Personally, I'm pretty excited about this. Peter Elst posted a video from AdobeTV of Ryan Stewart demoing a feature that might be in the next version of ColdFusion. As a matter of fact, here's the comment I left on Peter's post:

Holy @%^&*@#%%^&%@##$%.

So what's this cool new feature? It's actually something being developed by the ColdFusion team, not the Flex team. Essentially, what it boils down to is that by adding a line of configuration code pointing to your ColdFusion server, and setting up a user account on that CF server that has this new remote access enabled, you can access some core ColdFusion functionality from your Flex application without writing a single line of ColdFusion code.

In his example, Ryan uploaded a PDF file, and used CFPDF remotely from his Flex application to access the meta-information about that PDF from Flex — all without writing any CFML. (I'm guessing that the upload itself required a few lines of CFML, but that wasn't what was being demoed.)

It sounded like Ryan said that access can be restricted per-user to specific tags, so it should be highly configurable.

I paused the video at about 2:10, and it looks like these tags are already supported: CFChart, CFDocument, CFImage, CFLDAP, CFMail, CFPDF, and CFPOP. This list has the potential to grow between now and release, too. I would bet they only have code-hinting enabled for features that are already functional, and I'm sure they're hard at work finding and implementing other great tags. I wouldn't be surprised to see CFExchange, CFDBInfo, and a few other tags added to that list. (How cool would it be to have a Flex app to administer MySQL in the same manner as phpMyAdmin?)

Ryan says that this feature "may be in ColdFusion 9, code named 'Centaur'." Let's be real about this: When has Adobe ever demoed a feature or product that wasn't all but guaranteed to be released? They are too careful to do something like that. So this may change form a little bit, but I fully expect it to be included, in some way, shape, or form.

When it comes down to it, this isn't incredibly ground-breaking, because you can already accomplish all of this by writing some server side code. But what's happening here is that the ColdFusion engineering team is doing what they do best: making tedious or complex things easy.

Most of all, it made me realize that we need to start thinking more about the status quo in our applications. How many flex applications do you have that require a username and password that get handed off to be handled by your hand-written server-side LDAP authentication code? You can do that automatically as the application loads, and the user doesn't even have to think about signing in, but still gets their personalized interface. You can do that today, but with these new "Proxy Tags" it would require less code.

I think ColdFusion 9 is poised to be a game changing release. Are you ready?