Angela McGregor, Webmistress at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Theater, Film & Television, who also has an alpha version of Blackstone, said, "The thing that stands out the most to me so far about the new version is all the new functionalities—items like being able to create PDFs on the fly (my personal favorite)—which are going to replace add-ons that a lot of us previously paid for through third-party vendors."

In addition McGregor said she is "very favorably impressed by how backward-compatible it is with [ColdFusion] MX—I've yet to see any broken applications."

Rob Brooks-Bilson, senior manager of Web services at Amkor Technologies Inc., said, "We've standardized on J2EE here at Amkor, and ColdFusion gives us a way to develop J2EE applications much more quickly than if we were to do all of the coding in straight Java. We're able to take advantage of Java's power and enterprise capabilities without the overhead and cost associated with J2EE development." Brooks-Bilson works in the Chandler, Ariz., operations center of West Chester, Penn.-based Amkor.

"We're greatly anticipating the release of Blackstone," he said. "It seems like each new edition of ColdFusion comes out just in time to fill a need we have. In this case, we're eagerly awaiting the new reporting capabilities, especially the ability to generate PDF documents. We're also extremely excited about the support for event gateways. We're already thinking about the potential usage for hooking our ColdFusion servers up with messaging services such as JMS [Java Message Service] and [IBM's] MQ Series. We're also looking forward to the announced API for server administration as well as the sourceless deployment capabilities."

In addition, Macromedia will be updating many of the components the company licenses from others, such as its support for Verity Inc.'s search engine and DataDirect Technologies' Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) drivers, Macromedia's Gruber said.

Gruber said the company got the code name "Blackstone" from the Blackstone River in Massachusetts, which is named after William Blackstone, who was one of the first settlers in Boston. ColdFusion has roots in Boston, where Allaire Corp., which developed ColdFusion, was based.

This article was first published on eweek.com.