Check it out here:

CIO Magazine - ColdFusion Tops List of Best Application Servers

Damon

"Windows Server and ColdFusion took third and fourth place, respectively [behind IBM WebSphere and Apache]. ColdFusion, in particular, rated highly in scalability, performance and support options. Evans Data attributed this spike in ColdFusion appreciation to last year's release of ColdFusion 8.0."

Check out the summary article here: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/32978

The full report describes the features and capabilities rated as:

Support
Scalability
Performance
Number of platforms supported
Value to cost ratio
Compatibility with other software
Integration with mobile devices
Messaging capabilities
Load balancer
Server infrastructure
XML and Web Services runtime
Session persistence
Database connectivity
Transaction services
EAI and legacy support
Security features
Change management
Application management console
Diagnostics
Event log
Auditing

and says,

"...ColdFusion offers not only a good, easy to use application server, but also easy access to other Adobe technologies."

"In July of 2007, Adobe introduced version 8.0 of ColdFusion. This new version provides Microsoft .NET integration, integration with Adobe Acrobat forms, and enhanced performance. In fact, Adobe claims version 8.0 is four times faster than the previous version, and the product’s users in this survey felt that performance was one of the server’s strongest points, along with scalability, security, and support."

"Version 8.0 also allows the creation of dynamic presentations using Adobe Acrobat Connect, and a built-in ColdFusion Server Monitor to help spot bottlenecks that slow performance."

"Other additions to ColdFusion 8.0 are built-in AJAX widgets, file archive manipulation, Microsoft Exchange server integration, multi-threading, perapplication settings, Atom and RSS feeds, reporting enhancements, stronger encryption libraries, array and structure improvements, and improved database interaction. But a major benefit of the product is its ability to turn any browser content into PDF."

Damon

Adobe ColdFusion Evangelism Kit

The PDF includes:

- A real-world ColdFusion 8 customer success story (Sandels.com)
- Adobe CTO Executive quote on ColdFusion's importance to Adobe's strategy
- Key statistics
- Customers by vertical
- Recent Awards
- Press highlights
- Product Roadmap
- CF / other Adobe product integration messaging
- CF Integation HUB
- Measured results of CF usage

For more info, see Kristen Schofield's BLOG

Damon

More here:

http://www.siia.net/codies/2020/winners.asp

Congratulations, team!

In other news, one of our four pending Adobe ColdFusion 8 reviews posted today in Software Editorial, A UK-based online magazine that specializes in software reviews and recommendations. Some excerpts:

"Companies choose ColdFusion to create complex and robust mission-critical applications for internal and external access. While there are a number of ways to integrate web content with relational data, it is a simple task with ColdFusion, and the support for modern technology (Ajax, .NET and Java) is a valid reason to consider using this product."

"So many positives. The application administration interface is simple and intuitive – it should be no problem for anyone with experience administering a web site or application. And I like the new server monitor, which is an impressive Flash application that is as well organized as any administration interface I’ve used over the years."

"I believe the ability to dynamically generate PDFs is indispensible. Anyone that ever had to handle source and version control for documents at any company will be pleased that they can keep just one version of each document and let ColdFusion create PDFs as needed. Very nice."

"This is a good product for companies already using older versions of ColdFusion, or companies looking to move older legacy systems to a newer, more robust solution that easily integrates the application and relational database data. The interface is intuitive, just like Adobe’s other products, and I did not encounter any errors during my tests. I have used other Adobe products to create and support web applications, but like that ColdFusion lets me build applications – not just linked HTML pages – for use on the internet."

The full review can be found here:

http://www.softwareeditorial.com/InternetWebDesign/coldfusion.html

Damon

http://nil.checksite.co.uk/post.cfm/coldfusion-8

A notable quote:

"Everyone I've spoken to says that ColdFusion 8 is probably the most significant upgrade for ColdFusion yet. If you don't upgrade for anything else, then you must upgrade for the performance increase you will get for your cfcs and your application in general."

Damon

But wow, what a difference!

Check it out here:
http://feeds.adobe.com

Damon

Check it out here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/64_bit.html

Damon

http://www.adobe.com/go/kb403277

The ColdFusion 8 Update 1 release is a follow-up to the extraordinarily well received initial release of ColdFusion 8, and includes full support for 64-bit OSs, as well as support for Mac OSX 10.5 ("Leopard") and Windows Server 2020.

We have also added some core language improvements, including nesting of structure and array creation and have made AttributeCollections significantly more powerful, allowing developers to create structures of information that can be re-used from one tag to another.

See the Release Notes for full details and the full list of feature additions.

The ColdFusion 8 release is one of our finest ever, but there is always room for improvement, so in addition to the feature updates, we have also fixed a significant number of reported issues. Take a look at “Issues Fixed in this Release” in the Release Notes for details.

Adobe ColdFusion 8 continues it's UNBELIEVABLE adoption curve without sign of letting up, and we now have the all-OS 64-bit platform support firmly nailed down in 8.0.1.

Nice job team!

Damon

Check it out here:

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/03/11/Adobe-ColdFusion-warming-to-64-bit-OSes_1.html

Damon

We knew many years ago that language constructs and putting DB data on a web page was a commodity and that's why we focused every ounce of strength and energy on adding higher-level features that customers said they needed, making the product unbelievably easy to install, use and administer, and making it the fastest thing this side of the firewall.

"Innovate or die!" was the mantra the ColdFusion team lived by.

I do wish Vince and the folks at New Atlanta absolutely every success in whatever direction or focus they turn the bulk of their attention on next, however. They're super smart, very in tune with their customers, provide exceptional customer service, and they really did one heck of a job for such as small company.

In retrospect, I guess this was inevitable, and I had a bit of a clue of how things were going (and truly felt bad for them) last year at CFUNITED when their exhibit hall booth was all but deserted. Personally, I'll miss them as a friendly and passionate ColdFusion competitor, but I have no doubt they will be around and have great success for many years to come, delivering great products and services.

Here at Adobe, though, we're going to keep doing what we're doing: focusing on innovation and solving our customers problems. The next major release of ColdFusion is shaping up to be incredible!

Damon

Winners will be featured in the June issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. For the full list of winners, take a look here:

http://www.drdobbs.com/blog/portal/archives/2020/03/jolt_award_winn.html

As the Director of Engineering for the Adobe ColdFusion engineering and QA teams that built ColdFusion 8, I'm obviously very, very proud of what we accomplished. Thanks to everyone involved in making it such an awesome product, especially our Beta testers, who contributed countless months of testing, feedback, suggestions, ideas and healthy criticism to help make ColdFusion 8 the best release of ColdFusion EVER.

The full list of credits for ColdFusion 8 can be found in the ColdFusion 8 Administrator, but I've listed them here as well for all to see. Everyone who worked on ColdFusion 8 be very proud of what they created, and of the tremendous job they did:

Engineering Management
Damon Cooper, Director of Engineering
Hemant Khandelwal, Engineering Manager
Praveen Gupta, Quality Assurance Manager
Kristen Schofield, Senior Program Manager
Vishal Manakame, Senior Program Manager

Engineering Team
Ashwin Mathew
Awdhesh Kumar
Carol Frampton
Chandan Kumar
Dean Harmon
Hareni Venkatramanan
Kiran Sakhare
M. Prabhakar Shenoy
Prayank Swaroop
Rakshith N
Ramchandra Kulkarni
Rupesh Kumar
Sanjeev Kumar
Tom Jordahl
Vijay Shah

Quality Assurance Team
Ahamad Patan
Asha K S
Bhakti Pingale
Bill Sahlas
Bob Powell
David O'Leary
Dipanwita Sarkar
Farah Gron
Jayesh Viradiya
Manju Kiran P Kiran
Sandeep Paliwal
Steven Erat
Tata Sankaram
Vamseekrishna Manneboina
Vinu Kumar

Documentation & Localization Team
Randy Nielsen, Documentation Manager
Anne Sandstrom, Documentation Lead
Hal Lichtin
Linda Adler
Sarah Hage

Product Management, Marketing, and Business Team
Jason Delmore, Senior Product Manager
Ben Forta, Product Evangelist
Tim Buntel, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Engineering Escalation Team
Ken Smith
Swathi Chitteddi
Tom Donovan

Best of Scorpio 1st Deadline Submitters and Testers Extraordinaire
Amit Yathirajadasan
Andy Sandefer
Patrick Steill
Randy Drisgill
Ray Camden
Sam Farmer
Terrence Ryan
Todd Sharp
Nick Walters

Congrats all! Now we need to figure out what to do with the award trophy....

Damon

Check it out here: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/coldfusion-8-believe-hype

Damon

http://www.trycoldfusion.net/

Damon

http://www.fusionauthority.com/community/4729-community-chronicles-0-2.htm

Damon

This is basically the software industry's equivalent to of the the "Grammy's", and it's a fantastic honor to be nominated and make the Finalist short list, especially having been part of the awesome team that produced Adobe ColdFusion 8.

These awards provide a unique opportunity for companies to earn the praise of their peers and competitors. The Codie Awards program, now in its twenty-first year, remains the standard-bearer for celebrating outstanding achievement and vision in our industry. ColdFusion 8 is nominated as a finalist in the "Best Web Services Solution" category. Other Adobe finalists are LiveCycle Rights Management ES, Captivate 3, and Acrobat Connect Professional.

Way to go team!

Damon

The full set again is just $50, which is unbelieveable, and you get absolutely everything you'll need to build ColdFusion 8 applications of all shapes and sizes, regardless of your experience history with ColdFusion. The docs have really undergone a quite revolution over the last 3.5 releases, starting with CFMX 6.0, then a full rework with CFMX 6.1, and another full rewrite with the CFMX 7 doc set, and now a major re-vamp and upgrade with the ColdFusion 8.0 release.

The full library is a 6 volume, 3,000+ page reference set, and is a must-have guide to installing, managing, and building Internet applications with ColdFusion 8 for every developer and administrator.

Randy Neilson, Hal Lichton, Anne Sandstrom, Linda Adler and the other ColdFusion doc team members did a truly AMAZING job with them this time, and you owe it to yourself to have the hardcopies available on your bookshelf while you're developing (if you're anything like me, you just can't replace good hardcopy books).

The full set includes:

- Installing and Using ColdFusion 8
- ColdFusion 8 CFML Quick Reference
- Getting Started Building ColdFusion 8 Applications
- Configuring and Administering ColdFusion 8
- ColdFusion 8 CFML Reference (Multi-Volume)

And the best books for learning and practicing (with working examples!) new features, IMO:

- ColdFusion 8 Developer’s Guide (Multi-Volume)

Enjoy, and please spread the word! These docs are excellent, and really should be (this time) everything you need for ColdFusion development using ColdFusion 8. I really wish we could have shipped these in every box, but it wasn't possible for a number of reasons (weight was a primary factor!!).

Damon

First, though, I'll note that Adobe ColdFusion 8 continues it's UNBELIEVABLE adoption curve without sign of letting up, and we now have the all-OS 64-bit platform support firmly in Beta now for 8.0.1, code-named "Gemini".

Adobe ColdFusion Features Survey
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=yLcENFTqjkIn6gqoFpRiUQ_3d_3d

Adobe ColdFusion Platform and Vendor Support Survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=_2fJgulePMz_2f1GM6FGV6uMUQ_3d_3d

Thanks in advance!

Damon

The survey is very short and to-the-point and can be found here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=321RrO9_2fWaP_2bdYMnmF9CuQ_3d_3d

Please do take a minute or two to fill it out if your shop uses ColdFusion at all.

Thanks in advance!

Damon

He writes,

"I thought I'd let you know that Economist.com has finished it's port to ColdFusion 8 across the whole live cluster and we have seen a reduction in page generation time of around 20% which is amazing and totally unexpected...the whole thing is ridiculously stable. I am amazed. Feel free to use this mail in any form you like."

Check it out here at http://www.economist.com

If you haven't upgraded to Adobe ColdFusion 8 yet, you're missing out on the instant boost of performance, scalability and stability ColdFusion 8 offers over all previous versions.

Just the process of upgrading will give your site and Web Applications a serious shot of adrenalin, not to mention making you look like a hero to your customers!

Damon

The following is an "Inside Adobe" article published today on the Adobe employee intranet, replusblished here with permission. This was written up for the Adobe Intranet as part of a series highlighting the company’s 25-year history.


-------------------------------------

Nov 21, 2007

As the world's first commercially available web application server when it shipped in 1995, Allaire's ColdFusion defined a new market space. For web developers, it dramatically simplified the process of dynamically publishing database content on web pages.

In subsequent releases, the functionality of ColdFusion expanded beyond database connectivity to include a broad collection of out-of-the-box services for building all kinds of Internet applications. Today, because it fits into any IT environment, ColdFusion 8 is ideal for everything from small departmental applications to highly scalable, reliable implementations of large, enterprise-wide applications.

Simplicity and Productivity

“ ColdFusion was designed from the very beginning, more than 12 years ago, to be incredibly simple to use and incredibly productive,” explained Ben Forta, director, Platform Evangelism. “It predates all of the other options out there, and even those that have come along much later have not figured out how to make development as productive as we did, with ColdFusion 1.0, in the mid 1990s.”

A key to ColdFusion's strength is that it combines a programming language with an enormous amount of built-in functionality.

“It's much more than a language,” Forta explained. “ColdFusion also provides thousands of lines of pre-written Java code. So if you need to create chart or reports, generate PDF files or generate a Connect presentation, everything you need is all there already, and you can implement it with just a few ColdFusion tags. You'd have to write hundreds of lines of code in Java or any other language to create the same applications that you can build in just a few easy steps with ColdFusion.”

ColdFusion Developers: Diverse, Loyal _ and Persecuted?

ColdFusion's customer base is very broad, covering all industries and creating everything from small departmental applications to very large public web applications that use hundreds of clustered servers.

It is also very loyal. Why? In part, because ColdFusion makes heroes out of web application developers.

“Imagine that you're a ColdFusion developer in a big company. A team of 10 Java developers down the hall is into its sixth month on a project. They're stuck in architecture reviews and writing code; the project never really goes anywhere," explained Tim Buntel, senior product marketing manager. “You can come along and build a great application all by yourself, with ColdFusion, in a matter of days. It makes you a hero in your organization.”

“Of course, it's a double-edged sword,” he added. “Over the years, some people have dismissed ColdFusion because you don't have to have a PhD in computer engineering to use it. They have said, ‘If it's so easy, it can't possibly be a real programming language. Real coders suffer, they drink a lot of caffeine and their hair turns white...’.”

“So that phenomenon has led to the somewhat weird psyche of a ColdFusion customer," Buntel said. "They are incredibly devoted to the technology, but they also have a slight persecution complex.”

An Evolution

“ColdFusion came to be because it was very difficult in 1995 for developers to create web pages that could deal with dynamic content from databases," explained Kristen Schofield, senior product marketing manager. “It gave HTML developers a way to take data from a database and display it on a web page in HTML format, very quickly and easily, with few lines of code.

“Our first few releases focused on that strength and building up the ColdFusion language around it – giving developers more functionality," she continued. "Then, with versions 4.0 and 4.5, Allaire offered features to integrate with other enterprise technologies and started to push for adoption in large enterprises.”

Macromedia acquired Allaire in 2001. While ColdFusion 5 shipped after the Macromedia merger, it was mostly developed under Allaire. ColdFusion MX (6.0) was the first Macromedia release.

“We re-wrote the language (which was originally in C++) in Java," Schofield noted. “We were responding to the industry trend of J2EE standards; it was an important investment to make for our customers.”

If version 6.0 was about architecture, the next release was about rich features.

“ColdFusion's claim to fame is that it's a glue; it works well with other technologies and makes hard things easy,” Schofield explained. “So we went back to that concept in the 7.0 release and focused on features that made reporting, PDF generation, rich forms, SMS integration and other functions even easier.”

That strategy was a tremendous success: the product's revenue grew 30 percent year over year.

Joining the Adobe Family

Most recently, with ColdFusion 8, the team has realized the opportunities that have come with the Adobe acquisition. Because ColdFusion is now an Adobe product, developers can enjoy seamless in tegration with Adobe technologies and use Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, PDF and LiveCycle Data Services in ways that other languages just can’t.

“B eing able to take advantage of wider Adobe products and technologies by building hooks to them into ColdFusion – and building links back from ColdFusion to them – is incredibly important,” said Forta. “First, it solidifies ColdFusion within the wider Adobe offerings, to make it easier to cross-sell products. But it also helps solve very real problems for our customers.”

Highlights

· 1995: Allaire releases Cold Fusion, the world's first commercially available web application server

·  1997: For the first time, Cold Fusion includes Cold Fusion Studio, a developer tool (an Integrated Developer Environment, IDE). Allaire acquired a shareware product called HomeSite, which became the basis of the IDE.

· 1998: Allaire changes the product name to ColdFusion

· 2001: Macromedia acquires Allaire and then releases its first version of ColdFusion (5.0). This is also the first release with Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver integration.

· 2002: Macromedia releases ColdFusion MX, which has been completely rebuilt, based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform, and designed to integrate well with Flash using Macromedia Flash Remoting

· 2005: Adobe acquires Macromedia

·  2005: ColdFusion integrates with Eclipse (a public project in support of an open-source IDE) for the first time

·  2007: ColdFusion 8 is the first Adobe release

Claims to Fame

·  Well-known customers include Boeing, Logitech, Bank of America , Embraer, Correos ( Brazil ) and the Peace Corps

· ColdFusion also powers the official Pokémon website!

· The e-commerce website with the highest level of financial transactions per day in the world – the United States Mint – is powered by ColdFusion

·  After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the European Commission's relief management agency used ColdFusion to build – in just two days – an application to track where aid workers were being dispatched

Did You Know?

· Whether you know it or not, you're using ColdFusion every day. It powers the Adobe Intranet, Adobe.com, the Adobe employee Knowledge Transfer Network web site (and countless other internal Adobe sites), as well as several new Adobe AIR applications.

