Coldfusion 7 - FlashPaper & Rich Forms

Wow! How cool is this? Macromedia Coldfusion MX 7 (Blackstone) was released today and it includes some very useful new features that make use of the Macromedia Flash Player and Macromedia Flash Paper.

With Coldfusion 7 you can now create rich forms using CFML tags. A Rich Form is a form made with Flash UI Controls. A new <cfform> attribute type=”flash” allows you to dynamically generate a Flash Movie on the server-side that can then be outputted to the browser for viewing in the Flash Player. You can even create tabbed navigation using the formgroup tag, splitting forms into easy to digest chunks. See the cross-over between Flex and Coldfusion here? - excellent stuff!

Another cool addition is the ability to convert documents into Flash Paper or PDF’s on the server-side using the new <cfdocument> tag. Basically it is now really easy to dynamically generate Flash Paper documents and either output them to the browser or send them via email. You can download the html source of a webpage on the server-side, convert it into a Flash Paper document that is then outputted to the browser and then user can print that webpage without any problems (such as content being cut off the page and so on…)

More information on these new features and many more can be found here.