 5.0! This is a feature developers have been wanting for a long time (it's listed first in terms of desired changes to ColdFusion in the Brain Trust article, later in this issue.)

Another great feature that people liked was the ability to do a second query on a query result set. While you can't do multiple cached queries in one search, this certainly expands the capabilities of ColdFusion greatly, allowing developers to do queries on a database without repeated trips to the database. (Hey, this could be even more popular than the idea of eliminating whitespace was at the last conference!)

Ah, but what of Java's slowness, I hear you cry! Well, fear not. Everyone at that conference who attended the first general session saw proof positive that a Java-based engine can actually make a great difference in speed, in certain cases. And that's what the "Neo" release of ColdFusion (the one coming after CF 5.0) will have: a Java-based engine. Not a Java-based language.

You're going to hear a lot of buzzwords right now that won't mean much for a while: Neo. Trinity. Pharoah. You will see some explanation of them in the conference report by our esteemed Managing Editor, S. Malkah Cohen, and begin to get a sense of what is happening. Don't worry; these words and terms will be clearer in time. You'll learn them, just as you learned <CFSET>, <CFHTTP> and <SELECT Var FROM datasource>. In the end, it will all gel.

So sit tight and enjoy the ride. If the Allaire Conference was any indication, this will be a good year for Allaire.

Judith Dinowitz
Editor-in-Chief

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