Exciting Changes in ColdFusion 9.0.1 : An Interview with Adam Lehman

Do you consider the Updater a must-have for all ColdFusion developers, and why do you say that?

Like any of the updaters that we've had in the past, this is a rollup of bug fixes that we've gotten since ColdFusion 9. We do recommend that everyone upgrade to 9.01. With hot fixes, we only release things that are extremely critical, but there are a lot of minor fixes that we put into an updater along with a few feature enhancements. In fact, there were 496 bugs fixes included in ColdFusion 9 Update 1.

What features stand out as really essential for developer productivity?

9.01 is a free update so we haven't added any brand new features; we fixed bugs and added enhancements to existing features.

In ColdFusion 9, we added the ability to write files directly to memory using the syntax ram://. In 9.01, we've added an enhancement to allow you to read and write directly to Amazon S3 using the syntax s3://. This allows you to connect and talk to Amazon S3 for file persistence using the same syntax. ColdFusion will manage the connection and parse the data for Amazon.

Before this, you would have to write your own web services and use web service calls to work with Amazon S3. We're really trying to abstract that complexity. It will make you pretty productive if you're trying to talk to Amazon S3.

Can you give us an idea of some companies that are using Amazon S3 or who are using ColdFusion with the cloud?

Since we made the licensing changes to CF9, it's hard to tell who's using Amazon or the cloud, as it's pretty much the same license no matter what you're using.

What can you tell us about the new caching function, cacheGetSession?

One of the philosophies we follow with ColdFusion is to provide easy access to complex technologies like Hibernate or Ehcache while allowing unrestricted access to advanced developers. Along those lines, we've introduced the cacheGetSession function which returns the raw caching object from Ehcache. Developers will be able to access additional functionality that is not exposed through the CFCACHE tag.

There is also another very important caching update in 9.01. We updated the version of Ehcache that shipped with ColdFusion 9 to a newer version that is now supported by Terracotta. Terracotta focuses on open source solutions for scalability, ehcache being one of them.

Terracotta creates open source versions of their products, hoping that everyone will start to use them, and they wrap those open source versions with more enterprise functionality for their commercial versions. Now Terracotta can enhance the version of Ehcache within ColdFusion and you get a tremendous boost in caching performance and scalability. A lot of our enterprise customers are already using Terracotta, and the company will be joining us at CFUNITED this year.

Can you tell me more about the metadata enhancements to CFSCRIPT?

In the initial version of ColdFusion 9, we did not support a way to specify metadata for arguments of components and functions in CFSCRIPT. In ColdFusion 9.01 we added support for argument metadata via annoations.

I see you've improved load conditions in the server monitor. Can you give us more detail on that?

The big improvement in the server monitor is that you have the option to break it out into its own separate server. Previously, all requests to ColdFusion came through the same gateway or pipe and internally we were reserving specific memory aside for the server monitor. But if you're under so much load that that gateway or that pipe is blocked up, then the request was not getting through to the server monitor. On the outside it would seem like the server monitor was hanging but in reality, the gateway was bogged down, and the server monitor requests were not getting through.

In the updater, we've created a separate server that runs on a different port, and that distinguishes server monitor requests from all other requests in ColdFusion. Now we are pointing the server monitor traffic to a different place.

You support LCDS 3 and BlazeDS 4. How come you didn't support them in ColdFusion 9 originally?

In ColdFusion 9, we rewrote Flash remoting to make it a lot faster. In the process of rewriting Flash remoting, we were breaking our connections to LCDS and BlazeDS. In the updater, we rewrote our adapters to LCDS and BlazeDS so that we have the faster Flash remoting and can still talk to the latest versions of LCDS and BlazeDS.

What other enhancements do you consider important?

We added a lot of little things in ORM but the real big one is multiple data source support. We also added the ability for var declarations within the loop construct. Now you can code for(var item in s) and declare your vars within the loop rather than having to do it before you break into the loop. And we added support for scripting services that were not available in CFSCRIPT in ColdFusion 9: dbinfo, imap, pop, ldap, feed.

At this point, what's missing from CFSCRIPT?

Some of the tags that we call service tags are not available in CFSCRIPT — like the CFSHAREPOINT tag. These are tags that do something externally with another server or are not operating directly with the logic of a page. Ideally we'd like to get to the point where all service tags are available in CFSCRIPT as well, but we're doing them piece by piece, the most essential tags first. We added the scripting stuff in 9, and moving forward in ColdFusion X [Editor's Note: the next version of ColdFusion], you can be sure that if we add a new tag, we'd add it in CFSCRIPT as well.

What can you tell us about ColdFusion X?

I'm hoping to talk about some things at CFUNITED. When we were busy building 9, we were looking at a three-version strategy. There were things we wanted to add to ColdFusion, but we know we couldn't get there in one version. ColdFusion X is a sort of in-between version where you're really going to see the server start to transform to something else but at the same time I think you're going to see it as a solid version. To get to where we want to go, we need to come back and modernize certain aspects of the server. I hate to be so vague, but I think it's safe to say that CF X will have a very modern feel to it.

That sounds intriguing. Can you give me a date as to when we'll see ColdFusion X come out?

We have two teams engineering-wise, one working on ColdFusion and one on ColdFusion Builder, but we're really one big team. We just completed the concept validation of Storm which is the codename for ColdFusion Builder 2. We already started development on that about a month ago. Now we are locking down the scope and concept of ColdFusion X and will spend the rest of the summer meeting with customers to validate our ideas.

MAX is always a good time to come back and speak to us. At MAX, we'll have a lot of information about Storm and about ColdFusion X.

Thanks so much for your time, Adam.

Thank you, Judith.