Adobe Systems today announced the public beta of Adobe ColdFusion 8, its software designed for developers building dynamic Web sites and Internet applications. ColdFusion, the company claims, addresses day-to-day development challenges to increase developer productivity, integrates with complex enterprise environments, and delivers rich and engaging application experiences for users. The ColdFusion 8 public beta is a feature complete preview, allowing developers to immediately experience building Internet applications using the software. Leveraging Adobe Flex technology and Ajax-based components, ColdFusion 8 enables developers to design and deploy rich, engaging applications by integrating complex environments into intuitive interfaces. The ColdFusion 8 public beta is immediately available at Adobe Labs.

The new ColdFusion 8 development environment also features advanced Eclipse-based wizards and debugging, letting developers build applications and identify and fix problems easier than in previous versions. The ColdFusion 8 Server Monitor lets developers swiftly identify bottlenecks and tune the server for better performance.

"ColdFusion 8 delivers several enhancements that boost day-to-day productivity," said Brian Rinaldi, ColdFusion Developer, Distributed Computing Group, Sun Life Financial. "Features such as debugging and server monitoring accelerate routine development and maintenance—and can really make a difference when it comes to keeping service levels high and applications running smoothly."

ColdFusion 8 integrates with a broad range of platforms and systems, including integration with .NET assemblies, expanded support for Microsoft Windows Vista and new J2EE servers including JBoss.

Adobe also claims that ColdFusion 8 also delivers significant performance gains over ColdFusion MX 7 and earlier versions of the product. Additionally, ColdFusion 8 applications interact with Adobe PDF documents and forms for a printable, portable way to intelligently capture information.

"This is the first release of ColdFusion under the Adobe brand, and now developers can seamlessly integrate their ColdFusion applications with other Adobe technologies such as Flex, Apollo, LiveCycle and even PDF to further the evolution of engagement over the Web," said David Mendels, senior vice president of Enterprise and Developer Solutions at Adobe.

The software supports Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and includes support for Apache (v1.3 and v2.0) as well as JRun 4.