· The largest vertical market for ColdFusion is governments (national, state and local). In fact, many public-facing .gov websites, such as the U.S. Senate, the National Park Service and the UK Parliament, have been built with the product.

· The European Commission is the largest ColdFusion customer in Europe; it has 500+ ColdFusion applications, and ColdFusion is one of only two official development languages

· Boeing has 300+ ColdFusion developers in-house and an internal ColdFusion blog. One staff member's sole responsibility is to coordinate all ColdFusion use throughout the company.

·  There are an enormous number (probably thousands) of ColdFusion blogs on the Internet; almost every member of the Adobe ColdFusion team has one

·   In 1996, Microsoft tried to get into this market by buying ColdFusion. Allaire said no, so Microsoft went and bought something else; that product eventually became ASP.

Key Acquisitions in ColdFusion's History

· 2001: Macromedia acquires Allaire. (Brothers JJ and Jeremy Allaire originally developed ColdFusion.)

·  2005: Adobe acquires Macromedia.

What Others Have Said_

“You can program faster than you can think with ColdFusion.”

-Jochem van Dieten, ColdFusion Developer, Prisma IT

“If it were not for your product, our agency would shut down. We’ve got five years of applications to build, and if it weren’t for ColdFusion, there would be no way for us to get ahead of that. Your product makes all that possible.”

-a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration employee, at a recent conference

"We use ColdFusion 8 in the back end for our AIR Adobe Directory application. Venkatesh Yadav, a developer on our team, built a ColdFusion application to broker calls between our AIR application and Microsoft Exchange. We were able to develop a killer feature in our application to show when an employee has meetings. When you look someone up, clicking on the calendar icon shows their availability for any day you choose; and it works for conference rooms, too. This is all made possible by ColdFusion 8. Very, very cool stuff!”

-Ron Nagy, Senior Business Systems Analyst, Adobe IT

“I know it sounds cheesy, but ColdFusion makes coding fun.”

-Brian Rinaldi, Web Developer

“[ColdFusion 8] shows Adobe’s commitment to the product and to enabling ColdFusion developers to build better web-enabled applications faster than is possible with any other available technology.”

-Simon Horwith, Web Developer's & Designer's Journal

How has ColdFusion revolutionized the way the world engages with ideas and information?

“ColdFusion empowers the masses to take advantage of this incredible infrastructure called the Internet along with the vast amounts of information buried there – in Oracle databases, ERP systems and who knows where else. It's simply phenomenal that anyone, from hard-core developers to executive assistants who've never written a line of code in their lives, can install a product and, within an hour, tie to all kinds of information and build really usable applications that solve real problems.

"Encouraging, allowing and empowering people to build applications so efficiently and quickly, no matter what their skill set or background, is probably the most important part of how ColdFusion has encouraged people to engage all around.”

-Ben Forta, director, Platform Evangelism

Cold Fusion 3.1 circa 1997, before Allaire changed the name to ColdFusion (sans space).

More Information

·                            Learn more about ColdFusion on its adobe.com page.

·                            Read and view ColdFusion customer case studies.

·                            Visit the ColdFusion page on the Adobe Developer Connection.

If you are interested in 64-bit support, would like to get your hands on the bits ASAP and are willing to participate in the pre-release program for these platforms, we have opened the gates for enrollment HERE.

In a (not really) related note, there was a story recently, where British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever.

How big? Bigger than you...2.5 meters, or EIGHT FEET, long.

Kinda like 64-bit Scorpio...big.   R E A L L Y   BIG.

To demonstrate both 64-bit Adobe ColdFusion 8 AND the giant scorpion, in relation to the average developer:

Damon

Just posted Nov 1, this is a great little 7-minute interview with Tim Buntel, CF's Sr Product Marketing Manager on 'What's New' in Adobe ColdFusion 8.

Check it out:

http://www.builderau.com.au/program/coldfusion/soa/Getting-to-know-ColdFusion-8/0,339028378,339283179,00.htm

Go CF!

Damon

"...a force to be reckoned with in the application server space. I’ve been using ColdFusion for 10 years, and I haven’t seen the community this excited about a new release in a long time. The recent release is by far the most compelling version since they moved to the Java platform — and possibly even the most compelling version ever."

...just like the 2007 World Series Champions Boston Red Sox!

More here: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?cat=467

Lots of goodness came out of Boston in 2007!

Damon

"This significant upgrade has been fully tested on ColdFusion 8 with stellar performance improvements noted across the entire application. Average page time and requests per second turned in a whopping 50% improvement from version 7 to 8."

The Press Release from FuseTalk is HERE.

Greg Waite, CEO of FuseTalk is quoted in the Press Release:

"Adobe's ColdFusion 8 is a real break-through product for the Web community at large -- it offers incredible flexibility, performance and stability."

"Add the power of ColdFusion to run across multiple platforms, simplify complex web development and provide enrichment and extensibility to other standards such as JAVA, .NET, Exchange, Flex and AJAX and PDF, and you have a powerful winning combination for building WEB 2.0 communities." Waite added.

I think ColdFusion 8 is a definite winner, judging by the early feedback. Organizations seem to increasingly be looking for technologies that deliver dramatic power and productivity gains as they embark on new Web 2.0 Flex and AJAX Web application projects, and ColdFusion 8 is apparently just what the doctor ordered to build these applications within existing IT J2EE and .NET infrastructures, quickly and easily.

Add in the tremendous performance gains we delivered in ColdFusion 8, with highly optimized native compilation to super tight Java VM bytecode, and organizations can not only develop powerful new Web 2.0 applications faster than ever, but can also run them as native, fastest-ever, highly scalable J2EE applications as well.

Viva Adobe ColdFusion.

Damon

http://www.adobe.com/go/kb402466

Additionally, folks having any of the following three CFDOCUMENT issues can apply this ColdFusion 8.0 CFDOCUMENT patch here:

http://www.adobe.com/go/kb402584

I apologize for letting these get into the Final release, but at least we have the patches out there now! We'll try to stay as repsonsive as we can.

Thanks!

Damon

http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/ecards.htm

Damon

More details here: http://www.adobe.com/products/jrun/productinfo/faq/eod/

An excerpt:

"After careful consideration and analysis of both the server marketplace and customer feedback, Adobe plans to discontinue new feature development for Adobe® JRun™ software, the fast, affordable and reliable J2EE compatible application server. However, Adobe plans to release Updater 7, the next update to JRun, in the second half of 2007, in order to meet the needs of existing JRun customers."

Basically, the ColdFusion team has taken on the JRun team and taken the product under our wing. We're actively doing enhancements to JRun needed for ColdFusion, and that will continue for the long term foreseeable future. All the enhancements that went into the embedded JRun inside ColdFusion 8 are currently being baked into Updater 7 for JRun 4, and will go through an additional round of testing and then we'll release it to JRun customers. See the FAQ for what's in there.

The pattern for the future should look something like: ColdFusion needs some enhancements, they are made in JRun, integrated into ColdFusion, then rolled back out to JRun customers in the form of future Updaters, hot fixes, security fixes, etc.

Bottom line: Adobe JRun or ColdFusion customers are in good hands.

Here are some FAQ's for ColdFusion customers with regard to the JRun end of new feature development FAQ:

Q. What does the end of new feature development of JRun mean for me as a ColdFusion developer?
A. Very little. Adobe ColdFusion software uses JRun as the bundled J2EE application server in the classic “standalone” configuration and in the “multi-server configuration.” While Adobe has announced that there will be no new feature development for JRun as an independent commercial product, it is still very well suited for its current use in ColdFusion and we will continue to update JRun to address ColdFusion requirements. This development announcement will have no impact on the functionality of ColdFusion or any of its features.

Q. Can I still deploy ColdFusion on JRun?
A. Yes. ColdFusion MX 7 and the newly released ColdFusion 8, the 8th major release of ColdFusion, both include JRun as the bundled application server.

Q. Should I move to another J2EE application server?
A. There is absolutely no need to change application servers as JRun will be supported as part of ColdFusion for the foreseeable future. However, ColdFusion also continues to support the leading J2EE application servers from top vendors, so there are plenty of choices available should you wish to change for any reason: See http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/systemreqs/ for the complete list of platforms supported by ColdFusion.

Q. What does this mean for my ColdFusion support contract? Can I still get support if I'm deployed on JRun?
A. Yes! ColdFusion, deployed either on the bundled JRun or on other supported J2EE application servers, has a full range of support plans available. See http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/ for more details.

Q. Does Adobe also intend to discontinue development of ColdFusion?
A. No! Adobe’s commitment to continued development of ColdFusion is very strong. The recent ColdFusion 8 release is one of the most significant releases in the product’s more than 12 year history.

Q. Will Adobe continue to support JRun?
A. Yes. Adobe will continue to honor all existing support commitments. However, we will no longer sell new Gold-level contracts for JRun as of August 3rd, 2007. All active JRun Gold support contracts will be honored through to the end of their term. Upon renewal, customers may renew into the next highest level of support for JRun – Silver support. An Adobe Support Renewal representative will contact you 60 days prior to the expiration of your support contract to help you transition to your new plan.

If you are an existing Adobe OEM partner, contact your Account Manager for assistance with your contract terms.

If you have any questions regarding your JRun support agreement, contact a customer service representative at 1-800-833-6687 for North America. Outside North America, contact http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/.

Damon

An internal Adobe staff writer interviewed a bunch of us on the ColdFusion 8 team, the following is the result, and I thought you might find it an interesting read.

Enjoy.

Damon
===============

ColdFusion 8: Lightning in a Bottle

July 30, 2007

Adobe announces ColdFusion 8, the highly anticipated new release of a product used by approximately 350,000 Internet application developers worldwide.

Adobe today announced ColdFusion 8, the latest version of a product used by hundreds of thousands of developers to create compelling Internet applications quickly and with ease.  This is the first release of ColdFusion since Adobe acquired Macromedia in December 2005. 

 

“This release is like lightning in a bottle – it’s something special,” commented David Mendels, senior vice president, Productivity Business Unit.  “Thousands of customers can’t wait to get their hands on it, and our ColdFusion team has done an exceptional job making it the most powerful and versatile version of the product ever.”

 

“ColdFusion 8 rocks!” added Kevin Lynch, chief software architect and senior vice president, Platform Business Unit. “It has an impressive array of new capabilities, including integration with LiveCycle Data Services, support for Ajax data binding and presentation, smooth Flex integration, image compositing, PDF reports, and much more.”

 

“It clearly reflects how the ColdFusion team continues to listen to customers,” Lynch continued. “This release will enable hundreds of thousands of ColdFusion developers to solve real-world web application challenges more quickly and with even more engaging, effective user interfaces.”

 

For nearly all of its development cycle, ColdFusion 8 was part of the former Enterprise and Developer BU, which was recently merged with the Knowledge Worker BU to form the Productivity BU, led by Mendels. With the reorganization, ColdFusion is now part of the Platform BU headed by Lynch. 

 

What Is ColdFusion 8?

ColdFusion 8 enables developers to quickly and easily create compelling websites and other Internet applications that can be smoothly integrated in virtually any enterprise environment. The version announced today is the fastest ever, even when running applications built with a previous version.  It is loaded with new and enhanced features based on extensive, ongoing customer feedback.

 

“Customers absolutely love ColdFusion 8 because it’s easy to learn, fun to use, and powerful enough to create real-world, data-rich, enterprise-class applications, without having to go through a painful learning curve.  In fact, most developers find the product fun to use,” said Ben Forta, senior technical evangelist. 

 

Who Will Use ColdFusion 8?

ColdFusion 8 will be used by developers who want to create faster, more compelling Internet applications in less time, and IT project managers who want to improve the productivity of their teams.  “And they want it immediately,” said Forta. “Indeed, many of the beta testers have already started deploying ColdFusion 8 even before the product is shipped.”

 

Now 12 years old, the product already has an intensely loyal following and is used by more than 10,000 organizations, including 75 companies in the Fortune 100.  Well known enterprise customers include AT&T Wireless, Bank of America, Boeing, Caterpillar and U.S. Bank.  Other institutions, such as the Mayo Clinic, the Peace Corps, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania also rely on ColdFusion. 

 

By far the largest segment of ColdFusion customers work in national, state and local governments. In fact, many public-facing .gov websites such as the U.S. Senate, National Park Service, UK Parliament and European Commission have been built with the product. 

 

Many customers use ColdFusion to build public-facing Internet applications. Others rely on it to build non-public-facing Intranet applications.  For instance, both Adobe.com and Inside Adobe are built with ColdFusion.

 

Reasons to Buy or Upgrade

The ColdFusion 8 product marketing team and employees in Worldwide Field Marketing list many compelling reasons to buy or upgrade to ColdFusion 8, saying customers can:

• Experience out-of-the-box performance gains – even for applications written with a prior version – because ColdFusion 8 is the fastest version of the product ever
• Use the Server Monitor to see exactly what is happening in every application, and identify and fix bottlenecks via a sophisticated Flex interface
• Debug applications more easily and effectively than ever
• Enhance the end-user’s experience and productivity by creating personalized, multimedia-rich applications in Flex or Ajax, making it possible to interact with PDF forms and view rich-media, on-demand presentations
• Smoothly integrate Internet applications with nearly any enterprise environment thanks to support for Java and .NET objects
• Leverage ColdFusion 8’s integration with Microsoft Exchange Server to enable applications to access calendars, contacts and tasks
• Deploy applications natively on leading J2EE server platforms including IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, and JBoss

 

Building on a Successful Beta

Focused efforts to market the ColdFusion 8 release began months ago.  The product’s public beta, announced on May 30, was extensively marketed by targeted email, blogs and on appropriate websites.  Ben Forta and Adam Lehman, ColdFusion specialist, visited 41 cities in four weeks to meet with ColdFusion developer groups. They, along with Tim Buntel and Jason Delmore, also presented at dozens of events, demonstrating key features and benefits of the beta release.

 

“We targeted meeting with 2,000 developers and ended up meeting with more than 3,000,” said Forta.  “Many of them can’t wait to get their hands on the product, and survey results indicate that the vast majority of attendees plan on upgrading and deploying the new ColdFusion immediately.”

 

As a result of the tour and other marketing efforts, 14,000 developers took part in the public beta – nearly three times the target of 5,000 set by the ColdFusion 8 team.  “ColdFusion 8 has so many great features, and we’re already seeing developers create innovative applications that display the power and versatility of this release,” said Jason Delmore, senior product manager. 

 

Spreading the Word

Now ColdFusion 8’s marketing team is building on the momentum created during the public beta by aggressively promoting the launch, with an emphasis on the product’s existing base of customers and government as a key vertical.  According to Andrea Woolner, senior marketing manager, tactics in the campaign include:

• Targeted email announcing ColdFusion 8 to the product’s large base of loyal customers around the world
• Paid search ads
• A new banner ad for highly trafficked developer websites
• Blogging (there are scores if not hundreds of ColdFusion 8 bloggers, including many members of the development team at Adobe)
• Advertising on the ColdFusion 8 community website
• Live events and training, including a launch event, House of Fusion, this week in Washington, D.C., and upcoming AJAX conferences
• Sessions at Adobe’s MAX event in October
• Ongoing eSeminars

 

The product marketing team has also created a wealth of new content for Adobe.com, including a customer video, customer testimonials, demos, data sheets, white papers, and more. 

 

Behind the Scenes – Developing ColdFusion 8

ColdFusion 8 was developed by Adobe employees in Newton, Massachusetts, and Bangalore, India.  “We had team members in Bangalore and in the U.S.,” said Damon Cooper, director of engineering.  “It was a bit of a challenge with the time difference, but we made it work.  We had an outstanding team.”

 

Cooper said the research phase of development started in September 2005 and lasted about 18 weeks.  Everyone on the engineering team – both in development and quality engineering – split into subgroups with about five or six team members.  Each subgroup focused on a specific area related to the next release; for example, competitive products or the server environment in the enterprise. 

 

After researching their respective areas, the subgroups reported back to the ColdFusion 8 team as a whole and communicated their findings and recommendations. “Everyone was involved,” explained Cooper.  “As a result, I think everyone became a passionate champion for certain new features and enhancements.”

 

When considering the subgroups’ recommendations, the team as a whole looked at

• Benefits to customers
• The cost of building a feature
• The potential return to Adobe

 

Integration with Other Adobe Products

After Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, which took place a few months into the development cycle, a big focus for the product and development teams became making sure that ColdFusion 8 leveraged other Adobe products. 

 

“We had some great opportunities to leverage other Adobe technologies to enhance the power of ColdFusion, including PDF, Acrobat Presenter and LiveCycle Data Services,” said Delmore.  “We wanted to make sure that ColdFusion 8 took advantage of everything Adobe had to offer, and demonstrate Adobe’s commitment to the product.”

 

Synch Dev

Once the ColdFusion 8 team decided on a feature set and built early prototypes, they began meeting with customers through the Synchronous Development (Synch Dev) process.  Synch Dev is a customer-driven development process that requires engaging with users early and often.  It was broadly used at Macromedia and usually involves five waves of customer visits, totaling about 30 half-days.

 

“As we went through Synch Dev, we ended up refining and refining and refining to the point that we felt very good about our feature list and the future of the product,” said Cooper. 

 

After each Synch Dev wave of customer product validation visits, the product pitch and prototypes were modified to take customers’ feedback into account, before the next wave of customer visits began,” recalled Cooper.

 

Once the picture of the final product and the must-have features became clear, the engineering team began feature-design and development work.  The development process was broken into “Dev Blocks” averaging about 12-15 weeks each in duration. As each Dev Block was completed, the entire engineering team went into a two week closedown period – for example, just prior to the Alpha 1 release, the Alpha 2 release, the Beta 1 release, the full public beta (internal release candidate), and the GMC/final releases.

 

“At each stage, we invited customers to participate. We didn't want to miss anything major,” said Cooper.

 

All Hands on Deck

Prior to the public beta and every milestone release, the ColdFusion 8 team had a close-down period that required “all hands on deck,” recalled Cooper. “For two weeks, every development engineer, every quality engineer, put their feature development pencils down and focused solely on making sure all aspects of the product were the absolute best they could be.”

