If you missed this year's CFUN conference (June 26-27), you missed a lot. In addition to the great time spent meeting and talking with other ColdFusion programmers, Ben Forta gave a keynote demo of the next version of ColdFusion, code-named "Blackstone".
I haven't been this excited about the release of a version of ColdFusion in quite some time. Blackstone has new features for using Flash to produce very sophisticated, very user-friendly forms with advanced features such as tabs and accordions. It adds excellent support for producing PDF files from native ColdFusion code, and it introduces a new, very powerful report writer. And of course, it does all this with the trademark ease of programming for which we've come to depend on ColdFusion. It will, in short, make you a coding hero.
This makes ColdFusion the best presentation language available and this is important - very important - because to the users, the user interface is the application. I have been puzzling for some time over the question of where ColdFusion fits in the enterprise space increasingly dominated by the J2EE and .NET platforms, and with Ben's presentation I think I see how perfect a marriage ColdFusion is with Java.
Java is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the enterprise computing space. It runs on virtually every processor (given its "write once; run anywhere" ability) and is used for everything from running Mars rovers to cellphones to gas station pumps. But Java is primarily a server-side language, which is where it excels. Adoption of Java applets on the other hand, has slowed to a crawl.
ColdFusion - particularly the Blackstone version - excels at providing the presentation layer, but is much weaker than Java on the server side, where it lacks such Java features as constructors, interfaces, abstract classes, overloading, and a null object - all undergirded by Java's strong data typing that virtually eliminates runtime exceptions.
In this article, I want to demonstrate how ColdFusion and Java can work beautifully together. First, though, I must apologize for the ColdFusion presentation layer shown here. Due to space considerations, my presentation code is going to be woefully simple, but I hope it will show how easily ColdFusion can work with Java.
First, let's look at the Java code. I've used several of Java's features that ColdFusion lacks to create a more robust "domain model." (A domain model is a scale model code representation of the "domain" under study.) I start with a Pet interface. In Java, an interface provides the specification for a data type (including methods), but provides no implementation. Here's the code:
package pettingZoo;public interface Pet { public String getName(); }
Now any class that wishes to can declare itself to be of type Pet. The requirement, set forth in the Pet interface, is that all "implementing classes" must implement a getName method that returns a string. The Java compiler will ensure that all implementing classes will be well behaved.
