Adam Lehman and Tim Buntel graced us with their presence at the Philly CFUG meeting tonight.

A couple things I really liked:

• Tim directly addressed the fear of the CF community that ColdFusion doesn't have a future. Basically "Look at everything we're positioning for the future! ColdFusion is the technology that we're using to drive them all!"
• Adam has really refined the examples he uses to explain each feature.
• Adam also really did a great job of answering earlier criticisms of <cfexchange> issues. (Not just the ones I leveled at him.)
• In general, I'm really impressed by the ability the CF road team shows to alter their presentation in response to the community. They're not just reading the same presentation to you. Well they are reading from the same presentation, but they've definitely changed the talk based on issues brought up by their audience.

figured I would take down the entire list of features discussed to date. Why? So I don't accidently mention a hypothetical to-date-unnamed feature, after the jump:

• Ajax
  • <cfajaxproxy>
  • Json Functions
  • Ajax Wizard
  • Ajax UI Components
    • Yahoo UI Library
    • <cfgrid>
    • <cftree>
    • <cfselect>
      • Dual Select Lists
      • Auto Suggest Combo Boxes
    • Calendar and date pickers
    • Rich TextAreas
    • <cfwindow>
    • <cflayout>
• Image Manipulation
• Improved File IO
• Thread Manipulation
• <cfdocument> Improvement
• Reporting Enhancements
• CFC enhancements
  • <cfinterface>
  • onMissingMethod
• Database Enhancements
  • Database driver level logging
  • Nested <cftransaction>
  • <cfdbinfo>
  • <cfstoredproc> can be cached
  • <cfqueryparam> can be cached
• Debugging
  • Eclipse based debugger
• Argument Collections for various tags
• Implicit array creation
• Implicit structure creation
• Javascript Operators
• SFTP support
• FIPS Compliancy
• CFC Serialization
• .Net consumption
• <cfexchange>
• On Demand Presenations
  • <cfpresentation>
  • <cfpresentationslide>
  • <cfpresenter>
• <cffeed>
  • RSS
  • Atom
• PDF Manipulation
  • <cfpdf>
  • <pdfform>
    • <cfpdfformparam>
    • <cfdpfsubform>
• Server Monitoring
  • Monitoring and Profile have a minimal effect on server resources
  • Memory tracking currently causes 18% processor utilization overhead.
  • Customized Alert actions based on CFC
• Per Application Setting
  • Application Mapping
  • Custom Tag Paths
• Platform Support
  • Vista
  • Apple Mac OS X on Intel
  • 64-bit Support (Solaris)
  • JDK 1.5 & 1.6
  • JBoss 5.x
  • VMware
  • MS Virtual Server
• ColdFusion 8 is 5 to 8 times faster on object creation