The evangelists have been busy the past month showing off the new features of ColdFusion 9 “Centaur” and ColdFusion Builder during the user group tour and I’m happy to be able to tell everyone that both are now available in public beta on labs. Terry Ryan, Ben, and Adam Lehman all have good writeups of things so I’ll run down a few of my favorite features.

ColdFusion 9 “Centaur”

• Microsoft Office Integration – With CF 9 you can generate and read from native Office formats like Excel, PowerPoint and Word. The best part? We’ve now got a cfshareportint that is as easy to use as our hooks into Exchange and Active Directory. Making Flex front ends for SharePoint has never been so easy.
• Scripting Support – As more of a “scripter” than a “tagger” I’m happy to be able to say that you can now use CFSCRIPT for anything in the ColdFusion language. If you don’t want to use tags, you don’t have to.
• ColdFusion as a Service – My favorite feature bar none, and one I did an AdobeTV episode on (below). You can take some of the great CF tags like cfmail, cfpop, and cfdocument and use them right inside of your Flex application without writing any ColdFusion code.

ColdFusion Builder “Bolt”

• Extendable extensions – The CF Builder team has made it really easy to add code generation and other features to the IDE just by writing some CFML. So you can make additions to the IDE just by using some ColdFusion.
• Server Management – You can manage your servers right from within the IDE. Kind of a handy feature.

So enjoy the new features! ColdFusion Builder plugs nicely in with Flash Builder 4, so you can get your full public beta on with some great Flex/ColdFusion integration.