In February this year Macromedia announced the release of Coldfusion MX 7. CF is actually a J2EE app that interprets a simple, tag-based language called the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). Key new features include the ability to interact with any network protocol beyond HTTP, flash-based and Xforms support, simple PDF creation, and that an entire application can now be stored as an EAR or WAR file.

Other improvements include:

• Application events now allow developers to execute code at specific points during the execution of a request, such as onApplicationStart() or onError(). The onSessionEnd() event fires when a user's session times out and is a capability that has been requested for many years.
• Web services creation has been improved, including the ability to specify custom WSDL for a web service, and generating document-literal WSDL in addition to RPC.
• XML data can now be validated against a DTD or XML Schema using the XMLValidate() function.
• Charting and graphing looks better than ever, with numerous new options for style and display.
• The included Verity search engine has been upgraded, and now supports alternative spelling suggestions and categories.
• The Query of Queries functionality is now more lenient about casting your data to various underlying Java data types, and also allows for specification of Java data types when constructing a query manually using the query functions.
• Greatly expanded data validation options, form validation options, and automatic protection against cross-site scripting attacks. For example, new data validation types for the tag now include credit card, URL, European dates, and XML.

Read Review: Macromedia's ColdFusion MX 7.0

Some other cool stuff includes standard support for SMS send/receive.

Marc