Yes folks now you get to be as cool as I’ve been! For the past few weeks / months I’ve been involved in the ColdFusion 8 aka Scorpio beta. Today you too can play with the next version of ColdFusion. Adobe today released the first Release Candidate or Public Beta for ColdFusion 8!! I’ll give you a second to jump around, pick yourself up off the floor, or just read that all over again.

So why is this version going to be so great? What can you look forward to exploring? Well here’s my highlights:

Built in server monitoring - Yes now you can monitor your server for tuning, bottlenecks, and performance issues Built in debugger - If you’re an Eclipse fan then this will be something you’ve been dying to have. Now you can! Spry integration - Yes folks it’s not getting even easier to build AJAX application with ColdFusion and Spry integration. .NET Support - While I haven’t played with this myself it’s now available for those of you who need it.

The stuff / tags I’m most excited about:

CFFeed tag - Read RSS / ATOM and create RSS 2.0 / Atom 1.0 feeds easily! The new CFPDF / CFPDFForm tag to do some cool things with LiveCycle and PDF’s in general CFExchange integration - Do I really need to say anything else? CFImage - Standardized image manipulation, will it live up to the expectations, probably it has CAPTCHA built in :) CFZip - Finally we can zip and unzip to our hearts content without a CFX of other custom code SERVER MONITORING! CFThread - Oh this is just going to be plain fun! Per Application Setting! Set mappings and custom tag paths on a per application basis. No more single login to CF Administrator OnMissingTemplate in Application.cfc - Why they didn’t do this in an earlier version I don’t know but thankfully it’s there now! New file manipulation functions - Getting to the down and dirty with file manipulation Javascript operators in CFML Expressions - Do you miss the ++ in your code? now you can bring it back old school. CFDbInfo tag - Bring all kinds of DB meta data to your screen.

So there you have it folks. Now since this is a beta we have NO IDEA what will be considered Standard features and what will be considered Enterprise. So as you are playing with the beta be vocal and let Adobe know what should go where!

GO GET IT!