Adobe's ColdFusion warms to .Net

Adobe Systems's ColdFusion software for building Internet applications and Web sites is being improved with Microsoft .Net support, enabling .Net objects to be invoked from within the ColdFusion language.

A public beta of ColdFusion 8, accessible on the company's Web site, is to be offered on Wednesday. The general release is set for mid-year. Version 8 is the first Adobe-branded release of the former Macromedia technology.

ColdFusion is a server-side Java application; it is partnered with a markup language for writing ColdFusion applications. .Net support in the upcoming version 8 bridges the Java and Microsoft worlds.

"Customers don't need to select one technology to the exclusion of the other," Tim Buntel, Adobe senior product marketing manager, said.

Also featured in ColdFusion 8 is generation of PDF documents as well as capabilities for working with PDF forms and manipulating existing PDF documents. Support for the JBoss application server has been added, also.

For developers, Adobe is adding interactive debugging based on the Eclipse IDE. A Server Monitor capability, meanwhile, identifies bottlenecks in the server.

Adobe's Flex rich Internet application technology and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components are leveraged in the new product for integration of complex environments with intuitive interfaces, Adobe said.

ColdFusion differs from Flex in that Flex is a client-side technology featuring a language and compiler to convert code to Flash content. With ColdFusion, the server-side technology can integrate with databases and Java and .Net objects while also offering text searching. However, ColdFusion also can generate an HTML interface for Web applications.

The ColdFusion upgrade puts to rest questions about Adobe's commitment to the technology after acquiring Macromedia, said analyst Ray Valdes, research director for Internet platforms and Web services at Gartner.

"People may have wondered if Adobe appreciated ColdFusion, and I think they do. I think it's part of their enterprise software strategy," Valdes said.

While Adobe recently offered the Flex software development kit to the community at large via open source, there are no plans to open-source ColdFusion. This stance gives the company the ability to make certain ColdFusion integrates with other Adobe technologies, Buntel said.