I got off to a late start getting ColdFusion 8 installed across our shared web servers, but now that it’s here- I have to say that I am really excited about some of the new features. Most especially there are a handful of new/upgraded tags, .NET integration, and built in MySQL compatibility.
CFGRID Demo Video
Some of the new tags can be found using this link. Personally, I am excited about the AJAX features of cfajaximport, cflayout, cfwindow and others. This opens-up a wide variety of new CRUD interfaces to be built for slick user GUI’s and no-refresh page interaction. It would have been nice if Flash Forms wasn’t so slow and that Flex wasn’t a whole new thing to learn. Some upgraded tags include “cfform type=HTML” which turns the whole thing into an AJAX interface and “cftextarea richtext=yes” which adds a VERY slick WYSIWYG text editor. The editor is probably one of the best I’ve seen– clean code, templates, image insertion and the ability to show your paragraph blocks. Cflayout now includes a tab navigator to create tabbed pages. Interestingly, it can also dynamically pull in another page from a remote source to fill the contents of the tab’s page.