 

“Everyone on the team understands that quality is a feature and probably the most important feature that we ship,” Cooper continued.  “Knowing how many customers rely on our technology, we all wanted to get it right.”

 

Early Feedback

Early feedback from beta customers and developers at conferences indicates that the team has, indeed, got it right. 

 

“Members of our team recently attended the CFUnited Conference, and after breakout session on Ajax, they were mobbed,” recalled Cooper.  “Many of the 600 developers who attended those sessions, as well as others at the conference, wanted to know how ColdFusion 8 was built, how we did it.  Some of our guys felt like rock stars.”

 

Delmore added, “As we went through the Synch Dev process, customer feedback went from great to ecstatic.  We’re keeping our fingers crossed that this launch will be something big.  This release could have a huge impact.”

 

“I agree,” said Cooper.  “I think the ColdFusion 8 team has done something pretty extraordinary here.”

 

More Information

• Read today’s press release on Adobe.com
• Visit the ColdFusion 8 pages on Adobe.com

 

Employees Referenced in this Story

Tim Buntel

Damon Cooper

Jason Delmore

Ben Forta

Adam Lehman

Kevin Lynch

David Mendels

Andrea Woolner

This time around, well, first off, we're NOT shipping yet, (in fact we are just getting the DVD burners out of their boxes!), but it's pretty much all the same in terms of facilities, so I'd thought I'd do a quick walk around the ColdFusion 8 engineering and quality assurance areas today to show you what a world-class, mega software operation truly looks like.

Let me caveat this by saying....we have fun on the CF team, first and foremost. And we build some kick-butt software for our customers, and we're as passionate about what we're building as our customers are using it to change people's lives.

We take that responsibility given to us very seriously. But to somehow deal with the incredible stress and responsibility that comes with owning the worlds most used software, little indicators of dealing with that stress begin to show as you walk around the CF R&D zone.

Let's call this...the ColdFusion 8 "Non-Tour" then. Click the "CF" logo to begin.

May the team forgive me. :)

Damon

ColdFusion 8 IRM Product Security Briefing

Bottom line on this release: "...ColdFusion 8 exhibits a high degree of resilience to application layer attacks with no compromise on functionality provisioned by the new features."

At Adobe, and on the ColdFusion team, we take product and customer security very seriously. We understand the trust you place in us and the awesome responsibility we have to making sure our products are as secure as we can humanly make them, prior to ship.

To that end, we have a strict and very detailed internal Product Security Audit Policy that we adhere to.

From an engineering perspective, before any public final release, including the ColdFusion 8 release, the product undergoes an extensive, open-book, multi-phased external product security audit at key checkpoints from a reputable outside contractor who specializes in product security. It's very expensive in terms of committment of cost and resources, but very well worth it for us and our customers, we believe.

We open our source code, discuss feature implementation at length in closed-door meetings with the security company and the engineering team discusses every new product feature implementation and change in excruciating detail.

Each developer and QA engineer confesses his/her fears (and I have plenty of those, so I contribute my share!) about every new feature from a "Can it be hacked, abused or exploited?" perspective, and we grant full, unfettered access to our source tree and engineers to the outside firm. They're under iron-clad NDA of course, and they work diligently to tear apart what we've built, find real and potential problems and weak points, so we can fix any issues before the product ever gets near a paying customer.

Conclusion from the IRM document:

"IRM's security evaluation of ColdFusion 8 revealed that the product has been well designed with security as a major consideration during development. The ColdFusion 8 model requires certain administrative tasks to be performed as a part of deployment in order to enforce a stringent security regime. Security management of these servers is essential in ensuring security of the overall deployment. It is important to follow Adobe’s best practice guides for securing these servers and applying appropriate security patches.

Adobe also maintains resources on secure development of ColdFusion applications which can be found at the following URL: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/security.html.

ColdFusion developers should strive to incorporate secure coding principles into their development methodologies as highlighted by Adobe.

Overall IRM was impressed with Adobe’s integration of security processes in the development lifecycle, the result of which can be seen in ColdFusion 8, a product that withstands stringent security testing with relative ease. All of the new features incorporated in this release adhere to highest levels of application security enforcement without any compromise on functionality."

Damon

This time around, well, it's pretty much all the same in terms of facilities, so I'd thought I'd drop down and do a quick walk around the ColdFusion 8 engineering and quality assurance areas today to show you what a world-class, mega software operation truly looks like.

Let me caveat this by saying....we have fun on the CF team, first and foremost. And we build some kick-butt software for our customers, and we're as passionate about what we're building as our customers are using it to change people's lives.

We take that responsibility given to us very seriously. But to somehow deal with the incredible stress and responsibility that comes with owning the worlds most used software, little indicators of dealing with the incredible stress begin to show as you walk around the CF R&D zone.

Let's call this...the ColdFusion 8 "Non-Tour" then. Click the "CF" logo to begin. May the team forgive me. :)

Damon

http://www.markdrew.co.uk/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=06C9CA64-ADC5-5F28-847BCE2077B920D3

Thanks Mark!

Damon

1. SD Times – 5/31/2007 - Adobe Releases ColdFusion Beta by Alex Handy
http://www.sdtimes.com/article/LatestNews-20070515-29.html

2. IT Week – 5/31/2007 – Adobe Updates Development Tool by Phil Muncaster
http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/news/2191061/adobe-updates-development-tool

Additional Posting:
Computing UK: http://www.computing.co.uk/itweek/news/2191061/adobe-updates-development-tool

3. TheOpenSourcery.com – 5/30/2007 - ColdFusion 8: Backend Integration for Frontend Goodness by Jacques Surveyer
http://www.theopensourcery.com/wordp1/index.php?p=610

4. PC World – 5/30/2007 – ColdFusion Warms to .Net by Paul Krill (InfoWorld reprint)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132356-c,webauthoringsoftware/article.html

Additional Reprints:
- ARNet: http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php/id;1412886503;fp;4194304;fpid;1
- Digital Arts Online: http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=7986
- Computerworld AU: http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1412886503;fp;2;fpid;1

5. ServerWatch – 5/31/2007 – ColdFusion Gets an Overhaul by Andy Patrizio (InternetNews.com reprint)
http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/3680681

6. Linux World – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Unveils ColdFusion 8 Public Beta by Staff (ColdFusion Developer’s Journal Reprint)
http://linux.sys-con.com/read/382340.htm

7. TechWorld – 5/31/2007 – Adobe Offers ColdFusion 8 Public Beta by Staff (Digital Arts reprint)
http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsID=8999&pagtype=samechan

Additional Reprints:

- Reseller News New Zealand: http://reseller.co.nz/reseller.nsf/news/F1E0A514855B42C3CC2572EB007AAD4B

- PC Advisor UK: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=9537

1. CRN – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Advances ColdFusion With Public Beta by Stacy Cowley
http://www.crn.com/software/199703521

2. Dr. Dobb’s Journal – 5/30/2007 - ColdFusion 8 in Public Beta by Staff
http://www.ddj.com/dept/webservices/199703494

3. InfoWorld Daily Podcast – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Cozies Up to .Net with ColdFusion 8 hosted by Tom Sullivan
http://weblog.infoworld.com/daily/archives/podcast/archive.html

4. PC Magazine – 5/30/2007 – Adobe ColdFusion 8 Public Beta Goes Live by Darryl Taft
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2138836,00.asp

Damon

1. InfoWorld – 5/30/2007 – Adobe’s ColdFusion Warms to .Net by Paul Krill
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/29/adobe-coldfusion_1.html

     Article also published in:
     - IT Business: http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=43694&cid=6
    - PC World: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132356-c,webauthoringsoftware/article.html
    - Tech World: http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsID=8977&pagtype=samechan

2. eWEEK – 5/30/2007 – Adobe ColdFusion 8 Beta Goes Public by Darryl K. Taft
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2138586,00.asp

3. InternetNews.com – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Gives ColdFusion A Big Overhaul by Andy Patrizio
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3680376

     Additional Posting:
    -DevX: http://www.devxnews.com/article.php/3680376

4. Computerwire – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Release ColdFusion 8 Beta by Tony Baer
http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=5BC3121B%2D745E%2D47D6%2DBB26%2DC1F3E4B52CC8

     Additional Posting:     
-Computer Business Review: http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=0692B461-9545-42B4-A0F9-59A81C8AD31F

5. MacWorld UK – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Ships ColdFusion 8 Beta by Jonny Evans http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=18157

6. ZDNet Blogs – 5/30/2007 – New Version of ColdFusion Aimed at .NET, Ajax Crowd by Ryan Stewart http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=392

7. ColdFusion Developer’s Journal – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Unveils ColdFusion 8 Public Beta by Staff http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/382340.htm

     Article also published in:
    - Web Developer’s Journal: http://webddj.sys-con.com/read/382340.htm

8. WebProNews – 5/30/2007 – ColdFusion 8 Brands With Adobe by David Utter http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/05/30/coldfusion-8-brands-with-adobe

9. Computing News – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Unveils ColdFusion 8 Public Beta by Staff http://home.nestor.minsk.by/computers/news/2007/05/3019.html

10. SitePoint – 5/30/2007 – Now You Can Be as Cool as Me—GO GET CF 8 BETA! by Eric Jones http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/05/31/now-you-can-be-as-cool-as-me-go-get-cf-8-beta/

11. MacNN – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Offers ColdFusion 8 Beta by Staff http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/05/30/coldfusion.8.beta.posted/

12. Trading Markets – 5/30/2007 – Adobe Launches Public Beta Of ColdFusion 8 Software by Staff http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/BREAKING%20NEWS/558423/

13. WHIR News – 5/30/2007 – HostMySite Offers ColdFusion 8 by Staff http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/053007_HostMySite_Offers_ColdFusion_8.cfm

14. Digital Arts – 5/30/2007 – Adobe offers ColdFusion 8 Public Beta http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/05/30/coldfusion.8.beta.posted/

Press Releases:
---------------------

Adobe Unveils ColdFusion 8 Public Beta
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
- BusinessWire: http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070529006231&newsLang=en

- EFYTimes India: http://www.efytimes.com/efytimes/fullnews.asp?edid=19352&magid=11

- WebWire: http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=37644

Web Hosting Provider HostMySite.com Launches Free ColdFusion 8 Beta Program
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
- TheHostingNews.com: http://www.thehostingnews.com/news-hostmysite-web-hosting-unveils-free-coldfusion-8-beta-program-3344.html

- Web Hosting News: http://www.hostreview.com/news/news/070530HostMySite.html

Damon

Adobe Press Release:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200705/053007ColdFusion.html

ColdFusion 8 Public Beta:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion8

ColdFusion 8 Public Beta Hosting:
http://www.hostmysite.com/cf8

Enjoy!

Damon

9,165 Beta forum message threads
69 Beta forum message threads about the proper naming of attributeCollection

3,901 bugs fixed
113 bugs filed by Ray Camden

57 major feature signoff meetings

5X faster than ColdFusion MX 7 (up to)

33,769 source code files in the main source tree
2,365,591,552 bytes worth of source code files and libraries in the main source tree

....and we're not done yet!

Damon

The doc is here: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhshbm3s_59cwj9xq

Matt's BLOG post is here: http://mattwoodward.com/blog/index.cfm?event=showEntry&entryId=9AA42CC8-A6D3-9ABC-0592E5B77BB96F90

Nice job Matt! (You must be the world's fastest typest!)

Damon

http://www.remotesynthesis.com/blog/index.cfm/2007/5/14/Scorpio-Tour-in-Boston-This-Wednesday

Tom Jordahl and I (at very least) will be there from the ColdFusion engineering team to help heckle Jason, and maybe help answer a few questions if we can as well :)

See you there!

Damon

"ColdFusion 8 looks freakin' sweet-a** and I can't wait for it hit the shelves. With every version of ColdFusion brining even more outstanding features to the table, one can't help but think... is there some divine intervention going on here?"

More here:

http://www.bennadel.com/index.cfm?dax=blog:707.view

It's actually just listening to our customers...intimately, and solving their problems.

(Ok, ok, that and a few beers to help the creative process.)

Thanks for the kind words, guys.

Damon

We've been extremely busy, as you can see, but this should be a great release.

Enjoy!

http://blog.cutterscrossing.com/index.cfm/2007/5/10/Scorpio-Tour-Nashville-Final-Wrapup

Damon

Dave Shuck's BLOG

You're starting to get more of a glimpse into what my team has been working on, BUT....there's more...much, much more yet to come in the weeks ahead.

Stay tuned!

Damon

Several people had questions about the availability of ColdFusion books, and you may not be aware that 1) the ColdFusion MX 7 doc set is absolutely top-notch excellent, and 2) the full set of all CFMX7 books is available for sale at cost at the Adobe online store here.

Again, the whole set is now $50 (basically @ Adobe cost) and you get absolutely everything you'll need to build CFMX7 applications of all shapes and sizes, regardless of your experience history with ColdFusion.

The docs have really undergone a quite revolution over the last 2.5 releases, starting with CFMX 6.0, then a full rework with CFMX 6.1, and another full rewrite with the CFMX 7 doc set. Randy Neilson, Hal Lichton, Anne Sandstrom and the other doc team members have done an AMAZING job with them this time, and you owe it to yourself to have the hardcopies available while you're developing (if you're anything like me, you just can't replace good hardcopy books).

The full set includes:

- Installing and Using ColdFusion MX 7 (72 pages)
- ColdFusion MX 7 CFML Quick Reference (38 pages)
- Getting Started Building ColdFusion MX 7 Applications (152 pages)
- Configuring and Administering ColdFusion MX 7 (170 pages)
- ColdFusion MX 7 CFML Reference - Vol 1 (448 pages)
- ColdFusion MX 7 CFML Reference - Vol 2 (654 pages)

And the best books for learning and practicing (with working examples!) new features, IMO:

- ColdFusion MX 7 Developer’s Guide - Vol 1: (840 pages)
- ColdFusion MX 7 Developer’s Guide - Vol 2: (262 pages)

Enjoy, and please spread the word! These docs are excellent, and really should be everything you need for ColdFusion development using CFMX7.

Damon

However, in order to receive this notification, you need to have an Adobe membership.

Most of you likely already have this; it's what you use to sign in if you want to download trial software or post to the forums. If you don't, you can create a new membership account at https://www.adobe.com/go/gn_your_account.

Just make sure that you have checked the box indicating that you want to receive communications from Adobe via email on the “Change Communication Preferences” page under your account information.

Remember, if you don’t have that magic box checked, we can't send you word when the beta is released (company "opt-in" policy and all that...)

Damon

Here's a great blog post from a customer who attended one of the Scorpio preview events yesterday: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/04/24/9-ways-coldfusion-8-will-rule-web-development/

Enjoy!

Damon

http://www.adobe.com/go/kb401239

The Hot Fix addresses two issues: one with JRun 4 and one with ColdFusion 7.0.2. JRun 4 erroneously reused the input stream buffer for some requests, and in ColdFusion 7.0.2, when CFC instances were kept in shared scopes, in some istuations, they were not being released properly.

To complete the loop, this issue was also previously reported here, and should now be addressed with this Hot Fix.

Damon

Come see the incredible innovations and customer solutions the ColdFusion engineering team has been working on now for the past 2 years. No fluffy features, no features for feature's sake. It's all about giving developers the tools they need and can use right now to build powerful, dynamic rich internet solutions with true intuitive ease, like you've never seen before, and in record-breaking time.

We do respect your busy schedule, so we'll stay focused on previewing the innovations that we think will make you look like a hero with ColdFusion, yet again.

ColdFusion first introduced dynamic web pages to the World Wide Web in a serious way back in 1995 and 1996. I believe we're going to change the Web again with ColdFusion 8 in 2007.

Check the schedule for the preview nearest you: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/events

Damon

More instructions and the detailed list of "what's fixed" at the link below.

ColdFusion 7.0.2 CHF2:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=kb400996

ColdFusion 7.x Updates Page:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_17883

Damon

http://blogs.sanmathi.org/ashwin/2007/03/08/the-death-march/

Nuff said :)

Damon

"Studies" will apparently determine if this remains permanent, but if you're running applications on ColdFusion MX 6.1 or ColdFusion MX 7.x, you'll want to be on Sun's 1.4.2_11 (or later VM.)

More info on DST here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

Anyway, we had an issue with ColdFusion MX 6.1 on JDK 1.4.2_11, having to do with CFLDAP support, and we issued a patch that's posted here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=b3a939ce#MX61U

But in general, for proper handling of the US 2007 DST issue, please read the Adobe Tech Support article here for the latest info:

http://www.adobe.com/go/d2ab4470

The Adobe TechNote articles are:

For ColdFusion 5: http://www.adobe.com/go/kb400365
For ColdFusion 6, 6.1, 7 and JRun: http://www.adobe.com/go/d2ab4470
For general info on DST with CF6 and up: http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_18310

Oh, and of course don't forget to set your clocks forward 1 hour at home!

Damon

The article begins with,

"Forget Ruby on Rails; in this article I outline why, as a Java developer, you should be perhaps be looking to another technology closer to home to leverage your existing in-house skills and infrastructure..."

I couldn't agree more, especially with what's in the ColdFusion Scorpio release coming later this year!

Damon

This year's MAX dates:

North America MAX 2007
September 30-October 3, 2007
McCormick Place West, Chicago

EMEA MAX 2007
October 2007
Barcelona, Spain

Japan MAX 2007
November 2007
Japan

I'll post more info when it's made available, but for now, please mark your calendars for the MAX near you.

(HINT: Adobe ColdFusion will surely be a significant part of this year's MAX event!)

Damon

Find a location near you and check it out for sure. We'll be showing some amazing stuff that will seem truly "magical". Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd law of prediction states:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

To be sure, Adobe Scorpio will definitely seem that way to many users.

Ok, so you have no excuse not to be informed :)

The Adobe TechNote articles are:

For ColdFusion 5: http://www.adobe.com/go/kb400365
For ColdFusion 6, 6.1, 7 and JRun: http://www.adobe.com/go/d2ab4470
For general info on DST with CF6 and up: http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_18310

Damon

See you in the forums "on the inside"...

