ColdFusion 9, codename centuar is in development and looks to be feature rich from what people have disclosed. Thats all good, and Im looking forward to it, but there are some other things I hope they are working on for ColdFusion outside the product. These things are lacking and have been for some time.1. Some decent online documentation, perhaps adopt the Flex style docs or similar.2.

Sometimes, in a products life a change of name is necessary to seperate the old from the new, to give the product a new life, to highlight a change in direction.Think Turbo Pascal -> DelphiThink Lucky Goldstar -> LGThere are many examples I can think of. I was thinking that perhaps that time is near for ColdFusion, ColdFusion suffers from a bad name, bad press and confusion between the product ColdFusion and the theory of Cold Fusion.Given the evolution from Alaire, Macromedia to Adobe.

I was thinking what I would like to see mostly in CF9. Thought I'd put together a top 3 list.1. Full script support (for every tag including queries)2. Support for Public / Private Key encryption3. A free edition to compete with BlueDragon & RalioI think 1. will take the language to where it needs to be so that hard core might like it more and the taggers can still do tags. 2. Is becoming more usefull when you are developing say an Air app with a CF backend.

One thing I would like to see in ColdFusion 9 is the bringing together of ActionScript and CFML. The more similarities the better for all concerned.Having worked with a lot of Flex recently, I love ActionScript and would love in particular to see ColdFusion introduce Static Classes.While Im on my wish list, a couple nice things that would be easy to implement, and save some confusion.

Anyone having problems with ColdFusion 8 on Vista since SP1. Well lots of people are having problems with the install / config. I reported to Adobe and the answers are a bit disapointing. Firstly they knew nothing about it, you might think they would test the software post a release of a major Service Pack, or even on one of the betas. Secondly the response I got, was I tried it and it worked fine. Anyway, after many, many hours I know exactly what the problem is and there is a simple workaround.

I have had several people try this now, and CF8 will not install on Vista SP1 using IIS.Below is what you get, I could probably manually hack lots of IIS settings and get it working, but since there is nothing on the NET on this, I would like to know why.I have narrowed it down as I didn't originally know if it was 8.01 related or SP1 related, and it is definately Vista SP1 that breaks everything.I have reported this to Adobe and they have contacted me asking for more info, so the wheel is in motion.

I was initially unfazed by the announcement of the Free Open Source BlueDragon, I have never used, never wanted to. Mainly as it's not priced well against ColdFusion 8, if I wish to pay almost full price, I might as well get the real deal.But I've been thinking about it for several days, and there have always been applications that I wanted to develop, but couldn't because of the ColdFusion pricing limitations.

IE8 is a nice browser, it renders the Acid 2 test perfectly and Microsoft has finally taken a leap of faith that not even Firefox has.But with a leap of faith comes a host of issues, IE8 will not render a whole lot of sites very well. Including Blogger. I couldn't post this from IE8.And all the CF8 Ajax / DHTML features are broken. Even in IE7 emulation mode the grids will not render correctly.So who's fault is this? Is it Microsoft for being so brave, Adobe for including DHTML stuff, EXT for not working.

Round 2,Well I love the new ColdFusion 8 Ajax stuff, just completed an entire configuration application using it. Then move onto a small Flex 3 project, which then went to Air.After completing the Flex 3 app, I thought hmm, I wonder if the configuration application would be better in Flex. The answer in this case is probably yes, I'm going to do it again in Flex and see how it goes, the good thing is the CF8 version is driven by CFC's which I can still use in the Flex version.

I am a big ColdFusion fan, and I love the ColdFusion 8 features, especially the Ajax stuff. But being in the ColdFusion space you are inundated with Flex stuff, there is a lot of Flex at every ColdFusion conference, a lot of CF people are moving to Flex and writing blog posts and tutorials etc. Try finding a CF conference that doesn't have Flex path or topics.Even the CF god Ben Forta is heavily involved in the Flex side of things these days.Adobe and the general community is pushing Flex.