Blackstone Beta
I’ve finally been invited to participate in the Blackstone Beta program! For those of you who may not already know this, Blackstone is the codename given to the next version of Coldfusion, i.e. Coldfusion 7. It’s due for official release sometime next year, but the Beta has been made available to those people who might be interested in having a play with it before the final release and maybe in the process picking up some bugs that Macromedia’s internal QA may have missed.
First impressions? I’ve only just downloaded the installer so it’s too early for me to comment but reading the feature list & some reviews, it seems as though this new version is going to be verrry cool. Respected CF’ers like Ben Forta and Ray Camden have already blogged about Blackstone in recent times. Ofcourse foolasagoog also has a few interesting posts about it.
I can’t wait to have a play with it for myself and see how it copes with my existing CFMX code. I also can’t wait to play with some of the new features (and there are a fair few!). I’m particularly interested in it’s increased support for Java/J2EE support, amongst other things in Blackstone, you can package a Coldfusion App as a WAR or EAR without distributing the CFML source. Coming from a strong Java background myself, I’m particulary interesting in learning more about the benefits using CF in a J2EE application.
You can read more about Blackstone at the blogs that I mentioned earlier as well at the official Macromedia Blackstone pages. If you’re already used Blackstone please feel free to post your impressions as a comment below.
Finally, for those on dialup planning to download Blackstone be warned, at 230MB+ it’s a much bigger file than the Coldfusion MX installer – Enjoy!