Damon

1. Flex Application Wizard:

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/demos

This demo shows how to use ColdFusion Extensions for Flex Builder 2 to easily generate a complete rich Internet application to view and maintain records in a database.

2. ColdFusion MX7 Performance Brief:

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/whitepapers/pdf/cf_per_brief_0107.pdf.

The brief measures gains in application runtime performance by comparing average page response times in a test application across ColdFusion MX7 and multiple earlier versions of ColdFusion.

Damon

The components can of course be pulled from the generated CF/FB Wizard app and used in any way you wish in your own home-grown app, as with all the components we generate/ship with, including the validators and Input masking components, etc (we recognize not everyone will go into production with a generated app! :)

Check it out and enjoy!

Special thanks Mike Nimer and Dean Harmon who suffered my relentless push to get this done and to the Flash player team, the Flex SDK team and the FlexBuilder team, all of whom fixed blocking bugs that made this possible.

Damon

More info on DST here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

And here's the skinny on the world-wide implementation of DST in each country/region of the world (and a bit of dark comic relief...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_around_the_world

To wit:

"On September 5, 1999, terrorists were transporting a bomb that they mistakenly thought was set to go off at 5:30 PM Israel Standard Time; it was actually set for 5:30 PM Palestinian Daylight Time, which was an hour ahead. As a result, the bomb went off while the bomb was still being transported, killing the terrorists (and earning them a Darwin Award)."

Anyway, we had an issue to with ColdFusion MX 6.1 on JDK 1.4.2_11 having to do with CFLDAP support and we are issuing a patch for that here in the next day or so:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=b3a939ce#MX61U

But in general, for proper handling of the US 2007 DST issue, please read the Adobe Tech Support article here for the latest info:

http://www.adobe.com/go/d2ab4470

Damon

=======
If you’ve opened this e-mail:

a) You forgot that I do this every year.
b) You're a glutton for punishment.
c) You joined the team this past year and nobody thought to warn you.

I’m sending this early to make sure no one escapes... :)

‘Twas the night before Christmas
Oh no, can it be?
The annual helping of
CF poetry

Yes, it’s now just like clockwork
So sit back and read --
Or would you rather I send this
Through an RSS feed?

So as penguins are dancing
Across movie screens (I just had to get penguins in somehow!)
Let’s look back at these 12 months
To see where we’ve been

We found ourselves traveling
A Mystical road
And soon we were churning out
7.0.2 code

Now our customers say
It’s just like romance
For this year ColdFusion
And Flex learned to dance

Data services, gateways,
And XML files
And those too cool new wizards
That make people smile

So, in the middle of summer
In the sun and the heat
CF 7.0.2
At last hit the street

So we met and we pondered
We analyzed trends
To see where the Scorpio
Journey would end

[New Scorpio features section removed..sorry :) ]

The alpha releases
Have had features galore
(Of course on the Forums
They’re asking for more…)

But, if in this short poem
Your feature’s not listed
Fear not, ‘cuz in real doc
There’s no way we missed it

As the old year is ending
We hope CF 8
Will ring up sales numbers
Right out of the gate

We all hope that next year
About this same time
You’ll be reading some more verse
About CF 9!

(It’s over. You can come out from under your desk now…)

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season / end of year break! All the best,

Anne

=======

Have a safe and happy holiday, everyone, and thanks for a GREAT year!

Damon

http://www.placona.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2006/12/6/CF-Easter

(If it makes anyone feel any better, here's my offical statement for any features-rights activists: "No features were harmed or sacrificed in the making of this [SWF] movie. All egging work was performed on closed courses with professional engineers, and on personal time. :)

Have fun :)

Damon

ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 Cumulative Hot Fix 1

Special thanks to Ken Smith and all the folks in CF Engineering and QA who fixed and tested this one. Good stuff guys.

Damon

Adobe LiveCycle: http://www.livecycleportal.org
Adobe ColdFusion: http://www.coldfusionportal.org
Adobe Flex: http://www.flex.org

Damon

Check out the latest batch of hotfixes, and keep an eye out for future hotfixes for Adobe ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_17883 We should have another batch of important hotfixes coming in the next few weeks as well...and they all get rolled up into the next verson (Scorpio), thankfully! :)

Also, be sure to make sure you're up-to-date with the latest ColdFusion Product Security Bulletins and Hotfixes here: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/#coldfusion

Also, be sure to sign up for the Product Security Bulletin and Hotfx Notification Service here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=szalert

Finally, if you're confused by all the Updater/Hotfix etc terminology, it's all made clear here (welcome to my world!): http://www.adobe.com/support/updaters/terms.html

(BTW, I've asked support if they could possibly add a proactive Notification Service for regiular product support hotfixes and Updaters as well...we'll see what we can do there longer term...)

Damon

http://www.flickr.com/search/?s=int&q=%22scorpio+man%22&m=text

Enjoy :)

Damon

Most notably, we're preparing to rev Scorpio for testers with some of the biggest advances to ColdFusion in many years and a ton of other stuff you've asked for in the past as well. We aren't done innovating yet, but I'd say we're past the half-way mark on the pure construction part of the project, and the release validation "Sync Dev" process is now well behind us. As a result of that that process, which I've described previously, Scorpio changed in definition somewhat and was then fully validated with a broad spectrum of CF customers. They enthusiastically gave us "two thumbs up" and overwhelmingly told us they'd "definitely" upgrade when as spoon as it was available, and some customers actually begged us to back-port some of the features to CF7 so they could have them sooner! :)

There's no doubt in my mind that Scorpio, like CF7, will once again make history with the incredible amount of customer-focused innovation that's going into it. We haven't put EVERY feature ever asked for by customers in there, but I'm sure that Scoprio will be a must-have release, and that you'll find we've been listening to our customers very carefully. But don't worry, we've also thought alot about your future and the types off apps you'll be building in the next few years, and we're anticipating the tools you need to run circles around other developers struggling with piece-meal development alternatives. Our job is to make the hard stuff easy, make you guys heroes, and that’s what we're working to do with Scorpio.

We're also getting ready for the Adobe MAX 2006 conference in Las Vegas next week and everyone who's going is jazzed to be able to meet with customers again and hear their stories and how we can help them out.

If you're going, I look forward to meeting you, and be sure to stop by the ColdFusion booth....someone from the CF team will almost always be there on staff, and we'd love to talk with you about what you're working on and what your challenges are and how we can help.

Damon

Below is an update to the original CFTHREAD Proof of Concept (POC) that adds experimental multithreading support to CFML on ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 that Adobe Computer Scientist and ColdFusion Engineering Team developer extraordinaire, Rupesh Kumar put together in his own time for you to play with. Our development engineers are called “Scientists” at Adobe which is cool because it means that we understand the importance of experimentation.  And like all good scientists, we hypothesize and test – some things make it into the product, others don’t – but we’re always innovating. 

A note on the simple example: you'll want to modify both templates to copy a file (I use a “C:\baseline.txt” file) that exists on YOUR system to a directory that exists on YOUR system (I used “C:\____WORKFOLDER”).  I’d recommend turning on debugging so you can see the execution times yourself as well (much more dramatic that way). Also note that spawned threads shouldn't count towards Simultaneous Threads slots of the CF Server, so you shouldn't need to adjust that setting to accommodate your extra threading.

The CFTHREAD POC enables you to spawn a new thread and optionally wait for a thread to finish. A thread can be spawned using and a thread can join with another thread using .

This update will be the last for the CFTHREAD POC, but it does address some of thread safety issues of the first CFTHREAD POC, and has the same syntax. The two small additions to this updated POC are that a) you can pass any variable to the thread tag and b) any variables defined in the thread tag are local to the thread.

Thread Safety
==========

Each thread has its own local scope and any variable that you define inside the thread goes into that local scope. This is very much like function local scope except that you don’t need to prefix those variables with 'var'. A page scope or other scope variables will be accessible inside the thread using the appropriate prefix like variables.xx or request.xx. CFTHREAD tag also allows passing any variable as attribute to the tag. The attributes thus passed can be accessed using attributes.xxx.

Apart from thread local scope, there is a special scope for thread called "thread" scope. this is a scope in which only the owner thread can write but all other threads can read values from it. This scope can be accessed by ".xxx". The owner thread can also access it using 'thread.xxx'

A thread can put some data in its scope and it can later be retrieved.

Browser Output and Error Handling
========================

CF code written inside CFTHREAD can not write any content to the browser. So any output written using from 'CFTHREAD' will be accessible inside the 'thread' scope using "thread.OUTPUT" or .OUTPUT

Similarly, any error thrown from a body will not be sent to the browser and will be available in thread scope using "thread.ERROR" or .ERROR

Syntax
=====

1) To start a thread:

This will spawn a new thread and any content between tag will be invoked inside that new thread.

2) If you want to wait for this thread to finish, you can use

If thread 'th1' is already over by the time you reach here, it will have no effect. Otherwise it will wait for th1 to complete. One important thing about this POC is that you can wait for only user threads that have been created in that request. So you can not use join for any arbitrary thread in the VM, for example. If you only want to do some operation asynchronously and do not need to wait for its completion, you need not use .

3) To retrieve a value put in a particular thread scope, simply access that scope variable. So you can use th1.x to get the value of x kept in th1 scope.

4) CFTHREAD does not provide a way to sleep. however if you want to do it, you can use

This code lets the current thread to sleep for 10 secs (10000 milliseconds). For example, if you want 'th1' of above example to sleep for 10 sec, this code snippet will go inside

CFTHREAD POC Setup
=================

The zip file contains two other files

- cfthread.jar - This file should be kept in /lib/updates
- taglib.cftld - This should be kept in /wwwroot/WEB-INF/cftags/META-INF. To be on the safer side, you should backup your own original copy of this file.

Restart your server and you should be ready to try out the POC!

DOWNLOAD CFTHREAD POC & SAMPLES ( 101K)

Caveats
======

Once again, just to be clear, this POC is not a CF product feature at this time, has not been properly QA'd, contains bugs and is unsupported. There is also little chance that should a POC evolve into a feature that the tag syntax will not change (perhaps drastically) in the future, and there are no plans to update the POC as future major versions of CF come out.  CFTHREAD may or may not make it into a future release, but that partly depends on feedback from you, our customers.

Enjoy! And thanks Rupesh!

Damon

For those of you interested in the ColdFusion-related sessions this year I've listed some of them here:

GENERAL AND FULL-DAY SESSIONS:
Architecting ColdFusion Applications for Performance, Scalability, and Maintainability (Full Day Session)
Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and ColdFusion (Full Day Session)
An Introduction to ColdFusion Powered Flex
Image Manipulation in ColdFusion

BEGINNER SESSIONS:
Building Your First ColdFusion Application

INTERMEDIATE SESSIONS:
Building Your First Dynamic Web Application
Advanced ColdFusion Components
Securing ColdFusion
Introducing CFEclipse
Advanced ColdFusion Printing and Reporting
Building ColdFusion Powered Flex Applications
ColdFusion 7 Application Framework
Leveraging ColdFusion Components in ColdFusion

ADVANCED SESSIONS:
Leveraging the ColdFusion Application Framework
Search Engine Optimization
AJAX/Spry Framework Overview
ColdFusion.Net Integration
Developing Hybrid Applications with ColdFusion and Java
The Big Framework and Methodology Debate
Unlocking the ColdFusion Server Black Box
Using ColdFusion Components as Objects
Using ColdFusion with Flex Data Services

For the latest up-to-date information, check out the Sessions by Track page.

Damon

And the two main ColdFusion-centric Blog Aggregators:
Adobe XML Blog Aggregator
Fullasagoog

Damon

Here's a link to a shortened PDF version of the survey results (in Japanese with key portions annotated in English):

CS survey by Nikkei Computer2006_short ver2.pdf

ColdFusion won #1 for performance, reliability, productivity of application development, and total CS points.

In fact, the Adobe ColdFusion/JRun combo got the highest rating in almost every category, well above Oracle App Server (#2) and NEC (#3)...BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere, TomCat, Hitachi Cosminexus, etc.

Congratulations team!

Damon

It's a single page, but it's jam-packed full of the essential ColdFusion Developer and Community resources, Blogs, Podcasts, Sites, User Group Info, Adobe CF Product Notifications, the "Smart Category" ColdFusion MXNA feed, the Adobe CF Events feed, ColdFusion download links, links to ALL ColdFusion product docs, IM Help Bots, CF Developer books, uses Ajax, and much much more.

If you do CF development or care about CF in any way, you need to make this site part of your daily routine.

Check it out:

http://www.coldfusionportal.org

(And nice work, Ray!)

Damon

The ColdFusion Server engineering team in Newton, MA is hiring. Recognizing that employees are at the core of our success, Adobe recruits and retains highly qualified and motivated individuals, creates an environment where they can innovate and achieve their best, and rewards them for their performance by giving them an opportunity to share in the company’s success.

POSITION SUMMARY: 

We’re looking for a razor sharp coder who is driven to make a serious contribution to the implementation of one of the most innovative, broadly used and respected Internet Application products currently under development in the world. You will be responsible for development of key Adobe ColdFusion technologies used by literally hundreds of thousands of developers around the world to build rich, high-performance web and Internet applications.  In this role you will work on design and implementation of ColdFusion product features. Demonstrated multi-threaded server development expertise, outstanding software engineering skills and the ability to design and develop independently as well as in tight collaboration with other engineers are required.  Over and above what a “regular” commercial server software engineer is capable of, because of ColdFusion’s unique customer base and mantra to “make hard stuff easy”, you possess the natural ability (the “art”) to produce beautifully simple, elegant but fully enterprise-class capable, scalable and extensible solutions.  You must be able to successfully deliver on aggressive timelines and work in an environment where agility is valued, change is embraced and passionate engineering discussions over how to best serve the customer are encouraged. 

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

Design, document and develop robust, scalable system architectures. Work with other developers in the team to develop features within a common architecture.

KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS:

To perform the job successfully, an individual should demonstrate the following competencies:

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and be able to produce effective, concise specifications and documentation as part of the design and development process.
• Strong software development skills including data model design and the creation of well-engineered code. Strong object oriented design and coding skills are a must.
• Capable of contributing in a fast paced, integrated product team environment.
• Extremely proactive about building the best software possible.
• Knowledge of Java and J2EE is required.
• Knowledge of Web Service standards (SOAP, WSDL) is a major plus.
• Knowledge of ColdFusion and CFML and familiarity with the ColdFusion developer community preferred.
• Knowledge of Ajax frameworks, Flash, Flex and other Rich Internet Application development technologies are a plus.
• Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related engineering discipline.
• 4+ years of recent experience working on data-intensive coding tasks.
• Experience building web applications and working with application servers and databases
• Solid appreciation of software engineering principles such as software lifecycles, version control and configuration management - while remaining flexible and agile.

Adobe believes personal fulfillment and company success go hand in hand, sustaining one another. In fact, our dynamic, rewarding working environment is well known – including seven consecutive years on FORTUNE magazine’s "100 Best Companies to Work For" and other, similar accolades. By hiring the very best and brightest, Adobe continues to be a simply better place to work – creating a dynamic environment today and providing incentives for future achievement.

If you (or somone you know) fit the bill, feel free to shoot a resume to me directly: dcooper@adobe.com.

Damon

The CF/Flex 2 Application Wizard, or "Super Wizard" as we call it here, is based on a template application that was written and reviewed for best practices. The application that's generated by the Wizard uses Flex 2, the Flash Remoting Update in CF 7.0.2 and ColdFusion Components (CFC's) as the backend.

It would have been nice to have been able to have inlcuded the ability of the Super Wizard to generate a Flex 2 + CF and Flex Data Services (FDS) application as well with Flex Builder 2, but unfortunately, we just ran out of time.

However, we did get as far as a working copy of the application that was (will?) be used as the "template" app for the CF/FDS portion of the Super Wizard.

I OK'd Mike Nimer's posting of both template applications (CF/FR and CF/FDS) so you can check them out and at least see an example of what coding with CF to FDS vs Flash Remoting is like, and try out a CRUD FDS CF app for yourself to see the "push" and update conflict resolution in actiion (try running two app instances of the CF/FDS app and try updating the same record, for example, and see the conflict resolution in action).

Available Here

Enjoy!

Damon

ColdFusion 7.0.2 IRM Security Audit Whitepaper

We'll try to make a practice of publishing the full final reports from our external product vulnerability audits for future releases from now on as well.

Damon

1) Which IDE(s) are you currently using for ColdFusion development? (IE Dreamweaver, CF Studio, FlexBuilder/Eclipse/CFEclipse, Notepad, other, etc)

2) What IDE's have you used in the past (and why did you switch)?,

and

3) Which IDE would you LIKE to be using if you could wave a "magic wand" and make ANY changes you wanted to your IDE of choice? What are those changes?

[NOTE: Before responding, be aware you'll be subscribed to further comments on this list.]

Damon

Just a quick note to let everyone know on the affirmative: we're listening, reading pretty much every single post down to the last comments made by readers of those blogs, and let me just reassure folks that everything (yes, absolutely everything) gets considered.

The CF Team is focused on Scorpio development currently and in terms of picking the right "major" features of a release we're following a process known internally as the "Synchronous Development Process".

SDP helps us really nail down the defining features of the release to make sure they're the most relevant and useful for our customers. The process is fairly rigid, has been used by many recent product releases at Macromedia/Adobe, forces us to ask some hard questions of ourselves and customers, and it's the same process we followed when identifying the major features we had to do for the ColdFusion "Blackstone" (CF7) release.

An entire book could be written on the SDP process, but it's robust, iterative, it takes the "Core" SyncDev CF team on the road in "waves" talking to carefully selected groups of customers which represent the various parts of our customer base. It also has some great (and very sophisticated) tools and approaches and follows a formal, prescribed process to refine the feature list to the one that should make it into the product.

We also mix in favorite features and enhancements requested by customers from all the various forums, our own "CF flavored" home-cooked ideas, as well as tight integration with and use of other company technologies that make sense as well.

