import mx.server.Centaur

[Ken Dunnington]

At cf.Objective last month, during the ColdFusion 9 BOF, the Adobe folks asked us what stuff we'd like to see in the next release of CF. I don't recall who started it, but there was a lively discussion about adding the ability to code in ActionScript 3 on the server. I think the Adobe guys were getting annoyed after awhile, but I've been thinking about it since the conference. I love coding in AS3 - I credit AS2 with helping me really "grasp" a lot of OO concepts, and AS3 has only strengthened that - but would it make sense? Adding to this was an announcement today by Microsoft about something they're calling ARAX, or Asynchronous Ruby and XML. The idea is that they want to push the IronRuby interpreter running inside Silverlight 2 as a way for Ruby/Rails developers to code client and server code in Ruby. Jokes about how much Silverlight sucks aside ;), this does make me wonder more about what adding an AS3 engine and server API to ColdFusion would do for the platform. As much as I love CF, I have been using it more and more as a service and business layer instead of a presentation layer, and in those cases CFML does feel like it gets in the way. Of course, I can use CFScript, but it just isn't the same.

There was one common theme among the AS3 promoters, though, that I think Adobe is taking much more seriously, and when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. The need for a professional IDE is going to be a huge part of ColdFusion's future. CFEclipse has been great, and kudos to everyone who's worked on it, but once you've used Flex Builder, it's hard to go back. Adobe has specifically asked for ColdFusion IDE feedback from the community, and the same folks who want AS3 on the server are just as spoiled by Flex Builder as I am, so I think a new, Eclipse-based CF IDE, with introspection, better code hinting, better debugging, etc. would go a long way to assuaging them. And who knows, maybe someone will write an AS3 plugin for the Java Scripting Engine and then we'll get everything we asked for and more! Eat that, Silverlight!