Although I was a part of several previous beta/pre-release testing versions of ColdFusion (Scorpio and Centaur) and my posts being as unpopular as they are so far, maybe it’s for the best I’m not part of Zeus [yet].  But, I’d still like to wrap up this series with a few remaining things I’d like to see brought to the tenth release of ColdFusion.

• Facebook integration (similar to Google Maps integration only your parameters include your appID and secret key) — For those who don’t know, the work by Affinitiz on a ColdFusion SDK for FaceBook, although only in beta at the moment, is top-notch stuff… I love it!
• Twitter integration
• Google Calendar integration

This certainly isn’t a major thing and not even really a problem. It may not be considered best practice, but I can pass form variables directly into a CFC as such:

<cfform method="post" action="my.cfc?method=formMethod">

Best practice would have you submit to another CF file which invokes the method. I’d love to eliminate that extra step of submitting to a CF file (no reason… this is my wishlist ) and have submitting the form data to the CFC be best practice:

<cfform method="post" component="#myCFC#" method="thisForm" optionalArgument="#formStructure.fieldName#">

When output to the browser, the form’s action would be masked with whatever the component file is, but without revealing the method (for security reasons). You could send the entire structure to the CFC’s argument or allow optional arguments from the structure as shown in the code above. Maybe it’s a tough sell, but I think it’s cool.

If nothing else in this series was unpopular enough, I know this certainly will take the cake [or pie].  We have a development version of ColdFusion, but I still think the Standard edition of CF should be made free with no support from Adobe while offering a “professional edition” that’s the same thing as the Standard edition which includes paid support from Adobe.  Although there are free alternatives to ColdFusion out there, none of them are true to ColdFusion imho, adding in and making their own tweaks and adjustments along the way.  I’ve been preaching free CF w/o support for years though.

Anyhow, despite Adobe’s lackluster image lately [with Flash], ColdFusion remains an exciting, quality product and I’m looking forward to the next chapter of ColdFusion development.