Macromedia Inc. has released some more details on the next release of its ColdFusion Web application development and deployment platform, code-named Blackstone.

The San Francisco company said it will formally announce ColdFusion Blackstone later this year and the product will ship early next year with several new features, including new support for rich forms, printing and reporting.

Tim Buntel, senior product manager for ColdFusion, said the new features enable developers to create more compelling applications "with rich developer-centric features" that take advantage of the architecture advancements the company made in previous versions of the technology.

The new version will include support for printing HTML documents, banded reporting, rich tag-driven forms for data entry and data management, new support for styles and themes for a consistent look and feel, the ability to easily generate PDFs, and "a big suite of extensions for [Macromedia] Dreamweaver," Buntel said.

In the last release, Macromedia included support for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application servers such as IBM's WebSphere. "Since we focused so much on J2EE infrastructure, we want to take advantage of it," Buntel said. Blackstone will include support for Web Archive (WAR) files and Enterprise Archive (EAR) files, he said. Another Java-related benefit is the ability to run multiple ColdFusion servers on one machine, he added.

In addition, Macromedia has developed gateways that enable ColdFusion to respond to additional requests other than just HTTP. "So we developed these gateways like TCP/IP or a file system gateway or a content management system where ColdFusion could react to a file being added," Buntel said. The gateways can also enable ColdFusion to respond to other Internet technologies like instant messaging or SMS text messaging. "This is new territory for us that we're really excited about," Buntel said.

"We're going to ship a number of these gateways preconfigured by us, and we're going to allow developers to build their own," he said.

Moreover, the next version of ColdFusion will include the ability for applications to work better with government organizations that require high security by enabling users to plug in their own security model, Buntel said.

Buntel said despite open-source alternatives for Web development, such as PHP or Perl or even proprietary technologies like Microsoft's ASP.Net, ColdFusion represents a better value for developers because of all its features, which are not commodity features.

"A lot of the features in Blackstone would be impossible in an open-source environment, or you'd have to buy a commercial add-on" to match its feature set, Buntel said.

"The new version is going to be an amazing boon to the productivity of ColdFusion developers," said Roland Collins, chief technology officer at InvestEdge Inc., in Pittsburgh, who has been working with an alpha version of the product. "Some of the new features are really pretty revolutionary for the application server market, and could easily sell as separate products. They will really help us—and all developers for that matter—make huge steps forward in the quality and interactivity of Web-based applications."