Talking with the Blackstone Team @ JDJ

At MAX I had the pleasure of sitting around a private table with several members of the Blackstone Development Team to talk about the new features, the development community, and future ColdFusion releases after Blackstone.

With so many people in the room who were all passionate about the release features, it became difficult to keep all of the information in a "typical" interview format (with question-to-question flow and nothing but direct quotes for answers). I was, however, able to gather enough information to give some insight as to the internal development process, what shapes the ColdFusion features list, and what may be in store in the future.

Attending this meeting were the following Macromedia employees from the ColdFusion Team (and their titles):

• Dave Gruber: senior product manager
• Damon Cooper: director of engineering
• Tom Jordahl: principal engineer
• Jim Schley: principal Q/A engineer
• Jim Murphy: senior Q/A engineer
• Mike Nimer: senior engineer
• Dean Harmon: senior engineer

The interview with the team members began with me asking a series of questions but quickly turned into more of a forum for open discussion. Although it ruled out a lot of direct quotes, it also contributed to the general flow of creative juices and more candidness. This article will therefore be based around not just what was said, but my overall impressions from talking with the team. Before continuing, it's important that I disclaim that in no way does this article make any promises about what is or is not in Blackstone nor what will or will not be in any subsequent release of ColdFusion (but we can hope, can't we?). The remainder of this article summarizes my discussion with members of the Macromedia Blackstone Development Team.

To begin with, we discussed how Blackstone came to be. About four to five years ago, when Allaire/Macromedia was beginning to think about and prototype a version of ColdFusion that was written in and ran on the Java platform, there was a list of features that they wanted to implement. At the same time they were facing the decision of re-architecting ColdFusion to run on the Java platform. They ultimately decided to put off most of the new features and focus on the Java re-architecture, which ultimately became ColdFusion MX.

After MX was released, the team returned to the feature list in a project that was code-named "Elvis" (some of you may have heard rumors about this "product"). Elvis became Red Sky, which focused primarily on bug fixes and performance. Red Sky later became ColdFusion MX 6.1. Now that the engine is streamlined and stable, the Blackstone team has been able to refocus on this list of features they'd like to implement. These features, according to Tom, came from specific customer requests and a broader effort to address a growing collection of customer needs.

Why return to the feature list now? Well, with a solid platform in place on which to deploy these features (CFMX6/6.1), the team finally has the time they need to properly tackle them. Damon pointed out that "the server team is more committed than ever to not releasing any feature if they don't have proper time to test it." He also made a point of explaining that Blackstone is going to be a very stable release. Its features are built on top of the ColdFusion MX 6.1 code base with the Updater and hot fixes. This release has been extremely focused on quality: there are 2,000+ beta testers and some 2.2 million lines of code in a customer application repository that they are using to test backwards compatibility (without changing a single line of code in any application). In Damon's words, this release is being "seriously punished and will be ready for immediate primetime production deployment when it leaves the building."