The Macromedia Blackstone project is currently in beta testing. For those of you that don’t know, Blackstone is the latest version of ColdFusion MX.
I’m on the Blackstone beta test team but I haven’t gotten to do much testing due to work demands. However, one of the hardest parts about doing beta testing is getting a server up and running so you can try out all the new features. Well, that’s not a problem any longer.
CFDynamics is currently offering free Blackstone hosting to anyone interested. That’s right, you get to try out Macromedia’s latest version of ColdFusion and it doesn’t cost you a dime. I thought that was pretty cool so I figured I’d let all you geeks know about it.
Some of the new features in Blackstone include.
- Rich Forms: Tag based generation of Flash forms & XForms.
- Printing: Print individual pages or entire documents w/perfect formatting.
- Reporting: Business reporting capabilities that reduce the need for 3rd party reporting tools.
- Graphing: Increased capabilities for charting & graphing business intelligence.
SysAdmins will enjoy
- Multi-Instance Management: Providing application partitioning and isolation.
- Sourceless Deployment: No more giving your CF Source code away.
- Java App Deployment: Deploy CF as a Java EAR or WAR file.
Can’t wait any longer? Here’s the signup form.
In the beginning of this post I said “Beta is the new Black” and I meant it. Everyone is releasing products in Beta for their core audience to test and provide feedback. This didn’t use to be the case with new product releases but in this ever-changing internet landscape it’s becoming the norm. Google made it acceptible and now many others are following suit, even Microsoft.
Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.
