With the release of Adobe's ColdFusion 8 -and today's general availability release- SYS-CON.TV's Roger Strukhoff sat down with ColdFusion Developer's Journal Editor-in-Chief Simon Horwith for an exclusive interview from SYS-CON's TV studios overlooking Times Square in New York.

Simon had had the opportunity to work with the CF8 public beta, and his enthusiasm could not have been more emphatic. "It's fantastic," he said in the interview, "the number of features is ridiculous, crazy, great. And it's also very stable."

He also noted that people with whom he had spoken about CF8 "were very excited." He said that CF8 features "massive performance benefits," as well as a slew of powerful new features that will enable developers and architects. "(With CF8),  you can create presentations, work with pdfs and pdf forms like never before. The language is a bit more object-oriented, which is fantastic. For those developing enterprise apps, CF8 lets CFCs serialize which is great for architects. And the new reporting engine is great."

Simon also commented on the AJAX-y aspects of CF8, saying that it "allows you to generate very nice interfaces--flash forms, flash interfaces, flash paper, pdf content. With CF8 there are a ton of new features that generate very, very nice RIAs that are AJAX-based as well as Flash-based." He also noted though that CF8's strength as a server-side product remains undimmed, and that "integration (with front-end design) is huge. With CF8, there is a very tight integration between Flex and ColdFusion, as well as between ColdFusion and a lot of (other) server-side technologies."

View the SYS-CON.TV Interview with Simon Horwith

Adobe ColdFusion and Flex are prominently featured at SYS-CON's AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West, being held September 23-27 in Santa Clara, CA. In addition to specific sessions devoted to the two powerful Adobe technologies, there is a Flex track at the event. SYS-CON Events is also producing a series of Adobe Flex Developer's Bootcamps, taught by leading Flex architect and teacher Yakov Fain of Farata Systems.