Of course, there are also features that we add in that are hatched by CF engineers themselves that are just too cool to leave out :) (You wouldn't believe the now fundamental features of CF that came down this route!)

Anyway, we're well under way building the future of CF, and while we do have a bunch of features already done, we still have a bunch of TBD features and other work to do as well, but please do know that we take input from everywhere we can find it and all ideas are considered.

We kicked off this release last year with about 15 solid weeks worth of all-hands-on-deck research that came up with a set of recommendations that serve as inputs to the SyncDev and development processes. Suffice it to say, a lot of planning, listening and innovation goes into the defining of a major ColdFusion release, but we never forget our roots and what we're about:

Making Hard Stuff Easy.

Keep the ideas and feedback coming!

Damon

The first example copies a file 50 times files + sleep 200ms each time, and the second example launches 50 threads with CFTHREAD to do the same work and join back up at the end of the page with CFJOIN.  

This POC works with CF 7.0.2 (Standard or Enterprise).  While you can do multi-threading and asynchronous CFML with these POC tags, they don’t provide any of the fine-grained threading control you have with ColdFusion Event Gateways and the Asynchronous Gateway, for example.  So you don’t get thread pooling, control over how many worker threads can be active or pooled, metering on Gateway messages In/Out, or any of the other advanced capabilities of the Event Gateway architecture on CF7, but they do the basics: run stuff asynchronously in separate threads and allow for the use of local (thread-local) variables, allow access to shared scopes, etc.

A note on the simple example: you’ll want to modify both templates to copy a file (I use a “C:\baseline.txt” file) that exists on YOUR system to a directory that exists on YOUR system (I used “C:\____WORKFOLDER”).  I’d recommend turning on debugging so you can see the execution times yourself as well (much more dramatic that way).

Also note that spawned threads shouldn’t count towards Simultaneous Threads slots of the CF Server, so you shouldn’t need to adjust that setting to accommodate your extra threading.

Running the serialized example with debugging enabled yields this execution time block:

Execution Time

red = over 250 ms average execution time

And running the CFTHREAD example with debugging enabled yields this execution time block:

Execution Time

red = over 250 ms average execution time

To be crystal clear, this little POC is not a CF product feature at this time.  This is just a simple and unsupported engineering Proof Of Concept.  I’d personally welcome your feedback and comments and I’d love to hear how folks might be able to use such functionality, but the POC’s are unsupported.  This is also no guarantee that the tag syntax will not change (perhaps drastically) in the future, and we have  no plans to update the POC as future major versions of CF come out, etc, etc.  CFTHREAD and CFJOIN tags may or may not make it into a future release, but that partly depends on feedback from customers.

One known issue/observation in playing with this personally: there appears to be a bug where if you don’t rejoin (using CFJOIN) all the threads you've spawned by the end of the page or you get a “500 Null” error (at least with my example, if you comment out the CFJOIN loop).  However, calling CFTHREAD (once) and skipping the CFJOIN appears to work fine.  Just so you’re aware.  You still get amazing parallelism as demonstrated above, even if your page waits for all threads to complete. Maybe if there’s interest we could fix that one thing, but for now, do play with these POC tags and let me know if they’re useful to you.

DOWNLOAD CFTHREAD POC & SAMPLES  (74k)

Damon

I suspect there's two reasons folks have been trying to do this: 1) either because of their Flex 1.5 + CF history (and they just assumed they needed to do the same with Flex 2), or 2) because they wanted to use FDS and Flash Remoting calls in the same Flex 2 app with CF as the back end. Ok, there is a rare third case where it might make sense, but the TechNote will be updated with that info to make that case very clear and make sure folks know that merging is definitely a highly specialized case, and NOT the norm that most people have to worry about.

Whatever the reason, I've observed some folks still trying to do this and running into difficulties in some cases.

The good news is that you can absolutely use Flex 2 FDS AND Flash Remoting in the same Flex 2 app SWF with CF 7.0.2 as the backend with "custom channels", but you do need to use setRemoteCredentials() independently on each (credentials don't automatically pass through Flash Remoting into FDS with in this case with custom channels, but this shouldn't be a big deal, just something to be aware of when coding your app).

There is a TechNote on the Adobe site that talks about merging Flex 2 FDS into the CF web application J2EE instance, but we're revising it shortly to make sure people realize they should have no reason to do this now with Flex 2 and to talk more about using custom channels in Flex 2 apps.

Thanks to Mike Nimer and Pete Farland for this.

Mike's blogged some details here: http://www.mikenimer.com/index.cfm/2006/7/19/Flex-Data-Server-and-CF-Flash-Remoting-together

Damon

You no longer need to be in the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program to get access to the library, which is great.

"XPAAJ" roughly stands for "XML/PDF Access API for Java Applications", and Ben Forta's got some very cool CF custom tags he'll be posting up soon that make use of some of the functionality in this library, so download it and check it out.

Note that this is not "the" Adobe PDF Library that commercial software vendors and others can license from Adobe, but does allow for very useful PDF and PDF Form operations from a Java environment (including from ColdFusion of course, since ColdFusion is written in Java and you can use any Java API's in your CFML pages).

Some of the operattions XPAAJ can perform on PDF's include the ability to do:

- PDF Text extraction
- XML form data import/export
- XMP metadata export
- PDF Annotation import/export
- Conversions between PDF and XDP
- PDF File attachment import/export/delete

The SDK also contains Java code samples that demonstrate these operations, but watch Ben's Blog for more info on the ColdFusion custom tags he put together that use the Adobe XPAAJ library...cool stuff!

As Mike Potter also points out, there are a few key things to be aware of in the license:

1) You can use the software if a) you own a copy of Adobe Enterprise software (defined as commercially available versions of Adobe software branded as LiveCycle, ColdFusion or Flex), and you may only use it for your own internal business purpose OR b) You can use the software to develop programs to extract data from PDF files delivered to you from a licensed copy of LiveCycle Forms or Reader Extensions.

2) There are restrictions on the library WRT re-distribution, selling/reselling, etc.

(Be sure to read the license prior to downloading for full details.)

Download the XPAAJ Library Here

Enjoy!

Damon

Fixes a bunch of ColdFusion Report Builder issues (thanks for reporting these, Kay and others!)

Enjoy.

Damon

Tim's back...and here's his explanation:

http://www.buntel.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=7DDAB8AC-4E22-1671-5CD5319B0EF88124

:)

Damon

For those of you interested in the ColdFusion-related sessions this year I've listed some of them here:

GENERAL AND FULL-DAY SESSIONS:
Architecting ColdFusion Applications for Performance, Scalability, and Maintainability (Full Day Session)
Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and ColdFusion (Full Day Session)
An Introduction to ColdFusion Powered Flex
Image Manipulation in ColdFusion

BEGINNER SESSIONS:
Building Your First ColdFusion Application

INTERMEDIATE SESSIONS:
Building Your First Dynamic Web Application
Advanced ColdFusion Components
Securing ColdFusion
Introducing CFEclipse
Advanced ColdFusion Printing and Reporting
Building ColdFusion Powered Flex Applications
ColdFusion 7 Application Framework
Leveraging ColdFusion Components in ColdFusion

ADVANCED SESSIONS:
Leveraging the ColdFusion Application Framework
Search Engine Optimization
AJAX/Spry Framework Overview
ColdFusion.Net Integration
Developing Hybrid Applications with ColdFusion and Java
The Big Framework and Methodology Debate
Unlocking the ColdFusion Server Black Box
Using ColdFusion Components as Objects
Using ColdFusion with Flex Data Services

For the latest up-to-date information, check out the Sessions by Track page.

Damon

Damon

Now available here:

http://www.adobe.com/go/cfmx702docs

and again, the ColdFusion 7.0.2 install instructions are here:

http://www.adobe.com/go/flex2_cf_installation

Enjoy, and please do use it and spread the word...teaching folks to fish is better than giving them fish, right? :)

Damon

Part 1:ColdFusion Extensions for FlexBuilder – App Gen Wizard Intro (14:01)
Part 2:ColdFusion Extensions for FlexBuilder – App Gen Wizard Advanced Features (08:50)
Part 3:ColdFusion Extensions for FlexBuilder - Other Features, Wizards and Utilities (11:23)

EDIT: Reposted now that Flex 2 and CF 7.0.2 are available...

Damon

Adobe Races Ahead Of Microsoft With Flex 2 Overhaul

Damon

ColdFusion 7.0.2 ReportBuilder

Damon

Welcome back, Tim!

(Goes to show...you can never really leave the ColdFusion team!)

Damon

http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/coldfusion/mx702/cf702_releasenotes.html

(Also available via a link the updated 7.0.2 Administrator, and can be found via the Adobe ColdFusion product page, via the "Documentation" link, then the "Release Notes" link).

HTH!

Damon

FAQ about ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 Updater

Here are the two press releases that went out over the wire this morning:

Adobe Announces Immediate Availability of Adobe Flex 2
and
Adobe Flash Player 9 Leads a New Generation of Dynamic Media and Rich Internet Applications

ColdFusion customers can download the free ColdFusion 7.0.2 Updater here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads_updates.html

Enjoy!

Damon

We have a strict and very detailed internal Product Security Policy that all product teams must adhere to, and I'm proud to say that the ColdFusion team (due to some very early lessons we learned the hard way back in the very early Allaire days), is a sponsor and a major contributor to this policy.

From a pro-active engineering perspective, before every release, the ColdFusion product also undergoes an extensive, open-book, multi-phased external product security audit from a reputable outside contractor who specializes in product security. It's expensive, no doubt, but very well worth it for us and our customers we believe. We open our source code, discuss feature implementation at length, and grant full access to our code and engineers to the auditing firm (who is under iron-clad NDA of course) and work to find potential problems and fix issues BEFORE the product ever gets to a paying customer.

Anyway, just a reminder: PLEASE make sure you are running the latest patch levels for your version of ColdFusion (and all Adobe products), and have reviewed the Adobe Security Zone Advisory list here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/

In general, you can be sure that when we release a new Updater or dot (or dot-dot) release, we will always roll up all the latest hotfixes and security fixes into that release, so you know you have the very latest patches on the day it's released. But it's entirely possible that an issue could be found after the latest release has shipped, and an Advisory could be released with a patch, and it makes sense (very good sense!) to make sure you're aware and on top of it.

So we've also provide an email notification service everyone should sign up for:

Adobe Product Advisory Nortification Service

From that page:

"The Adobe Security Notification Service is a free e-mail notification service that Adobe uses to send information to customers about the security of Adobe products. Anyone can subscribe to the service, and you can unsubscribe at any time."

"With this service our objective is to provide customers with timely and accurate information that can help protect them against malicious hacking. We research issues reported directly to Adobe, issues found internally at Adobe, and issues discussed in public places such as security newsgroups. When we publish bulletins, they'll describe the security issue, its impact, and how customers can protect themselves. The bulletins will also detail what actions Adobe has taken and additional resources that may be available."

Stay patched and stay safe!

Damon

Part 1:ColdFusion Extensions for FlexBuilder – App Gen Wizard Intro (14:01)
Part 2:ColdFusion Extensions for FlexBuilder – App Gen Wizard Advanced Features (08:50)
Part 3:ColdFusion Extensions for FlexBuilder - Other Features, Wizards and Utilities (11:23)

Damon

Introduction to ColdFusion-Powered Flex

Enjoy!

Damon

We'll hopefully have some very exciting announcements, some of which you might be able to guess but some I'm sure will be a complete surprise, and some demos of some very exciting innovation the team has been working on in parallel with the Mystic release.

We look forward to listening, learning, and hearing your in-person feedback on how we've been doing, what challenges you're facing, and where you think we need to go next.

The official CFUNITED site.

Damon

http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6083279.html?part=rss&subj=bldr

On the CF + Flex 2 combination in particular:

"The FlexBuilder IDE contains some excellent ColdFusion development tools, and allows you to literally build an entire Flex application in minutes. If you have seen Ruby's scaffolding in action, you will have an idea of how rapidly you can use FlexBuilder to create Flex apps and all the related ColdFusion server-side components. The impact that Flex 2.0 is going to have, not just on ColdFusion development but on Web development as a whole, is (in my humble opinion) going to be huge."

I couldn't agree more. The coming months will be an incredible time to be part of this community!

Damon

Get 'em while they're hot :) Up to now, only 5-digit short codes have been available (ie Google’s "46645", etc).

The introduction of cross-carrier 6-digit codes is an indicator of the sharp increase in demand created very recently as organizations finally recognize and move to claim the massive ROI mobile-enabled applications can provide.

Coincidentally, we've seen a major surge in the deployment of 2-way session-aware SMS Text-enabled applications using ColdFusion MX 7's built-in SMS Gateway, and some of the applications are very, very cool. Everything from online Premium SMS (pay-per-message) services, mobile gambling, web user identity verification to mobile-enabling existing Web and business applications.

Mobile-enabling existing Web and business applications and workflows especially makes for great ROI when you're talking about enabling an application to "reach out" in a workflow scenario to be able to ask a question or extract a decision from a decision maker, regardless of where they are on the planet. Getting a real-time decision or approval made can reduce hours or days of lost "wait" time in critical business processes, and that means real-measurable ROI for many, many organizations.

Many customers are researching their options to build or enable these mobile SMS apps and when they discover that ColdFusion MX 7 ships with all the tools you need to build interactive, 2-way, session and client-aware applications in CFML, it uses the same point-to-point industrial-strength protocol used by the wireless carriers to communicate and transfer SMS traffic among themselves, and is actually wireless-carrier certified by carriers such as AT&T Wireless, etc, and works great with SMS Aggregators like m-Qube and Click-A-Tel, PLUS the fact that these apps can be built and tested and ready for live deployment in a matter of DAYS with CF7, and can deploy their apps on their standard J2EE servers as standard EAR/WAR compiled Java J2EE apps with CF7, it’s a pretty straight-forward decision.

More on ColdFusion MX 7's SMS Gateway here: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/event_gateways

And building an SMS app (or mobile-enabling an existing application) really is amazingly simple with CF7. You can create a basic "echo: [whatever-you-typed-on-your-phone]" app in about 5 minutes or so, and test it out with the built-in SMS Test Server (ie phone company server), Phone Emulator (visual UI of a phone interface that talks to the SMS Test Server) and an SMS Gateway in CF7.

Check out the 2-way, interactive menu-driven sample apps in the CF7 {cfusion}\gateway directory using the built-in SMS Test Server, Phone Emulator UI and Sample SMS Gateway for a quick taste.

Of course, mobile-enabling your Flex 2 applications will also be super-easy and extends the possibilities of applications you can create if you're using ColdFusion 7 on the back end. Imagine having a 2-way interactive conversation (with Flex 2 and ColdFusion 7.0.2 push-to-client capability) or real-time workflow dashboard updated with input from a senior manager's cell phone. The ROI (and coolness factor!) of RIA's just went waaay up :)

Some places we’re seeing organizations make use of mobile-enablement of existing apps or workflows include PO approvals, critical notifications, help-desk services, phone directory lookup, CEO dashboard & alerts, meeting reminders & cancellations, SMS-email bridging, new user signup security verification (code sent to phone must be entered into the web app for verification), and any place workflows of any kind have time-critical steps that involve people.

Another type of application that is ripe to take off for organizations with geographically-dispersed remote devices that periodically require human intervention, is the SMS-enablement of those devices. The devices can be queried as to their status, location, content levels, readings, etc, and can "call home" to a central office when they need help, maintenance, refilling, have been tampered with, etc.

Examples include devices that transmit GPS and vehicle telemetry, remote device monitoring, vending machines, gas pumps, natural gas or water meters, tanks, ships, fleet trucks, cars, even GPS Coke cans! (ie CocaCola's US Summer 2004 contest)...basically any time it’s cheaper to send a text message than it is to send a human (or just isn't possible to send one), SMS makes great sense.

And with CF7, building these industrial-strength, 2-way session and client-aware apps is possible in just minutes.

See my previous posts on the following topics for more info and next steps to make sure your app and organization can leverage the ubiquity of mobile phones to streamline workflows, add security and maximize your applications' ROI:

Some additional CF7 mobile SMS-enabled application ideas

CF7 SMS Applications Made Easy PPT Presentation

Finding an SMS Services Provider for your app

Native SMPP vs Web Services for SMS apps

Have fun, and I look forward to hearing how you were able to streamline your organizations processes and maximize ROI!

Damon

AND...I also just got confirmation we've filled the CF Sr Product Marketing Manager spot as well, and rumor is it's someone most of you will DEFINITELY know. ;-)

Stay tuned, and welcome Jason!

Damon

Check it out!

https://dcooper.org/gallery/ColdFusionFlexApplicationWizard.htm

Enjoy! (And thanks Dean!)

Damon

Today we released Flex 2 Beta 3 and ColdFusion MX 7 Flex Connectivity Updater - 7.0.2  BETA 3. We sincerely hope you can take some time and put both through their paces.

In this Beta you will find features that allow ColdFusion to provide server-side logic for Flex applications and hot fixes to other ColdFusion functionality. Beta 3 includes the following key components:

• An updated CF Reporting Engine
• CF 7.0.1 Cumulative Hotfix 1, 2 and 3, including MS IE EOLAS fix for UI components, Flash Forms, etc.
• Updates JRE to 1.4.2_09 for Server and JRun Multi-Server configurations
• New "Flex Integration" CF Admin page to turn on/off Flash Remoting and Flex Data Services support
• Support for restricting the IP address of machines that are allowed to connect to the Flex Asynchronous Messaging Gateway and CF Flex Data Services.
• Flash Remoting Update, Flex Asynchronous Messaging Event Gateway, and Flex Data Services Adapter all now support user authentication
• Flash Remoting AS3 Update
• Flex Asynchronous Messaging Event Gateway
• Flex Data Services Adapter
• ColdFusion Extensions for Flex Builder 2
• Services Browser (remote Web Services and CFCs) Plug-in
• RDS Table CRUD DAO/ActiveRecord & Flex Assembler CFC Generation Wizard
• CF Remote Development Services Plug-in
• Actionscript Value Object to CFC Value Object Wizard
• CFC Value Object to Actionscript Value Object Wizard
• ColdFusion / Flex DB Application Generation Wizard  (available to B3 users around May 12)

We're particularly excited about Beta 3, and the productivity features we've added to FlexBuilder 2 for ColdFusion customers.

