Adobe Systems today released the public beta of ColdFusion 9, the company's application development platform and has unveiled the Eclipse-based ColdFusion Builder Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Adobe went for three simple categories of improvement with this release: Increase user productivity, improve integration with popular enterprise software, and simplify the workflow between Adobe products.

To increase user productivity, server administration has been simplified in this version, with the Server Manager application, which lets multiple ColdFusion servers be managed centrally through an AIR-based app. New tools seek to simplify the development process, such as ColdFusion-as-a-Service which gives access to ColdFusion services through AMF (Action Message Format) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) without having to write ColdFusion Components (CFCs). Also, integration with Hibernate's object relational mapping (ORM) lets developers build database-independent applications without the need to write any SQL.

In the interest of making ColdFusion 9 more valuable in the enterprise space, applications built in ColdFusion 9 can now be tightly integrated with Microsoft SharePoint services, allowing access to SharePoint's repositories and document libraries. Furthermore, support for Microsoft Office and OpenOffice have been added, letting ColdFusion 9 applications interact with spreadsheets, presentations, documents and charts made in those productivity suites.

David Wadhwani, General Manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe said in a statement today,"ColdFusion adoption has accelerated since we introduced support for Flex, AJAX, and PDF with ColdFusion 8. The increased integration with everything from Adobe AIR applications to enterprise-based Adobe LiveCycle ES software enables companies to meet critical business needs quickly, while ColdFusion Builder provides developers with an enhanced workflow between ColdFusion and the Flash Platform for RIA development."

ColdFusion Builder, formerly known as "Bolt," is the new IDE that integrates ColdFusion 9 with Flash Builder 4 (a.k.a., Flex Builder) and AIR for simpler creation of rich Internet applications. It was built in Eclipse, just like Flash Builder, and can be used for development in Java, HTML, CSS, MXML, and PHP.