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Adobe has released ColdFusion 9 (Centaur) and ColdFusion Builder (Bolt) public beta versions today. As I write this post, I’m downloading the installers for both. I look forward to see the new features CF 9 brings us.

The new features that mostly caught my attention are:

• Built-in ORM based on Hibernate, this is a great addition and probably the biggest change to the product. I’m a fan of Transfer ORM and thankful for all the work Mark Mandel has put into the project for the CF Community. I don’t know if the built-in ORM will be better than Transfer or not yet. But having a ORM built-in to CF is definitely a great option to have. Especially when working with clients that are skeptical or have policies against Open Source software.
• Implicit getters and setters (finally!). This seemed obvious for sometime now. I’ve been using snippets to create the getters & setters for a long time but now I can better spend my time. One thing I hope and that is that the methods can be overwritten if needed.
• Closed gap between CFML and CFSCRIPT.  I write most of my code in CFScript so this is a big one for me. I’m not sure exactly what this means but if it means I can do everything that CFML does using only CFScript then (whoohoooo!) this makes me extremely happy.
• ColdFusion services exposed for Flex and AIR via Actionscript libraries.  This is powerful stuff and indeed one of the best additions to the product.

The ColdFusion Builder, which is based on the Eclipse IDE also looks very promising and is probably the most anticipated part of this release.  The community has been asking for a CF-IDE for sometime now, especially since the release of the Flex Builder.  With the CF Builder you will be able to manage servers and deploy projects right from the IDE by using FTP.  The IDE will also help by completing tags as you type and by listing things like datasources when typing “datasource=” inside a cfquery tag. For a list of the new features checkout the post by Ben Forta at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/cfbuilder_whatsnew.html

To download the public beta version of the products visit http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_coldfusion9

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