We're currently putting the final touches on the ColdFusion / Flex 2 DB Application Generation Wizard, and we hope to refresh the CF / FlexBuilder 2 plugins soon to add this exciting functionality that will bring hyper-RAD productivity to ColdFusion customers using FlexBuilder 2, to dramatically jump-start Flex 2 /CF DB application RIA construction.

For now, here's a sneak peek at the ColdFusion / Flex 2 DB Application Generation Wizard and resulting generated Flex 2 / ColdFusion application:

Get more info and download everything from the Labs site: here: http://labs.adobe.com

Welcome to the future of RAD RIA development!

Damon

- Senior Product Manager, ColdFusion
- Senior Product Marketing Manager, ColdFusion

To see more info about these two key positions, go here and search for "coldfusion" in the Search box at the bottom of the page: Adobe Job Listings

This is an amazing opportunity to work for a world-class software company and help change the world. There is probably no other position in the software world where you can have such an awesome and direct impact on the lives of so many people, literally.

There's probably also no more rewarding position in the world of commercial software development than being in a leadership role on the ColdFusion team at Adobe these days, and for sure there's no other place you can have this much fun and still get paid!

Both positions are located in Newton, MA.

Damon

Mystic Overview/Intro: http://labs.macromedia.com/wiki/index.php/ColdFusion/Flex_Connectivity

but here's a direct link to the PDF as well (Chapter 5 documents the Mystic Flex Builder 2 Extensions):

Mystic Doc: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/documentation/en/flex/2/using_cf_with_flex2.pdf

HTH

Damon

The ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity Beta 2 release represents an important milestone for ColdFusion customers wanting to build Rich Internet Applications with Flex and ColdFusion.

With this release, not only have we improved the previously delivered support for the Flash Remoting Update and the Flex Asynchronous Messaging Gateway, we've also added support for Flex Data Services 2.0 and included the first of a set of Flex Builder plug-ins for ColdFusion developers that can dramatically improve development productivity for some key coding tasks when you are building ColdFusion-powered Flex applications.

We're excited about Beta 2, and grateful for your participation.

I believe ColdFusion + Flex 2 will empower you to quickly and easily create amazing new Rich Internet Applications faster and easier than with any other technology, anywhere. And there's more to come...we're not done yet!

Of course, we recommend that you install Mystic Beta 2 on development and testing servers only at this point, but I'd encourage everyone to take Flex 2 Beta 2 and CF Mystic Beta 2 for a spin.

PS: Using Flex Builder 2, then adding CFEclipse and the Mystic Flex Builder plugins will make for a very productive environment, and will let you use RDS and the CF Query Builder for your FB/CFEclipse development!

Please visit the Labs site for more information about this beta release, to interact directly with ColdFusion engineering and quality assurance engineers and other ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity beta 2 users, and to access the ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity Beta 2 Bug Tracker.

Damon Cooper
Director of Engineering, ColdFusion
Adobe Systems

Some resources where you can find more information, including the actual 508 VPAT filed for ColdFusion MX 7 can be found at the links below.

The ColdFusion MX 7 508 VPAT: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/tools/vpat/coldfusion.html

The ColdFusion MX 7 Accessibility Mini-Site: >http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/features/coldfusion/

Accessibility and ColdFusion Overview: Accessibility and ColdFusion MX 7 Overview

Accessible Rich Forms with ColdFusion MX 7: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/features/coldfusion/richforms.html

Accessible Documents with ColdFusion MX 7: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/features/coldfusion/docs.html

Creating Accessible Web Applications with CFMX 7: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/features/coldfusion/fp_frameset.html

HTH

Damon

A huge round of applause to everyone who worked so hard to get this release out the door! On the CF team, specifically, a big thank-you to Tim Buntel, Kristen Schofield, Mike Nimer, Tom Jordahl, Dean Harmon, Bob Powell, Bill Sahlas, Farah Gron, Dave Gruber and Ben Forta for making the CF Connectivity Beta 1 come together.

With this update, developers have access to ColdFusion components from applications built with Flex. A new version of Flash Remoting allows CFC functions to be called from a Flex application to provide simple access to all of the back-end services available from ColdFusion—database access, web services, POP/SMTP, file systems and more. It also adds a new ColdFusion Event Gateway type that you can use within a Flex application to specify a ColdFusion event gateway as a destination for messages; similarly, your ColdFusion application can use an Event Gateway to send events to a Flex application. ColdFusion simply provides the easiest way to create a publish/subscribe messaging system with Flex.

But there's more to come! The CF team still has more Flex 2-related goodness in the works to make sure CF customers make a successful transition to RIA development with Flex 2 and have all the tools, power and technology required to be successful building Flex 2 + CF RIA's super easily and super quickly. (That's what the CF team does best after all, so stay tuned for more info!)

I believe there's truly no quicker or easier way to create Rich Internet Applications than the combination of Flex Builder 2.0 and ColdFusion, and I'm pleased to be be a part of helping make sure CF customers are once again on the leading edge of web development technology. CF customers using Flex 2 technology will undoubtedly play a key role in defining and making the next generation of the Web happen.

ColdFusion Flex Connectivity Beta 1 can be downloaded here:

http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/cf_flexconnectivity/

Flex 2.0 Beta 1, including the newly-released Flex Enterprise Services Beta is available for download here:

http://labs.adobe.com

Note also the fact that a free version of Flex Enterprise Services, with limited concurrent connections and for use on a single server has been announced. (Flex Enterprise Services will also be available to purchase by CPU, departmental and limited scope (application specific) pricing options.)

Enjoy and stay tuned for more exciting CF/Flex 2 news!

Damon

http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/172556.htm

I'm glad to be a part of it, and I'm happy to say that we're full-out working on more truly great CF innovation.

Damon

We're finalists in the Web Development Tools category along with:

• Backbase Standard Edition 3.1 (Backbase)
• ColdFusion MX7 (Adobe)
• DevPartner Studio 8 (Compuware)
• JBoss Application Server 4x (JBoss)
• Macromedia Studio 8 2005 (Adobe)
• Rails 1.0 (rubyonrails.org)
• Zend Studio - Enterprise Edition 5.0 (Zend)

Very cool. It's great that Studio 8 also made the cut. Here's the full announcement:

http://www.sdmagazine.com/pressroom/jolt_finalists_2006.html

A little about Software Development Magazine's Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards from the link above:

"For the past 15 years, the Software Development Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards have been presented annually to showcase products that have “jolted” the industry with their significance and made the task of creating software faster, easier, and more efficient. Jolt Cola, the fabled soft drink quaffed by software developers for sustenance during project development marathons, sponsors the awards presentation."

“Our twenty Jolt judges—leaders in the software development field—have selected 89 impressive finalists from hundreds of nominations,” commented Software Development Technical Editor Rosalyn Lum. “The number of nominations we received this year was unprecedented and the process of narrowing down the finalists was a massive, albeit exciting, task, with many more products contending in each category. These products represent a cross section of the most ground-breaking tools for every phase of the software development lifecycle—a testament that the spirit of innovation is alive and well in the software development sector."

“In the next phase, we’ll be ‘looking under the hood’ at these select products, not only examining the standard criteria of audience suitability, productivity, innovation, quality, ROI, risk, and flexibility, but also seeking products that are: ahead of the curve; universally useful; simple, yet rich in functionality; redefine their product space; or solve a nagging problem that has consistently eluded other products and books."

"The awards ceremony will take place on March 15 at the Santa Clara Convention Center during SD West 2006, which attracts more than 3,000 software developers, renowned industry speakers, and press annually. Winners will also be featured in the June 2006 issue of Software Development magazine."

Hopefully we can win the award as well. :)

Damon

2006 will be a GREAT time to be a CF developer.

Happy New Year!

Damon

Nice work Sean!

ColdFusion IRC Gateway

Damon

Thanks!

:)

Damon

This CHF is recommended for customers running ColdFusion MX 7.0.1 if they are experiencing one or more of the specific fixed issues listed, and then only to ColdFusion MX 7.0.1.

Regards,

Damon

The install experience for the CF Flex 2 Adapter is a little involved right now, but hey, it's Alpha :) The most important thing we wanted to do was to make sure that the Adapter was functional, worked well and was available simultaneously with Flex Builder 2 Alpha.

Have fun, and we'll see you this afternoon at the CF 3-hour session at 1:30PM where we'll spend some time talking about the awesome pairing of CF + Flex Builder 2, walkthrough some code and demos and give you a sense of what the near future of Internet application development looks like.

(As a reminder, this session is not repeated.)

Damon

Tim Buntel and I will kick it off and tag-team the first 30 min, then Tom Jordahl and Mike Nimer will dig into CF7 topics, including the Flex 2/CF stuff.

See you there!

Damon

1) You can write your app once, without regard to aggregator/provider, since the API is fixed in the SMPP standard, vs different aggregator web services API's. Change providers, you need to change your application with web service API’s.

2) Most efficient and scalable solution (direct SMPP point-to-point protocol used by wireless carriers themselves in inter-carrier SMS links). Nothing will get messages to devices from your app, or get messages FROM devices to your app faster than a true SMPP account.

3) Most secure solution, since it's a point-to-point protocol, typically secured inside a dedicated, encrypted VPN tunnel directly with the aggregator. They, in turn, maintain secure and direct point-to-point connections directly with wireless provider datacenters.

4) Gateway apps can easily be reused with any Gateway type without re-writing code (ie SMS app can be accessed via IM with little/no code changes).

5) Extreme power, reliability and flexibility: you get direct access and full control over all aspects of SMS, including all commands and optional parameters, message rate throttling, auto-rebind behavior, message I/O tracking (for reporting/cost control), etc, etc. All part of the SMPP standard.

For more on the CF7 SMPP Gateway (which is AT&T Wireless carrier-grade certified, BTW!), check out Chapters 42-44 in the CF7 Developers Guide.

Of course, SMPP accounts are not typically cheap, but you can find reasonably-priced accounts if you shop around. In the US/Canada, though, to get cross-carrier functionality you’ll want a US Short Code. More on that and other SMPP hook-up options here: https://dcooper.org/?mode=entry&entry=FC5CF329-4E22-1671-58B0869C57B5ABCA

Damon

(Here's the main press release in case you missed it: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2005/announcing_flex2.html)

We've been working very hard for quite some time now to help make sure CF customers can take full advantage of this awesome platform from Day 1.

Stay tuned...I promise, there's NEVER been a more exciting time to be a CF developer/customer!

Damon

"DW 8 has gotten a lot faster and leaner...it’s way ahead of other tools in terms of CFML code support. It's even added some very HomeSite-esque coder features like the coding toolbar and code collapse. It's also very extensible and integrates with different tools. You don't have to touch design view any more."

"That's why I'm probably going to use DW8 as my first choice for CF -- and I am as code-centric as it gets baby. I was on the frontlines years ago championing HomeSite and code-centric features with the Dreamweaver team. I'm one of those HomeSite users that didn't notice when it dropped the design view tab. But the DW8 code editor has come a long way, and if I can come around to loving it, I think others can too."

Damon

Get an introduction to Merrimack in the "Welcome to Merrimack: An Even Better ColdFusion MX 7" DevNet article.

I'd like to especially extend a special "Welcome!" to Apple Mac OS X customers! Sorry it took so long, but I think this ColdFusion release is truly the perfect combination of Power, Productivity and Polish you've come to love and expect from this excellent platform.

To all of the many Merrimack Beta testers, "Thank you!" Once again you've helped produce a great release (and kept us on our toes!)

To everyone, welcome to the best release of ColdFusion ever!

Check out the following details for more information on the ColdFusion MX 7 Updater (7.0.1):

• Read the ColdFusion MX 7 Updater Release Notes.
• Read the Frequently Asked Questions about ColdFusion MX 7 Updater.
• Download the appropriate ColdFusion MX 7 Updater for your platform.

Damon

The survey can be found here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=451701362888

Again, thanks very much for your feedback, and thanks for the awesome response to CF Online Survey #1!

Damon

From time to time during this process, one or more CF engineering research teams may have some questions they'd like to pose to a sampling of customers, and while results from these mini-surveys are not, by themselves a scientifically accurate sampling of our customer base, they do provide important data points along the way.

The first mini-survey has some specific questions for CF customers around J2EE/OS/DB support, etc in CF, and has a handful of questions that we’d love to get your feedback on. This one should take less than 5 min of your time and can be found here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=299931348825

We would very much appreciate your input on this and future mini-surveys. You can help drive the direction of CF, and we appreciate and value your input very much. Look for more of these in the near future, as we look to integrate YOU directly into the design of Scorpio!

Again, thanks very much for your feedback!

Damon

http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=b39b42b5

Damon

ColdFusion RDS support in CFEclipse is one way we think we can be useful in contributing to this effort, and we hope we can add value to the CFEclipse experience in other ways as well.

We're looking to the future to try to help ensure that CF developers will be advantaged in every way possible and are able to leverage the newest technologies with the power and ease-of-use of ColdFusion to build truly amazing applications for a long time to come.

Damon

We hope to release an update/patch with SASL PLAIN and SASL [MD5 DIGEST] added as soon as we have it ready.

Sorry about that to anyone who was experimenting with Google-Talk (Beta) service and the ColdFusion MX 7 XMPP Gateway!

Damon

Besides the usual list of customer-driven bug fixes, there's lots of other added goodness, including updated JDBC drivers, web server connectors, Apache Multi-Processing Modules (MPMs) support on Unix, performance enhancements and improvements, JRun Web Server (JWS) - JWS keep-alive functionality, a new log level for HTTP requests, enhanced OS support (HP-UX 11 and 11i), Mac OSX 10.4, Solaris 10, AIX 5.3, RedHat 8, AS 2.1, AS 3.0, AS 4.0 and SuSE 8.

JRun 4 Updater 6 also adds support for JDK 1.5 (note that CF is not supported on JDK 1.5 yet, however).

The ColdFusion team has "blessed" JRun 4 Updater 6, so it's "good to go" for CF customers running CF on the full version of JRun 4.

ColdFusion customers can also rest assured that any security and other critical fixes included in JRun 4 Updater 6 have been brought back into the forthcoming CF "Merrimack" release (all install configurations), although Merrimack will be shipping with JRun 4 Updater 5+ fixes, since the timing of the two releases didn't permit us to include JRun 4 Updater 6 this time around in the installer kits.

Some useful links:

JRun 4 Updater 6 Download page
JRun 4 Updater 6 Release Notes

Damon

Since Google's new Instant Messaging network and IM client, "Google-Talk" is based on the Jabber/XMPP IM protocol standard, as has been noted by some already in the ColdFusion community, you can indeed use the Jabber/XMPP IM Gateway included with Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 to connect to the Google-Talk IM Service network. And as Google says on their Google-Talk Developer page, Google wants to "...encourage the developer community to create new and innovative applications that leverage our service."

The Jabber/XMPP protocol standard has been reviewed and formalized by the IETF and W3C and that's one of the reasons we picked the XMPP IM protocol to include with ColdFusion MX 7.

One of the things that's particularly interesting about Google-Talk using an IM standard protocol is that for the first time, a major IM network is potentially accessible to application developers (depending on Google's final user agreement with the Google-Talk network of course).

All kinds of interesting applications can be created using IM "bots" that can represent Enterprise entities such as ERP systems, etc, and the fact that a ColdFusion CFC can "know" when you're online (presence) can really make things interesting. An application can automatically IM the support rep that's currently online, for example, increasing the chances of a faster response. A PO system "bot" might send an IM to a manager or VP asking for approval for a PO, since it saw he/she was currently online, or escalate to someone who IS online if a PO request is getting stale needs immediate attention.

Another super-cool idea is to use the "status" of an online entity/buddy/bot to communicate real-time data that's constantly changing. In the case of this type of data, you only care about the latest possible value (stock price, for example). Using the IM Gateway Helper "setStattus()" function allows you to set a custom status message for a bot that buddies can see. This can be a great way to keep buddies (or subscribers to the "bot") instantly up to date. They'll see the highly visible message or data just by glancing at the "bot" in their buddy list. This saves potentially oodles of email update status messages, where all you'd care about is the last one anyway.

Or how about two applications "talking" to each other over XMPP? Perhaps neither application can connect to each other directly (firewall's, etc), but they may both be able to "see" and connect to a remote Jabber/XMPP server. They can then communicate via that server over XMPP. Think web services-over-XMPP, where no direct connection is necessary. Kinda like the old days when satellites were used to enable ground stations who couldn't directly talk to each other to communicate.

Or how about using the all-Flash-client-based XIFF XMPP ActionScript library and building a super-light, no-client (just Flash and a browser required) way for your web site users to get help with your website, access your Knowledge Base articles, or find the next available customer service rep? The Flash client would talk to a Jabber/XMPP server that would talk to your ColdFusion MX 7 XMPP Gateway Listener CFC and your ColdFusion app could then broker the conversation between web site clients and back-end customer service reps, or collect automated information (customer account number, etc) before making the connection to the right department to help the customer via chat.

There are lots of very cool, out-of-the-box-thinking type use cases for IM-enabling applications with two-way interactive, session-aware capabilities if you think about it. And the ColdFusion MX 7 Jabber/XMPP and Lotus/Sametime IM Gateways are definitely the easiest, fastest way to build these solutions...just minutes with a very little code!

