I just returned from CFSouth and wanted to share a couple of things that we
learned about Harpoon, CF5, and Neo.
CF5 Features:
User Defined Functions
Incremental Page Layout - Dont know what this is all about...
Application Deployment - Apparently Allaire is developing a product called
Harvest that will be rolled into CF. Harvest provides "Multi-server
management and monitoring, application deployment capabilities and service
level reporting."
CFSQL - I asked an Allaire guy what the advantages of CFSQL were, I was told
that a query could be application or session scoped and then you could
essentially query an in memory database. I asked if the cfsql engine would
be more efficient than looping over an app. or session scoped array. He
responded that cfloop was the second slowest tag in CF, but didn't have a
firm answer.
Graphing and Reporting - Perhaps a reference to Harpoon? No details were
given.
SNMP MIB Interface! - This is really cool, but I didn't get a chance to ask
any questions about this, and it wasn't elaborated on.
Enhanced database drivers - hmmm Maybe they are just supporting more db's...
Logfile analyzer - Sounds cool, there are quite a few 3rd party utils that
provide this now. I wonder what Allaire's will do.
That's about all that was said, no mentions of a new Studio to go along with
CF5. Where there is smoke....
Also what wasn't metioned was if Harpoon would be included with CF5, unless
I missed it.
Harpoon Features:
Perhaps the coolest thing about Harpoon is that it uses WDDX to pass data to
Flash. Since all the source code for Harpoon is going to be available for
free, we should now have a Flash 5 Actionscript WDDX parser!
One of the overall goals of Harpoon was to replace a lot of the java applets
that have been included in CF since 3.0 that we are familiar with. So many
of the java appliets have been done in flash now.
The tags that Steve Drucker went over were:
Navigation Toolbar - There is a programmable top navigation toolbar, that
looked pretty neat. We should be able to bang out a nice flash nav in a
couple of minutes now.
Calculator - The ever popular calulator app, can be presented to the user to
calculate something then fill in a form field or whatever.
Tree - This is the one I am most interested in. I think trees suck, but
clients request them for som reason. The flash tree also uses a dynamic
loading scheme that only loads the data requested.
Grid - A working replacement for cfgrid, very nice looking. Lot's of new
features.
Dropdown - Some kind of flash dropdown menu or something. All of the
different tags were gone over really quickly and I missed it if this one was
elaborated on.
A public beta will be available next week, so we can all check it out. Also
keep in mind that the Harpoon objects are Flash 5 only, so users will
probably need to install the plug-in.
Steve also mentioned a couple of urls for Harpoon reference and general
flash help:
http://demo.figleaf.com
http://flashlite.net
http://flash.central.com
http://chattyfig.figleaf.com
The only things that were mentioned about Neo that I thought were
interesting was that Neo will compile our current and future CF apps into
Java servlets. That means they should be platform independant! That also
means much increased performance. The server does not have to compile the
page into pcode before executing. Just execute an already in memory servlet.
What was nice to learn, was that all current CF applications, will run in
Neo. Not to metion perform much better. Neo will also support Unicode
finally (that is kind of assumed since it will be a java platform though),
so we should finally have more international CF developers among us in the
future.
That is about it, it was great and I cant wait for the big conference this
year coming to Orlando also. As far as extracurricular activities go, if you
are coming to the Devcon later this year. Orange St. in Orlando is a great
place to go and do just about anything. I was able to locate a kicking club
called The Red Door by the locals because they cant decide on a name. It's
right off Orange on Pine St. They had a good DJ on friday night and Chris
Domingo was headlining on Saturday night! Not to mention a lot of single
girls and guys for the single programmers out there (or just the out of town
ones <g>). Pretty good for a town that almost banned techno music about 5
years ago.
jon
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