Open Letter to the CF Server Team

Dear CF Server Team,
For quite a while now I've been piecing together a mental list of the features that I'd love to see added to ColdFusion. Damon Cooper recently blogged about two proof of concept tags at Adobe (http://www.dcooper.org/blog/client/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=916FEFD9-4E22-1671-57A23859C50FFF47) which look pretty cool. There have also been a few public demonstrations of Scoprio (CF 8) features - obviously until the final release nothing is set in stone, but they've been pretty cool features so far. Today I thought I'd share my list of the top features I'd like to see in the next release - some of them simply to make my life easier and some of them because I think it'd help Adobe sell more CF. I've put them in an ordered list so I can reference the number when explaining below, but they're in no particular order. Note - though I do see and hear quite a bit of NDA information, none of the features I've listed came from this information. Some of them I've been told are definitely in the works, some I have no, and no, I won't specify which are which.

1. Make CFC instances Serializable
2. Add support for image creation/manipulation
3. Add Interfaces to CFCs
4. Add support for CFC Constructors
5. Add support for method overloading in CFCs
6. Integration of Breeze functionality
7. Add CSS/HTML 'pod layout' support
8. Add native support for RSS
9. Control logging at the application level
10. Give us an IDE with CFC introspection
11. Expose more of what's going on under the hood
12. Give us an IDE or some hooks into better (interactive) debugging
13. Add accessibility (508) checking to an IDE or to the compiler (accessibility compiler warnings)
14. Introduce better control over threading (code and DB)
15. Add cache control at the application level
16. Add native support for several MS Office formats
17. Add support for granular control (grouping, flushing, etc.) of DB and content caches
18. Enhanced Flash forms using Flex 2
19. Add refactoring to an IDE
20. Make general improvements to CFDOCUMENT (performance and otherwise)
21. Add PDF Forms support
22. Add support for AJAX/Spry generation
23. Make improvements to large file parsing
24. Add non-DOM based XML Parsing (SAX or STAX)

Some Explanations:

Regarding #1
The claim that CF is an 'enterprise solution' is difficult to defend when someone points out this flaw. The fact that CFCs don't replicate is a bug, and one that is long over due to be fixed.
Regarding #3
A while ago there was a lot of discussion in the community about whether or not CF needs Interfaces. Many developers think that it's silly to have in a loosly typed environment. I didn't chime in back then, but will do so now. As someone who is often filling the role of 'architect' on projects, Interfaces would make my life easier. I'd love to diagram the objects in a business domain, create the Interfaces, and then hand that over to a team.
Regarding #4
It would be great if, inside of the opening CFCOMPONENT tag, we had a 'constructor' attribute to specify the constructor method. For backwards compatibility, I don't think just naming a method the same as the CFC would be received as well. In order for this to work properly, CFOBJECT and createObject() would need to support passing additional arguments.
Regarding #7
CF developers seem to like letting the server determine Flash Form layout with the various CFFORM tags, and many developers are asked to create pages/applications that use a 'pod layout' either with CSS or simple HTML. Why not give us some tags that create HTML and/or CSS in order to lay the content inside of them in a pod fashion?
Regarding #8
With the popularity of RSS, wouldn't it be nice to be able to specify that the server should convert a recordset straight to RSS?
Regarding #9
It'd be nice to be able to specify 'this.log='whatever' in Application.cfc (or CFAPPLICATION) so that a log file specific to the activity of that application is used for all long running templates, errors, application events, etc.
Regarding #11
Being able to see how many active sessions, current requests being served, which templates are being currently accessed and frequency of access, currently long running templates and queries, etc. would be VERY nice. This feature request also includes being able to view and control the JDBC connection pool from the CFAdmin.
Regarding #15
Having to turn trusted cache on for the whole server or not at all, sometimes means not optimizing one application because another app on the same server needs trusted cache turned off - why not turn it on with a Boolean 'this.trustedcache' in Application.cfc? Also, being able to control whether class files are saved to disk, the cached queries number, and the number of templates in the template cache - all at the application level, would be extremely useful for optimizing the applications that need it.
Regarding #24
Let's face it, XML is verbose by nature... and reading and parsing a large XML stream in CF is usually less than elegant. In fact, it's not difficult to crash your server parsing large XML packets. Offering XML parsing based on SAX or STAX as opposed to DOM, would drastically improve this. Jim Collins has already created an open source implementation of STAX for CF at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cfsynergy (CFDJ article online at http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/236002.htm) - I'd LOVE to see this integrated with the server.

I didn't think there was much that needed to be said about the other features I've listed, but I'd gladly elaborate more on any of these. Since the CF server Team is still deceiding on what's in CF 8, I encourage my readers to contribute to this list in the comments area, to blog their own lists, and/or to send feature requests for CF 8 directly to Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/go/wish.