Some links that might be useful as you connect your applications to IM via XMPP and possibly Google-Talk's IM network:

Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Home Page

Google-Talk IM interactive UI Client
Google-Talk IM Info for Application Developers

CFMX7 Documentation on Event Gateways
CFMX7 Documentation on Using the XMPP and Sametime IM Gateways

Matt Woodward's Dev center Article about using IM to talk to CFMX7

Boyzoid's Blog Entry on getting CFMX7 talking to Google-Talk IM
Jarad's BLOG Entries on using CFMX7 with Google-Talk IM

CFMX7 Default XMPP Configuration File defining Listener CFC method names, etc:
{cfusion}\gateway\config\XMPP.cfg

Damon

It's a great feeling to be able to do so much with the product and see the dedication and passion of the whole team show itself at all kinds of strange hours to ensure that every possible test and every conceivable configuration and contingency is carefully accounted for and examined from all angles. One thing is for sure: innovation, customer advocacy, and quality focus are alive and well on the CF Team at Macromedia.

Today was a proud moment...and just a taste I know of many more to come.

Damon

Wow, hard to believe it's already been nearly a full decade that ColdFusion has been making developers productive and powering dynamic web applications.

The ColdFusion MX 7 "Blackstone" release was a truly landmark release: solid and stable, fast, reliable, powerful, empowering, with radical new capabilities, and breaking out of what has become an increasingly stagnant and commoditized list of application server functionality.

We haven't seen people this excited in a long, long time. Clearly, CFMX7 sparked the imagination of thousands of organizations who have come to understand what this product enables them and their organizations to do, and they're bringing this innovation and power to bear, with great successes!

We've hit the 10-year anniversary of the first great set of innovations that initially made up the first version of ColdFusion, but we’re marking it with what I believe are even more radical and exciting innovations that will empower developers like never before and enable new categories of Internet applications with radical ease, in record time, and for many years to come.

So, Happy 10th Birthday, ColdFusion!

So come on in behind the scenes and Click Here to tour the ColdFusion MX 7 Team's facilities in Newton, MA, where ColdFusion MX 7 was conceived, built, tested and shipped.

Enjoy, and I'll see you at the birthday party!

Damon

Download Preso

Thanks to everyone who attended at 8:40AM Friday morning :)

Damon

They are located on the CFMX7 install CDROM, and are also available for free download from the MM.com website here:

Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Downloads Page

Enjoy!

Damon

The set is $50 and you get absolutely everything you'll need to build CFMX7 applications of all shapes and sizes, regardless of your experience history with ColdFusion. The docs have really undergone a quite revolution over the last 2.5 releases, starting with CFMX 6.0, then a full rework with CFMX 6.1, and another full rewrite with the CFMX 7 doc set. Randy Neilson, Hal Lichton, Anne Sandstrom and the other doc team members have done an AMAZING job with them this time, and you owe it to yourself to have the hardcopies available while you're developing (if you're anything like me, you just can't replace good hardcopy books).

The full set includes:

- Installing and Using ColdFusion MX 7 (72 pages)
- ColdFusion MX 7 CFML Quick Reference (38 pages)
- Getting Started Building ColdFusion MX 7 Applications (152 pages)
- Configuring and Administering ColdFusion MX 7 (170 pages)
- ColdFusion MX 7 CFML Reference - Vol 1 (448 pages)
- ColdFusion MX 7 CFML Reference - Vol 2 (654 pages)

And the best books for learning and practicing (with working examples!) new features, IMO:

- ColdFusion MX 7 Developer’s Guide - Vol 1: (840 pages)
- ColdFusion MX 7 Developer’s Guide - Vol 2: (262 pages)

Enjoy, and please spread the word! These docs are excellent, and really should be (this time) everything you need for ColdFusion development using CFMX7. I really wish we could have shipped these in every box, but it wasn't possible for a number of reasons.

Damon

There are numerous falls in the river, but all are passable by locks, making navigation easy. It's a majestic river; its waters are pure and healthy, and on its borders are situated some of the most flourishing towns in the state.

Cheers :)

Damon

In this latest release of ColdFusion, we didn’t add in an Easter-egg, because we poured literally every ounce of energy into customer-facing features, but we did manage to drop in a small "About" popup in the ColdFusion MX 7 Administrator with the names of the people who were directly involved with the production of ColdFusion MX 7.

They deserve a big kudos, in my humble opinion, since what they created was nothing short of phenomenal, and I'm very glad to have been able to be part of it. This could be called the ultimate software development “dream team”.

The next major release we're now gearing up for definitely has a tough act to follow in ColdFusion MX 7, but with version 7 as our new starting point code base, and some of the world’s top engineering talent, I'm more confident than ever that we'll be able to meet or exceed the level of innovation, quality and performance that went into CFMX7 in the next major release.

Anyway, if you’re interested in seeing the specific crew directly involved with the production of ColdFusion MX 7, in the Administrator, click on the "System Information" link at the top, and then click the "About ColdFusion" link. You should get a popup window with the specific ColdFusion MX 7 team.

Damon

Making the Case to Move to ColdFusion Enterprise Edition

In addition, there's a great little "Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade [to CFMX7]" here:

Top 10 Reasons To Upgrade to CFMX 7

Also, as a reminder, the second CFMX 7 Cumulative Hotfix and an updated CFMX 7 Report Builder is available for download here:

ColdFusion MX 7 Cumulative Hotfix Updates"

So there's no better time to upgrade...CFMX 7 is rock solid, doing great, and enabling some of the most amazing and compelling applications I've ever seen.

Everyone from the worlds largest companies to the smallest consulting shops are leveraging the power of CFMX7 and amazing their managers, users, clients, partners and employees with the speed and power of their next-gen apps built with CFMX7.

Now, I'm obviously a little biased (ahem), but when you see what some of these organizations are doing with CFMX7, and if you haven't already, you really owe it to yourself and your organization to take CFMX7 for a spin and think about how you could leverage it quickly in your organization:

CFMX 7 Getting Started In 4 Easy Steps

We've been gathering up some of these stories and examples, and hope to be able to share some of these soon, but wow...

Anyway, enjoy, and we'll see you at CFUNITED in a few weeks! We hope to be able to share a little more about CFMX7, what customers are doing with it, what we're working on and the exciting future of ColdFusion there.

Damon

For those of you coming to CFUNITED, be sure to bring your "most-wanted" feature list...we'll be asking the question,

"If you had a magic wand, what would you love to have ColdFusion do for you?".

Remember that no feature or idea is "too big" or "too small", so think through what new feature or platform or change or capability or interoperability or connectivity, etc you'd add/make to the ColdFusion product in the next major version if you ran the CF team!

Damon

We're excited to be there, and look forward to interacting with our most loyal and passionate customers. There will likely be a large government customer base there as well, given this years' location, so we also look forward to meeting with our US government customers, gathering your feedback and internalizing it as we move forward on the next version of ColdFusion.

Some key folks from the ColdFusion team will be there, including Tim Buntel, Dean Harmon, Tom Jordahl, Mike Nimer, Bill Sahlas, Bob Powell, Hemant Khandelwal, and myself, along with other Macromedians (including Christian Cantrell and Sean Corfield, Steven Erat and others).

CFUNITED (formerly CFUN) is really the premier ColdFusion-specific event outside of Macromedia's own MAX event, and attendance this year is expected to be very good, with CFMX 7 out and so much to discuss, learn and talk about.

ColdFusion also officially turns 10 years old this summer...I heard a rumor there might be something else very exciting worth celebrating as well...stay tuned, and be sure to get to CFUNITED-05!

Here's the official site link: http://www.cfunited.com/

Damon

Coversant / ColdFusion MX 7 Site

Coversant's Soapbox 2005/CFMX7 web site has an Interoperability Analysis white paper, CFMX7 XMPP Soapbox Sample Applications and more.

From their press release:

"Coversant's SoapBox Server and Macromedia ColdFusion give developers more options to deliver content and add real-time features to their websites. XMPP brings together these two world class products and allows for rapid deployment of collaboration services via the web," says JD Conley, Vice President of Product Development.

"The success of our testing is great news for ISVs and companies wanting to integrate with Coversant products to create rich IM and collaboration solutions," says Scott Vosburg, Vice President of Business Development.

Great stuff.

Damon

One of the best parts of being on the ColdFusion team are the opportunities like this to meet face-to-face with ColdFusion customers. We know you’re the reason we exist, and as with past user conferences, I know we will most likely come away a more energized, focused and dedicated team as a result. I promise we’ll do everything we can to pour that energy, passion, feedback and re-dedication into the next major version of ColdFusion in the most innovative, productive way possible.

We’ll also no doubt be humbled by the awesome responsibility of being stewards of the technology you use to tackle the problems the world everyday, and of course we owe you all a great debt of thanks for the energy, passion, feedback and relentless dedication you’ve demonstrated over the past 10 years.

We are just getting started.

We look forward to listening, learning, and hearing your in-person feedback on how we've been doing, what challenges you're facing, and where you think we need to go next.

The official CFUNITED site.

Damon

We did some great things with CFMX 7, and it'll be a tough act to follow, for sure, but we have an amazing group of people ready and rarin' to go.

I believe strongly that we need to be very customer focused in whatever we build, with about 75% of what goes into a release being based on direct customer feedback, and, say, 25% based on engineering-directed items and team-driven innovation.

The Event Gateways, dynamic FlashPaper generation, Rich Forms, CFDOCUMENT syntax and other stuff are examples of the later, and are an important part of a groundbreaking release. For example, while nobody told us, "Hey, you need to make sure you have dynamic FlashPaper in there!", these are the the types of features that capture the imagination, make you pause for minute and go..."wait a minute...you mean I can do X in two lines of code??"

Where does this stuff come from anyway? Here's my off-the-cuff answer, take it for what it's worth (maybe nothing)...

1) Skunkworks. Stuff we're not really supposed to be working on, ending up with a prototype of proof of concept. Usually fueled by beer or spirits (good or bad...you decide).

2) Fallout from other feature discussion/whiteboard session/work. While working on Big Feature A, we realized in a moment of enlightenment, that not only could we end up with a very sweet architecture, but it would allow us to do Big Feature B, C, D and E later on. (Hey, doesn't someone have a skunkworks project going on around "D" now? Could we pull it in?), etc. The last part is usually fueled by beer.

3) Common problems and issues we see at the uber-level (as a product team, one of the benefits is to be able to see the actual curvature of the customer world and see these uber-trends, problems, etc). Typically a "Whoa" moment happens and multiple team members see it at the same time. The team is such a cohesive unit, we are all aware subconsciously of many of these items, and they can pop up at the right second from multiple people on the team. Spooky to see. Usually fueled by beer.

4) Informal conversations. Can happen in the hallway, and lunch time, over beers (see a trend here?), on the way to the bathroom (these are usually to-the-point), while on a chairlift while skiing, whatever. Get smart people who are tuned into customers and who get-things-done together with a whiteboard nearby, and watch what happens.

5) Someone's "Super-Sweet-If-We-Could-Do-It-One-Day" wish-list items. Everyone's got 'em. Some logical, some edging towards the fringes, but everyone's got ‘em, and when there's a vision for it, a passion for it, customer validation on it, etc, it can get done.

6) Other places/ways I'm sure I'm forgetting.

The innovation itself is an amazing process to be a part of, as most you know from your own incredible innovations with CF, and we're ready to roll once again.

Damon

Besides all the amazing new features, if you haven't noticed in the CFMX7 Administrator: a small chunk text at the bottom of the page that cites the usual copyright notice, PLUS (for the first time ever) something new in the history of ColdFusion: "Patents Pending".

Unfortunately it's not possible to discuss what's covered (or not), as I believe they're filed undisclosed and I think remain sealed for 18 months, but they do cover great innovation by the ColdFusion engineering team, and speaks to just how truly innovative and different the CFMX7 release really is, compared to anything that's gone before.

The ColdFusion team is obviously very proud of ColdFusion MX 7, and we very much hope you are being treated even more like heroes with this new, powerful, unique and innovative set of new capabilities and tools at your disposal to solve new classes of problems and give your customers a really great user experience through your own innovation!

Damon

Check it out!

(NOTE: You may need to refresh the page a few times to see it rotate through): Macromedia Japanese Main Site

Damon

I think we should all pay attention, as mobile devices, mobile apps (of all kinds) and SMS usage is on a sharp up-ramp in the US (we've only been able to send text messages across all the major carriers for about 1.5 years in the US!)

If you're looking for interesting uses of SMS coming to the US in the next 2-3 years, look overseas today. SMS Banking and other everyday uses like credit card fraud notification/verifications, etc, etc are coming, and ColdFusion will be right there as the easiest way to build and deploy these apps.

Without a doubt, these apps aren't necessarily sexy, and they're certainly not Rich Internet Apps, and they DO have some severe limitations (160 char message lengths, etc), but you CAN interact realtime with masses of people securely today, regardless of carrier, platform, device or location, and all you need is one phone number (theirs or your short code) for one side or the other to initiate an interactive conversation (push or pull).

You also have the mobile users' phone number when they send a text message, and you can use that to verify identity, call them to verify or clarify info, or respond with a confirmation text message when they initiate the text conversation).

One simple and innovative use of SMS in China: SMS Taxi Service ...(SMS pizza, movie tickets and restaurant reservations anyone??)

How about getting a train ticket with your phone? How about an airline ticket or other tickets?

Never mind the possibilities available when un-manned mobile SMS devices can be used and easily call home office for help (vandalized billboard or bank machine, a soda vending machine that needs to be refilled, an automobile that needs service), or remote status of remote devices can be autonomously obtained (head office polls all status gas pumps for their current readings and optimizes delivery routes without station intervention)...

Everywhere you look, you can see where this technology can be pout to use to streamline processes, improve customer service and make life better for millions.

The fact that you can mobile SMS-enable your business or organization today with just a few minutes/hours/days of effort with Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 and the included SMS Event Gateway is a key breakthrough, since until now, these apps have been very hard to build and deploy in a robust, reliable, tested fashion that met carrier-level requirements for behavior, reliability and scalability.

I'm particularly hopeful this will all lead to the eventual marginalizing of "On Hold" Muzak, "Your call is important to us..." messages and endless transfers among customer service & support reps where I can easily get things done in seconds myself using just my mobile phone.

Damon

Damon

Special thanks to Tom Donovan and his guided tour of Bouncy Castle :)

Damon

Community MX
ColdFusion MX 7: The Newest Version of ColdFusion
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=E4D7E

Computerwire
Macromedia Dialing Mobile Devices
http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=906E5DE9%2DA2B6%2D4B86%2DA9C6%2D3F1EEB44067B

Computer Business Review (UK)
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=015013DA-0817-4613-A76B-D78796A516DE

ColdFusion Developer’s Journal
CFMX 7: This Is the Release That Will Make You a Hero Again
http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=48103

ColdFusion Developer’s Journal
"It's Here!" - Editor-in-Chief of ColdFusion Developer's Journal Introduces ColdFusion MX 7
http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=48104

eWeek
Macromedia Adds Mobile Support to ColdFusion
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1761268,00.asp

InfoWorld
Macromedia heats up ColdFusion MX 7
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/02/06/06NNmacromedia_1.html

InternetNews.com
Macromedia's ColdFusion Looks Beyond the Web
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3469121

Sys-Con TV
Interview with Dave Gruber
http://www.sys-con.tv/
Direct URL to video: http://www.sys-con.com/tv/video/load_005.html

CNET
Macromedia ColdFusion goes mobile
http://news.com.com/Macromedia+Cold+Fusion+goes+mobile/2110-1012_3-5566335.html?tag=html.alert

TechWeb
ColdFusion MX 7 Builds SMS Apps For Mobile Phones
http://www.techweb.com/wire/software/59301576

Database Journal
ColdFusion MX 7 Takes on a New Set of Problems
http://www.databasejournal.com/news/article.php/3469191

TechSpot
Macromedia Releases ColdFusion MX 7
http://www.techspot.com/story16924.html

IT Observer
Macromedia ColdFusion Goes Mobile
http://www.ebcvg.com/articles.php?id=583

Globe and Mail
Macromedia embellishes ColdFusion MX 7
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050207.gtcold0207/BNStory/Technology/

CRN
Macromedia Software Pushes Internet Apps Onto Phones
http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml?articleId=59301665

eChannelLine (Canada)
Macromedia stresses innovation with ColdFusion MX 7
http://www.integratedmar.com/ecl-usa/story.cfm?item=19180

Thanks again to the thousands of people who particpated in the Blackstone Beta program and to the dedication and passion of ColdFusion developers everywhere.

This one's for you.

Damon

"Partial Page Caching in ColdFusion MX Macrochat"

Wednesday, February 16, 2005 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM US/Eastern

"Learn how to write a custom tag that allows for simple caching in ColdFusion MX. Ray Camden will lead this discussion on creating a CF tag for partial page caching of information. Ray is the Director of Development for Mindseye, Inc., a Team Macromedia member and Macromedia User Group manager."

What You Will Learn

- Existing ColdFusion Caching (query caching and cfcache)
- Persistant Scopes
- The ScopeCache Custom Tag

You must register for this event at:

http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=137271&loc=en_us"

Damon

To that end, the Dev Engineer/QA Engineer pair teams for some of the larger new Blackstone features will be putting together their engineering perspective on the new features, and some of what went into them.

If you're one of those folks who's curious about how stuff works and why it's the way it is, in addition to the "what", hopefully you'll enjoy this article series.

I'll also post a little bit of a small photo tour of the Newton, MA engineering facility here where Blackstone was designed and built, including, of course the critical CF teaming area, beer fridge (and last Beer Boy build page), whiteboards (scrawled remnants of feature design debate discussions intact), the build and testing labs, Tom J's orange inflatable ceiling shark, QA golf alley, the CF Dunkin Donuts shrine, the much overused (and abused) T30 spare, and other crucial CF Blackstone ingredients.

For now, here's the Introduction to the "Making of Blackstone" Article series on the Macromedia website from myself and Tim Buntel.

Damon

1) Installing with CF KB: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flex/1_5/flexforcf.html

2) Ben Forta's CF/Flex article: http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flex/articles/dashboard.html

3) Blog entry that shows Blackstone Flashpaper in a Flex app https://dcooper.org/?mode=entry&entry=609B9952-DC57-D79E-83886B7D4E700834

and

4) (NEW) ColdFusion Developers Journal, December 13, 2004 "Flex Your ColdFusion Muscles - Building Rich Internet Applications couldn't be easier with ColdFusion and Flex" http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=47443&DE=1

Damon

Just to set the record straight: we are laser-focused on innovation; not due to nerves about any competitor, but because it's our passion - it's what we do for our customers, what we've done for ten years now and what we will do for many more years.

