Adobe is making headlines this week with its controversial decision to discontinue development of Creative Suite in favor of Creative Cloud, but that’s not all we’re seeing from its annual MAX Conference. ColdFusion, Adobe’s Web development software, is the subject of a recent whitepaper that details where the software is at and where it’s headed in the future.

Adobe sponsored a whitepaper from IDC called “Turning Up the Heat with ColdFusion,” and it’s mostly what you would expect from a company-sponsored analysis of its own software. There’s heaps of praise thrown upon ColdFusion for its ease of use while offering all the tools professionals need to build and scale enterprise grade Web sites.

That’s all fine and dandy, but the whitepaper gets really interesting once it gets into future developments. It provides some early details on where Adobe is heading with future versions of ColdFusion. For ColdFusion Server, Adobe has two new releases on the horizon that will add a number of features and enhancements:

Adobe has discussed the broad outline of the next two releases of ColdFusion server — Splendor and Dazzle. In between releases, the team has continued to work on other aspects. For example, support for the popular Amazon cloud in the form of a Splendor AMI was released in early 2013, providing users with a quick and simplified approach to deploying ColdFusion applications in the Amazon cloud. The key thematic areas of improvements for Splendor include bringing ColdFusion into the era of mobile
application development and support for social applications. Special emphasis is planned for additional security features, building on the significant security work done for release 10 and taking its priorities from the OWASP Top Ten Project. Improved manageability and deployment as well as revamped and new PDF integration functionality are also planned.

For the Dazzle release, expansion of the mobile platform support capabilities and support for multiscreen content are planned. Dazzle is also expected to carry the water for Adobe’s aggressive push into the digital marketing space by introducing deeper Web, mobile, and social analytics functionality. A customizable enterprise video portal is also planned, and capabilities that will enable ColdFusion to run in cloud environments in major cloud platforms are expected in the Dazzle release. Finally, the improvements are expected to be accompanied by a strong focus on security, extending the work done with Splendor and prioritizing mobile security according to the OWASP Mobile Security Project.

As for ColdFusion Builder, Adobe plans to also release two new versions to coincide with the Server releases:

Adobe has also identified key work areas for two future releases of ColdFusion Builder. The Thunder release is expected to play a key role in the end-to-end development workflow for mobile application development as well as provide a professional JavaScript authoring experience. Focus on new developers will be delivered with new workflows around a “getting started” scenario. The following release, code-named Blizzard, is expected to coincide with the Dazzle server release and to feature one-click multiscreen support, deployment support in line with Dev/Ops integration trends, and improved test and debug workflows.

The rest of the whitepaper catalogs the various challenges facing ColdFusion, and how Adobe can turn those challenges into opportunities. It also contains a variety of case studies from various software development houses. You can read up on all of that here.