As a Boston Red Sox fan in New York City, I'm no stranger to being outnumbered, or in the minority opinion.  Following this theme, I'll be presenting about Adobe Flex 2.0 at the upcoming AJAXWorld Conference October 2nd-4th in Santa Clara.  It seems I'll be 1 of only a few speakers giving a session on Flex related topics.  The annoucment from AJAXWorld Magazine can be found here.  I'll post more details as they become available. 

As of Monday, August 7th, 2006, I've joined forces with Mike Nimer, (formerly on the ColdFusion Product Development team at Adobe), and together we have formed Tapper, Nimer and Associates.   Mike brings to the table additional Flex and ColdFusion skills, but also adds java expertise to our offerings.

I'll post more details as they become available, but until we set up our tappernimer.com mail server, you can continue to contact me as you always have, via my tapper.net account.

Seems like all the gurus are blogging on what they would like to see in ColdFusion 8.0, so I thought now would be as good a time as any to jump on the band wagon.

Curious what others are looking for? Take a look:

Simon Horwith's list., Brian Kotek's wishlist., Brandon Harpers list, and Sean Corfields thoughts on the lists.

Let me start by prefacing my ideas with a quick summation of how i use ColdFusion today, as it may be different from the norm.  For the past several years, I've focused on building applications which run in the flash player.  For me, ColdFusion has been purely an application server to provide business rules and data access.  Its been several years since I've built an app which contains any .cfm pages, mostly, I'm dealing with pure CFC applications.  With that said, i am far less interested in additions for Flash Forms or XForms or other UI elements generated by CF, since I have Flash and Flex to build my front ends.  What I'm looking for is improved capabilities of the server itself, such as:

• Addition of constructors for CFCs
  
  This would be a great addition, and remove alot of the ugly work arounds we have had to use over the years for pseudo-constructor type functionality.  Simon Horwith.,  had some good ideas on how this might work.
• Static methods in CFCs
  
  Many folks are clamoring for interfaces and other java like functionality in CFCs.  While interfaces are great, I would get much more bang for my buck with the addition of Static methods, so things like Singleton's would be much more plausible.
• E4X support
  
  E4X has revolutionized how I work with XML in AS3, and we should have that same level of support in CFML
  
• Improved CFAdmin tools for creating Event Gateways
  
  The current system is just plain silly, where you need to externally define a config file for each instance.  For the built in gateway types, it seems like a no-brainer to add a form (ok, you can even use flash-forms if you want), to enter/edit  the required information for the gateway instance.  Too many developers see gateways as too complex to start learning, and much of that complexity is defining an arbitrary config file.  I'm not saying these files should go away, just that we should have some nice forms, rather than having to hand code them.
• Improved tools to debug remoting and gateways
  
  One sad thing in CF, is that any requests which are not to a .cfm page have no debugging information available.  How about a section of the Admin where we could see the last X requests, and any debugging information which went along with them?  Currently, we need to use external tools (like the NetConnectionDebugger), or run CF from the command line to find any information from these requests.
  
  Anyhow, I really havent given this list too much thought (does it show) but these are the first handful of things which would have made my life easier, if they already existed.