ColdFusion 8 Makes It Easier

ColdFusion 8 is now out as a public release candidate, and do I have a lot to say.

First off, I think the ColdFusion team did a great job at adding features across the board that would make ColdFusion a much more competitive product. But I think more interesting is looking at what the ColdFusion team is making easier for you in this release.

ColdFusion has, in my opinion, always been about taking the operations that everyone has to do to build web applications and make them easier. Early versions were focused on making talking to databases easier. ColdFusion MX 6 was about porting the codebase over to Java. You could argue that it was about making ColdFusion easier to work cross platform. That’s a stretch, so if you prefer we can say it was a rebuilding release. ColdFusion MX 7 was about making interfacing easier. Between <cfreport> and <cfdocument> ColdFusion gained new ways of output data. Flash Forms was intended to make writing form based interfaces easier. Gateways make ColdFusion easier to interact with in non-traditional, non-browser based ways.

So what does this version of ColdFusion make easier? I’ve been searching for an answer to that for a few hours now and I think I have a few answers.

First, from the original Scorpio Labs Page:

1. ColdFusion 8 will allow ColdFusion developers to create richer, more engaging web applications
2. ColdFusion 8 will provide powerful new insight into server performance and simplify application troubleshooting
3. ColdFusion 8 will give developers broader platform support and enterprise integration

Here’s my translation:

1. ColdFusion 8 makes Web 2.0 Easier
2. ColdFusion 8 makes Administration Easier
3. ColdFusion 8 makes selling ColdFusion to the Enterprise easier

ColdFusion 8 makes Web 2.0 easier

Cheesy, unliked, overused and unfortunately for me, necessary, the Web 2.0 moniker is unfortunately here to stay. It’s about many things. But I’ve always liked it, because I’ve always looked at it not from a technology perspective, (It’s Ajax, or Flex) but from an authority focus. Web 2.0 is about user content, not “authority” based content. It’s about users choosing how to consume their applications, not site owners dictating how to consume it.

One could make the argument, that there are only two types of typical, Web 2.0 user data that ColdFusion has to date, not dealt well with. They are Video and Images. Video is still shaking out, and still isn’t addressed by ColdFusion. (Adobe as a whole has direction on this.) But at least on the image side of things, ColdFusion 8 makes it easier to handle with <cfimage> and the suite of image functions.

It has always been easy to do Flex development against ColdFusion, but now <cfajaxproxy> and the JSON functions are making it easier to do Ajax development against ColdFusion. This further separates the choice of ColdFusion from the front end used to access it. This is a good thing, it expands a bit on what they did with 7, but also allows “ColdFusion and Ajax” to be said a lot together in press releases and technical news articles. This is good for us as a community.

ColdFusion 8 does not abandon the interface side of things though. There are a bunch of new display management tags including <cflayoutarea>, <cfpod>, <cfmenu>, <cftooltip>, <cflayout>, <cfmenuitem>, <cfwindow>. This shows that ColdFusion is still trying to make it easier to do things that everyone has to do. This time, they are clearly going after the interactivity of “Ajaxy” sites. Now, in the past, in ColdFusion, these types of interfaces have not always been usable on a forward facing application. This is no longer the case. Not only do they look completely modern and professional by themselves. But if you don’t like them, they can be styled by CSS.

Lastly on the Web 2.0 side of things, there is a <cffeed> tag. This makes both creating and consuming RSS or Atom XML feeds much, much easier. Not much to say about it, this is something that all of us have to do now, ColdFusion makes it easier.

ColdFusion 8 makes Administration Easier

The new ColdFusion Monitor tool is perhaps the best improvement to my job ColdFusion has ever made. The ability to track down an errant template is simply stunning. The ability to kill a running template is beyond stunning, it’s ginormous. You can actually see the stack trace of a running template if it’s causing a problem. You can even see every variable in every conceivable scope in a request. This is truly stunning.

Even though we central administrators love exercising iron-fisted control over our shared servers, it’s really nice for Adobe to open up limited capabilities of the administrator to distributed users. I do wish they had made it easier to tie it into a third party directory tool like Active Directory, but I’ll take what I can get.

Finally the administrator now has more options for tweaking performance. You can set limits on number of simultaneous page requests, CFC calls, Flash Remoting calls, and web service requests. All of these tweaks do make it easier for administrators to control their environments.

ColdFusion 8 makes Selling as an Enterprise Solution easier.

I’ve never been one to demand Java like features in ColdFusion. However there are a few areas, where it would be nice if more Java like behaviors were exposed. One case I’m talking about is file processing. ColdFusion 8 now lets you parse files line by line, instead of forcing you to load an entire file into memory at once. But that doesn’t even mention the addition of native Zip tools, which now exist. Granted you could have always dropped down into Java to handle this stuff, but the more you force that to be a solution for people, the more entry-level programmers that run into walls.

But, ColdFusion 8 doesn’t just play with Java better. Adobe’s been hanging out in Redmond. First ColdFusion 8 can call .Net objects like it can Java classes or CFC’s. I think a little cooler, is the fact that ColdFusion 8 can talk with Exchange. Granted, I’m a little sad to be out of an expertise, but happy that everyone can now play with Microsoft’s groupware offering. I’ll probably be saying even more on this feature in the upcoming weeks. But make no mistake about it, this is hands down the easiest way interact with Exchange other than Outlook. It’s really, seriously, that good.

There’s a lot of touting of the performance enhancements to ColdFusion 8. But in addition to just running faster, ColdFusion 8 allows developers to have more control over the performance of their applications through the addition of <cfthread>. This technology will allow developers optimize sequential behaviors like emailing, or rebuilding static files by running them asynchronously. Up until now, the only clean option for asynchronous operations was the Asynchronous CFML Gateway. It does the job, but is a little unwieldy to use if you aren’t an administrator on the machine. <Cfthread> doesn’t replace the Asynchronous CFML Gateway, it just allows another option in the continuum of asynchronous operations.

All in all, developers can now make faster performing applications, on a faster platform, which can talk to many more systems now.

Conclusion

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Every one of these one sentence blurbs represents a feature that deserves its own blog post. (They also probably represent years of developer’s time.) Additionally there are a ton of features, functions and tags I didn’t mention. This is by far the best release of ColdFusion yet.