However, I've watched the relentless postings by some of the competitors intended to make you believe two things which need clarification, and since they've not been forthcoming with customers, some clarification is in order. Claims of compatibility (or that they are somehow "compatible enough"), and that they will pick and chose which Blackstone features they will copy/implement, on their schedule are just not true. The test results clearly refute the first, and the protections we're putting in place will not make the second possible.

My personal belief is that customer's should hear the facts, in order to make intelligent decisions, and I guess I'm taking some shards for being first to repute their statements, but I believe it's important that customers know the truth, and this can be a start to that educational process. Again, though, we are and will continue to be laser-focused on innovation, and what drives us solely our passion for creating heroes out of our customers, developers, partners and end-users.

This will help cut down on maintenance I have to do to the site, as well as enable me to keep communication flowing. Apologies to anyone who posted comments today and lost their comments.

Folks are still welcome to send me feedback via email of course:

dcooper@macromedia.com
dcooper@cape.com

Damon

Unfortunately, the company making the copycat software isn't yet aware of them, and doesn't know what these failures are, even after years of struggling to become "compatible". I'd estimate it will be a 5-10 year effort at their current pace before these issues are discovered and solved, if ever. Unfortunately, their customers will be their main Quality Assurance team through this effort, learning the hard way what "penny-wise, pound foolish" means.

The particular ColdFusion compatibility test suite used to create the report I'm looking at represents tens and tens of millions of dollars in investment and many years of engineering and QA effort, support calls, onsite customer consulting engagements, Customer Advisory Board meetings, and a relentless drive towards engineering excellence and innovation to get built.

While it's understandable that claims of "Compatible, but Cheaper" are an effective ploy by copycats to trick unknowing customers into trying copycat software, these claims really are too-good-to-be-true. Worse, they can be misleading, confusing and even damaging to customer who believe them and find a very different reality the hard way.

Prospective customers should be really beware of 1) claims of "compatibility" and 2) promises of future development efforts to remain compatible. The first is simply not true today (and is not "close enough", as I look through this report…I was shocked to see the most basic types of issues that exist). The second promise of "future feature copying" is a promise they cannot keep.

We're working vigorously to protect our valuable intellectual property, defend against inappropriate use of our legal trademarks and brands, protect the massive investment in hard-won research and development assets, and work to ensure continued customer confidence, trust and investments in our products.

Our very loyal developers, customers, shareholders, partners and others expect us to protect them and their interests, and we're working to ensure that they can count on our responsible stewardship of the Macromedia products they depend on, believe in, and need from us going forward.

We're building the future of ColdFusion, and it's truly, truly amazing. Not just this next release, but the next few releases. I honestly can't see how the next releases of ColdFusion cannot but cause a "never going back" upheaval in solutions development and raise the bar for solutions and customer expectations, unlike anything we've seen in the last 10 years.

Macromedia ColdFusion will continue to enjoy massive resource and R&D investment, is staffed by 100% world-class talent, and is a vibrant and essential part of the Macromedia product lineup. Being part of such a great company, ColdFusion is able to tap and draw upon the resources and engineering resources across the entire company, from all product teams. Macromedia is the company that is changing the web, mobile devices, and the way people work and use the Internet and develop applications.

Macromedia ColdFusion will be your key to leveraging these advances in your organization for your customers. Caveat Emptor: beware of, and accept no imitations.

http://sys-con.com/story/?storyid=47197&DE=1

Happy Thanksgiving!

Damon

Now, while menu-based textual apps are not necessarily the best or preferred use case for SMS, this does demonstrate a (very) simple example of one type of usage of SMS.

This simple little app has two menu options:

1 - Stock Quote
2 - Weather

Well, actually, that’s not quite true…Macromedia employees actually see additional options you don’t see, such as an option to use the internal Macromedia employee directory application, etc, based on the incoming phone number. The CFC looks up the incoming phone number in the employee DB, and if it's listed, the menu option is shown, valid and available.

A few of us in Engineering have our own menu options as well, only displayed and valid if the incoming request is from one of us.

To check it out, (US phones only), simply send any text to phone number "48477".

(TIP: If your phone has an SMS text "chat" window, enter "chat mode" for the most fluid experience with this type of interactive menu-based app).

Here are a few SMS application example ideas:

- Airline 2-way flight change notification and rebooking
- SMS Banking, Credit Card and Account Alerts
- Real-time News Alerts (ie ABC News)
- Package Tracking (ie UPS)
- TV Voting and Messaging (ie American Idol)
- Mass media Voting & Contests
- Mobile 411 Lookups
- Mobile Company Directory & Phone Lookups
- Customer Feedback & Loyalty Programs
- Interactive Stock & Weather Alerts (1- or 2-way Push or Pull)
- GSM Device Apps (ie transmit GPS & telemetry, remote device monitoring, vending machines, gas pumps, even GPS Coke cans! (CocaCola's US Summer 2004 contest), and
- YOUR ENTERPRISE APPS (PO approvals, critical notifications, phone directory lookup, CEO dashboard & alerts, meeting reminders, cancellations, SMS-Email bridging, etc)

This last one is the one that excites me the most and I think holds a lot of promise to help streamline processes, allow legacy applications to become agile, and enable new types of apps across organizations.

If anyone has ideas for some cool functionality I can add to this little "48477" demo that you might find useful, please let me know.

Damon

Official Macromedia ColdFusion "Blackstone" Sneak Peek
Fusion Authority
Software Development Times
CNet News
InfoWorld
eWeek
ServerWatch
ColdFusion Developer's Journal

Damon

http://www.apache.org/dist/ws/axis/1_2RC2/

Axis 1.2 RC2 version includes:

* Performance enhancements over RC1
* Better doc/literal type mapping support
* JAX-RPC compatibility switch for WSDL2Java
* JMX support
* Jetty-based "mini" Axis server
* Bug fixes

We're working hard contributing to this effort and also trying to help get Axis 1.2 to be WS-I compliant with doc/literal support as best we can as well. WS-I would be a very nice to have for Blackstone, I believe.

Damon

Say you had a CFM page that had to do 100 pieces of work, each taking a while, that were needed to process the page, but they had little or no dependence on each other. Up till now, you'd have very few options other than to do each of the 100 items serially, and finish the page when all items are complete.

Wouldn't it be great if you could harness the multithreaded power of modern operating systems in your CFML code to split these work items up so they run in parallel, yet still be able to wait for them to all to finish (synch up) so the processing could complete as before and return to the user with the same results?

What kind of benefit would you expect to see?

In the best case, if none of the work items were related, say, you could spawn 100 threads (or better yet, if you could have a maintained 'pool' of ready waiting threads already spawned), and get these threads loaded up just with the work you wanted them to do, and the majority of the work could be done completely in parallel. In theory, you could achieve nearly 100X improvement, assuming there were no other 'work' related bottlenecks, etc. In other words, you could theoretically get all 100 pieces of work done in about the same time as ONE piece of work.

...and that would be sweet indeed.

In the example attached, the page with 100 pieces of work takes about 20,780ms (20 seconds) to complete.

In the Blackstone multithreaded example attached, the page accomplished the SAME work, but only takes about 230ms to complete.

This page also waits for ALL the work to get finished (like before), but because of the massive parallelism and scalability offered by using multiple threads, total user response time is improved by about 20,550 ms, or an improvement approaching 100X.

Very dramatic stuff, and your users will love you for it.

(SPECIAL NOTE: these results are not indicitive in any way of the performance of the final Blackstone product, and are provided only for discussion. Also note that Blackstone Beta users are under strict NDA, so please be careful if commenting on this post not to violate your NDA).

Imagine spawning off long running DB queries in parallel, for example. Page response times for most existing CF applications, in fact, would probably have some place that could make use of such a capability to dramatically make the user experience better.

Of course, anytime you can make these kinds of dramatic improvements to existing apps with little work, you'll look like a hero. And Blackstone is all about making you look like a hero to your users.

Below is a brief description of THE EXAMPLE FILES and how to set this up to run on your machine. This assumes you've got a Blackstone Beta installed. You'll also need to modify the CFFILE action='COPY' source='C:\Baseline.txt' destination='C:\____WORKERFOLDER\#x#.txt' line in 'Threadsynch_serial.cfm' and 'dowork.cfc' with a real source file to copy and destination folder to write 100 files to on YOUR machine.

1) 'Threadsynch_serial.cfm' does 100 pieces of long running 'work' in a CFLOOP, using CFFLUSH to keep the user informed, before completing. (The 'work' is comprised of copying a file and 'sleeping' for 200ms.)

(turn on debugging output in the Admin to see the total page execution times.)

2) 'Threadsynch.cfm' removes the 'work' out into a CFC, called 'dowork.cfc'. In the main work CFLOOP, rather than do the work inline, it instead calls 'sendGatewayMessage()' with the name of the Asynchronous CFML Gateway instance (I setup in the Admin to point at the 'dowork.cfc'), and the work ID # (loop counter) used by the 'dowork.cfc'.

The 'dowork.cfc' accepts the work ID # (loop counter from the CFM), does that piece of 'work' (copy a file and wait 200ms) and increments a Server scope variable inside an exclusive lock.

3) 'Threadsynch.cfm' then loops while checking the Server variable where 'dowork.cfc' reports progress, until all work is done. A thread sleep is included between checks in the loop to reduce CPU usage in the 'wait' loop. Each loop iteration reports the current amount of work done so far and CFFLUSH's that out to the browser.

4) Once all the 'work' is done, the 'Threadsynch.cfm' completes (not before).

5) Set the Event Gateway Threads setting to 100 (since I have 100 messages coming in nearly simultaneously and I want to maximize performance in this case) and restart CF to take affect.

TO RUN:

1) Run 'Threadsynch_serial.cfm'. Note the execution time.
2) Run 'Threadsynch.cfm'. Note the execution time.
3) Stare in amazement.

Behold, the power of threads.

Enjoy,

Damon

The backend was ColdFusion Blackstone running back in Newton, MA.

The results were (for the record):

TOTAL VOTES CAST: 584
Votes for Kerry: 317
Votes for Bush: 242
Votes for Nader: 25

Not sure what it's worth election-wise, but I thought I'd share. :)

Damon

We have a Blackstone-powered mobile SMS conference session tracker application online for MAX.

It's hooked into the MAX conference registration system, and if you provide your mobile number and enable the service, you'll receive notifications of your next session about 5-10 minutes prior to your next session, and you can also obtain your conference schedule for the current day with a simple textual-based menu option.

Sending "max" to the special short code will invoke the top-level menu.

This simple application should be available on all US-based cell phones. To make use of this service, be sure to enter your cell phone number and enable the notification option when you register online.

See you at MAX, and welcome to the (newly) simplified world of 2-way interactive session-enabled mobile SMS applications!

Damon

Many of Geoff's RSS sources frequently change servers, sites, domains, etc, resulting in changed DNS entries, but the DNS entries were being cached indefinitely in CF, so the CFHTTP calls would timeout or fail when the DNS entries were updated (cached didn’t match new real entries). Those RSS sources were therefore lost from his aggregator until Geoff bounced his ColdFusion server, and the caused the DNS cache to be repopulated.

I asked Tom Jordahl take a look, and he discovered there's actually some Sun VM behavior at play here. Tom blogged this earlier today here, but to recap, Java has a default "caching forever" behavior for DNS lookups. See the Sun docs on this subject here for more details: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/net/InetAddress.html

ColdFusion HTTP uses the java.net.InetAddress class to resolve hostnames. While this is the only place in our ColdFusion code to directly use this direct lookup technique, be aware that DB drivers and other OEM technologies may use this, however, and you should therefore keep in mind that this is a server-wide setting, so be sure to test thoroughly before making any changes to a production server.

As it turns out, there is a JVM property to override the default caching behavior, to help thwart DNS spoofing. We're investigating whether to change this default setting in the "Server" configuration to something more reasonable for Blackstone, with some documentation so J2EE setup folks know about this as well and can make the change if they desire this behavior.

Two Java security properties control the TTL values used for positive and negative host name resolution caching:

1) networkaddress.cache.ttl (default: -1). This indicates the caching policy for successful name lookups from the name service. The value is specified as an integer to indicate the number of seconds to cache the successful lookup. A value of -1 indicates "cache forever". A more reasonable default of, say, 14400 or 4 hours (4*60*60) or even a smaller value (30 minutes?) might make more sense in some cases, like Geoff’s, especially where a large number of small public Internet sites are constantly processed via CFHTTP.

2) networkaddress.cache.negative.ttl (default: 10 seconds) This indicates the caching policy for un-successful name lookups from the name service. The value is specified as an integer to indicate the number of seconds to cache the failure for un-successful lookups. A value of 0 indicates "never cache". A value of -1 indicates "cache forever".

To change this behavior on a ColdFusion MX-based server on a Sun 1.4.x or later VM, you’d change these two values in the java.security file in the cfusionmx\runtime\jre\lib\security directory.

Damon

It's goodness, but we've had more than a few issues we've had to dig into and fix so far to help whip it into shape, but Doc literal requires it, so we're going for it and helping push the Apache project towards the end goal.

Standards and interoperability are goodness.

Damon

"We ran this in the newsletter today:

CORRECTION In the Oct. 7 issue of SWP's Weekly Security Planner we erroneously referred to ColdFusion. It’s a Web-application development platform from Macromedia used by Web sites for a variety of purposes including Web applications and e-commerce. It isn’t free and doesn’t come installed by default. Our thanks to the handful of readers who wrote in to correct us.

and fixed it on the Web site."

Ben blogged this as well in Ben's Forta's Blog.

The editor will be contacting the author and says they should have correction in next month's issue to help clear things up.

"Cold Fusion" 1.0 was released around June of 1995, and the rest, as they say, is history. ColdFusion has become a critical part of life over the years, for hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide, of every skill set and background.

The ColdFusion "Blackstone" release is going to be a truly landmark release: solid and stable, fast, reliable, powerful, empowering, with radical new capabilities, and breaking out of what has become an increasingly stagnant and commoditized list of application server functionality.

While we're not at the actual 10-year marker yet in terms of the 1.0 release, it was roughly 10 years ago when ideas were coming together, ideas and code were being prototyped, excitement was building around what could be possible, and early customers were getting a taste of what would be in store for them from the product that would in many ways come to change the world.

In many ways, we're at a similar place now with the work happening on the Blackstone release. There's something very special about this one, and it's palpable around here in everything from the customer feedback, to the energy, excitement and determination on the team, to the interest from other teams in making use of our technology, to the mountain of intellectual property amassed so far, and in a hundred other ways. It's an exciting time without a doubt, and you can feel it.

I think that in the innovative sense, we have hit the 10-year anniversary of that first great set of innovations, and we’re marking it with what I believe are equally radical and exciting innovations that will empower developers like never before and enable new categories of Internet applications with radical ease, in record time, and for many years to come.

Happy 10th Birthday, ColdFusion.

Damon

Here's the MAX Agenda By Track, and here's the official Macromedia MAX 2004 site.

I'm doing the Mobile SMS Applications Made Easy session, and I hope to see you there.

Here are some of the ColdFusion and Blackstone-related list of sessions that have been posted so far:

Getting Started with ColdFusion
Building a Basic CMS with ColdFusion and Dreamweaver
Using ColdFusion to Power Flex and Flash Applications
The Future of ColdFusion: Blackstone
Database Design Fundamentals
Structured Development, ColdFusion Done the Right Way
Working with Multiple ColdFusion Instances
Leveraging Web Services with ColdFusion
Building for Scalability
Secure ColdFusion Applications
ColdFusion Performance Tips and Tricks
Building Internationalized and Multi-Lingual Applications
Integrating with Microsoft Office
Object Oriented ColdFusion
Advanced ColdFusion Components and Web Services
Java Powered ColdFusion
Coding for Reuse
The Infrastructure Impact
Blackstone Event Gateways
Mobile SMS Applications Made Easy
ColdFusion Printing and Reporting

So if you or anyone you know might be interested in Blackstone, reporting, dynamic FlashPaper 2.0 and PDF output, Rich Forms, XForms, ColdFusion, Flex, SMS mobile text messaging application development, Instant-Messaging and Presence-aware enabling applications, J2EE deployment, clustering, multi-threaded development, instance management, event-based programming, web services, rich internet application development, building your first web application, charting, cutting edge searching, performance & scalability, best practices, L110N application developement, building securing web applications, printing from web applications, content management, integrating with Microsoft technologies, and much, much, much more...

...then you definitely need to be at MAX 2004 this year in New Orleans. You and your organization will be positively impacted by this event.

See you there!

Damon

More will follow as we continue past milestones and freezes, but the first one is always where I reflect a bit on past releases, Security Bulletins, coding and QA practices, and do some self-examination about whether we've done enough to help ensure product and customer safety.

My father worked at International Nickel Company (INCO) in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, and I remember a "take the family to work" day, where we got to see the giant machines and processes in place to turn ore into precious metal, and remember the larger-than-life bright yellow and orange warning signs everywhere, the safety stats posted for each work area, and the "SAFETY FIRST" signs everywhere.

Today, I think many software companies would do well to place similar signs around their workplace to help keep everyone reminded of their priorities, their responsibility to customers, and the dangerous place the world has become, where our products can be all that stands between customers and those who would harm them.

We've had a hard look at the vulnerabilities that we've had to patch, and while we've improved dramatically in the past few years in terms of our processes, priorities, responsiveness and quality, we can always do more, and we're working very hard this release, and spending a very considerable sum to help ensure that ColdFusion Blackstone release is the most secure release ever.

Be sure to visit the Macromedia Security Zone and sign up for automatic Security Bulletin notifications if you haven't already, and we'll notify you if there's a product-related security issue or patch you need to know about ASAP.

http://www.macromedia.com/security

Damon