Focus on Devcon 2001

 
Oct 22, 2001
by Judith Dinowitz, with help from my roving reporters

October 23, 2001: Having spoken to my reporters, who sat through two general sessions of the Macromedia conference, I must say I'm very happy with the direction Macromedia is heading. (I'm not happy with Macromedia personally, but that's not something I'll go into right now.)

The three main themes of the general session on Monday were:

  • Upgrade to CF 5. It's a solid release.
  • Flash is a great way to do a user interface.
  • Neo is going to be a dynamic and even better iteration of ColdFusion, and it's coming sometime in 2002.
Now you may have heard these messages before, in one forum or another. But somehow, the concept of upgrading to CF 5 has not managed to reach the mass of ColdFusion users. The reason why has nothing to do with the merit of ColdfUsion 5 itself but with the perception. Ever since the early years, the feeling in the general computing industry has been that a ".0" release is not going to be a stable one. It doesn't matter how good the product is or how well the company is known for its quality -- much of corporate America is under the impression that .0 releases are simply not to be put on production machines.

Well, I'm here to tell you people that I've seen the present and future of ColdFusion, and they excite me. So, despite the fact that Macromedia would not issue me a press pass to the conference, I am going to advise all of our readers to stick with ColdFusion and to upgrade to CF 5. House of Fusion has been using ColdFusion 5 since it came out, on our production server, and at this point, almost all known bugs have been fixed with patches. Also, many of our readers may not realize that Macromedia is not putting out a version 5.1. There will be no new releases until Neo, just hot fixes and patches. So if you're not planning to upgrade until 5.1, you may never end up upgrading!

One major piece of news that came out in the general session on Monday is that Neo (the next iteration of ColdFusion) will be able to run with IBM Websphere and BEA Weblogic. Also, Neo will have support for all components and code written in the .Net standard. It was obvious that Macromedia has been working with several major companies, such as Sun, Intel, IBM, and Microsoft.

Some more in-depth coverage of Monday's session:

First, Adam Berrey, Vice President of ColdFusion Business, came out and spoke about the community support for ColdFusion and Macromedia's continuing support for the community. He asked several different groups of people who had supported ColdFusion in the past to stand up and be counted. (For a very different take on this, see Michael Dinowitz's Op Ed in this issue.)

Then Kevin Lynch, President of Macromedia, who, from what I have seen, is actively interested in the ColdFusion community, got up and spoke of the ways in which the current Web needs improvement. He cited the void in usability (65% of users fail when trying to buy something online) and the limits of HTML as a user interface. He gave a great case for Flash as a user interface, and also touted XML as a technology that can help sites and apps communicate with each other and exchange information. The key, he said, was to make websites able to interact with each other and with legacy systems more easily, to free people to work wherever and however they like, and to create a much better user experience online.

Kevin also mentioned another bit of news: Microsoft is now including Flash with its Microsoft XP systems and with Microsoft software on handheld devices. [See Issue 95: "Industry Leaders Support Macromedia Flash Player on Windows CE-Based Devices" and Issue 95: "Fortune 500 Companies Rally Around Macromedia Flash For Online Advertisements" for more on the industry's adoption of Flash.)

After a montage of endorsements of ColdFusion 5 by Macromedia people and by different magazines, Tim Buntel, Product Manager, spoke about Studio 5, which was (very subtly) released at Devcon. He demoed the following new features:

  • A second filetree tab allows the user to view two files from different sources at the same time.
  • Macromedia has moved the Studio help files to a separate window, so they can be viewed separately from the application you're working on.
  • The autobackup feature creates backup files before and after changes, so that one can go back to any old autobackup file and the old data is not lost.
  • A nice new feature that had the audience cheering was the ability to right-click on a CFINCLUDE and open that file straight from the main window (the same could be done with an image in Fireworks).
Tim also showed some examples of ways to use ColdFusion 5's new features, such as Query of Queries and CFFlush, to enhance production values and speed on a website. He demoed a very nice user interface in Flash that would show the user how much of their query has been processed (thereby stopping them from hitting refresh in the middle of a session.) He also showed how Flash could be used to make a form that puts all pertinent information on one page, and that updates the form page based on what has been selected already. In other words, this really went beyond that "skip-Flash" intro stuff we're all used to.

To round out the session on Monday, Jeremy Allaire and Ben Forta spoke about Neo, the next generation of ColdFusion servers. Jeremy reiterated and expanded on some of the same statements he made last year:

  1. Neo will continue ColdFusion's tradition of being the easiest way to develop dynamic Web applications.
  2. Neo will give the programmer flexible deployment options.
  3. Neo is backed by some major industry companies, such as Sun, Intel and IBM.
  4. Neo will be backward compatible.
  5. Neo will be able to run standalone or on top of IBM Websphere or Bea Weblogic.
  6. You don't need to know Java to use Neo.
  7. Neo will have some exciting new features.
  8. JRun will be available separately, but the CF Server itself will include a built-in JRun server. This means that you will not be forced to buy JRun to use Neo, but you will have the option, if you want, to upgrade to the full version of JRun.
  9. The widespread acceptance of J2EE standards means that Neo code can be distributed, in its compiled, Java form, and be run on a wide variety of platforms.
The key goal, Jeremy said, is to give developers more power than they've ever had without sacrificing the ease of use and quick learning curve we've always had with ColdFusion.

The highlight of Monday's session was Ben Forta's hands-on demonstration of the alpha version of Neo. Ben had the audience in stitches when he used a "Pick Your Poison" application to deliberately scuttle one version of Neo, and yet had his app still running because he had put a second instance of Neo on that same machine. There will doubtlessly be many uses for this on machines where more than one app is running (such as in shared-hosting environments.)

Ben also reiterated the benefits of invoking JSP tags within Neo, compiling and distributing Neo code as Java bytecode, and the gains in power and control that come with a J2EE framework.

In reality, there wasn't much that was new in Monday's session, but the repetition of some of the key concepts that Macromedia has been introducing over the past year to the ColdFusion community was helpful.

Tuesday's session was the more interesting and fun of the two sessions. That's because it was done as a scenario between a web application development house (XYZ Company) and a client who was known to change the specs at a moment's notice. The point of the scenario (which starred Jeremy Allaire, Sean Schnoor and other Macromedia people) was that Neo was what enabled XYZ to keep on top of the demands of this mercurial client. During this more in-depth demonstration of Neo, we saw such new tags as IMPORT (to import a Java tag or component) and INVOKE (to invoke a webservice). We also learned about CFC's (ColdFusion Components), which could be used to wrap up pieces of code with some commonality, thus giving us methods and properties in ColdFusion (otherwise known as object oriented programming). Some of you who have used Spectra may have seen similar ideas in Spectra's use of containers, handlers and objects.

The demonstrator noted that CFC's are a great way to share information between ColdFusion and Flash. They will make it easier to build Web services and add more support for scripting and tag-based scripting work.

The real fun part of Tuesday's demonstration was a look at Director's recently-introduced 3-D technology. Using Shockwave and Director, the "designer" involved in XYZ's site showed a rapt audience a beautiful 3-D island simulation which could be explored by mouse on the Web. This simulation was whipped up in about 5 minutes -- a slight exaggeration, obviously.

For a more detailed look at what was said in the Devcon 2001 General sessions, see Michael Smith's powerpoint presentation and the notes by Tobe Goldfinger on CFConf.org (http://www.cfconf.org).

It was obvious, from both the Monday and Tuesday general sessions, that ColdFusion is alive and kicking, and will (it seems) be around for a while.


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