I figured I'd chime in on the whole CFMX 8 wishlist debate that's been raging on. I was reading a post over at cf.Objective and it really made me reflect on what brought me to CF in the first place. And everything that Jared mentioned brought back some really cool memories about my initial experiences with ColdFusion.
I'm also missing the days of the “WOW” factor with CF. With all the hype about OO & frameworks, I think so many people (and that includes MM/Adobe) are losing sight of CF's biggest attraction; ease of use. I know plenty of developers that would like to continue to use CF just using POP (Plan 'ole Procedural) methodologies to get their work done and would rather see improvements in stability, performance and ease of use.
I'm not sure if a “Java Lite” type of product is what the majority of CF developers really want and what may be happening is that a small number of influential community members may be the bigger driving force for what Adobe will put in CFMX 8. Sadly though, that is par for the course with most products so I can't blame Adobe for that. I just don't believe that adding 30 new OO features into CFMX will make it a better product. It will definitely make it a more complicated product to use especially if backward compatibility is somehow broken.
Having worked in CF since v3.x. I've seen the evolution of the product and I have to say that I truly do love CFCs. But having also done heavy OO & client/server development prior to working with CF, its my opinion that 95-99% of the CF development community is not ready for object oriented methodologies or frameworks. The majority of developers that I know wouldn't even know where or how to start building CFCs let alone leverage MVC or patterns.
I truly hope that Adobe continues to improve CF's feature set while not abandoning the main reason that people use CF; ease of development.
