I had the luck last week of attending Scotch on the road 2009 in the SwayBar, London. There were quite a few sessions crammed into the day of talks, some taking a more technical approach, others a little more evangelistic. In this article I'll cover the points that I found of particular interest.

Firstly I was struck by how well the ColdFusion community seems to be doing over the last few years. There were several comments as to how many more developers and companies are now using ColdFusion as a development language. It really is encouraging to see that ColdFusion still has a place in the modern development world.

The overall focus of the sessions this time around was ColdFusion 9. Obviously with a big release arriving Adobe are keen to extol its virtues as much as possible. The major differences appear to be some major performance increases, and several additions to the existing functionality.

ORM (Object Relational Mapping) Is the newly integrated Java Hibernate framework. This is pitched as a way of speeding up development time, and avoiding writing repetitive getters and setters in your CFC's. The Java engine handles the entire database layer and frees the developer up to write the actual functionality, rather than endless SQL scripts. At its most basic it is a way of mapping CFC's using the CFProperty tags to a database schema. It's an interesting methodology that I hope to test out soon. (This is known as 'Active record' in many other languages.)

Solr/Verity/Sphinx - The Verity search index is still present but has taken somewhat of a back seat to the new Solr search index. This was something that really piqued my interest as we currently use Sphinx to create large full text search indexes. There are murmurings that that there are some performance differences between Verity and Solr, but it would also be very interesting to see Sphinx thrown into the mix. At some point I hope to run some comprehensive tests against the three to see their performance differences under load.

There has been an interesting change to the Eula this time around too. It isn't something that most people look at, but the licensing model has changed slightly. You can now reuse your ColdFusion 9 license on a non production server. This means that it is very cost effective in upgrading your staging or failover servers, as they can use the same license as your live servers. (For legal reasons don't take my word as gospel, this is how I understood Claude Englebert's presentation on it.)

Another very interesting feature of ColdFusion 9 is its ability to expose a lot of its functionality as external API's. You can now expose specific functions of the server, and it is only a slightly different syntax from the traditional cfml code:

Overall it was a very informative and thought provoking seminar. Fuzzy orange are to be commended on putting on a great day. I'd highly recommend any of their future events, not just for ColdFusion based developers, but for Adobe affiliates in general.