Adobe/ColdFusion News Brief, July 31, 2006

Jul 30, 2006

By Ryan Hartwich

Fusebox 5 Has Been Officially Released

Sean Corfield briefly explained what caused the delays, but the new Fusebox 5 release is now available. Learn more at: http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/Where_is_Fusebox_5

<cf_pdfform>

Ben Forta announced on Thursday a new feature/tag available to ColdFusion developers, <cf_pdfform>. This tag works in conjunction with a free jar file (XPAAJ) available to licensed ColdFusion server owners. The tag can be used to interface with PDF files and submit data to ColdFusion through a PDF file, similar to some functionality in the LiveCycle software. At this time, the tag is unsupported and will differ from a planned <cfpdfform> tag in Scorpio, but worth checking out. You can read more about the tag at:

CF_PDFForm: Programmatically Set And Get PDF Form Fields

WishList for Features in CFMX 8 (Scorpio)

In the last few days there has been a lot of lively discussion on a number of blogs and listservs concerning upcoming features in Scorpio. There seems to be a split in the features most requested: 1) Java/Object-Oriented-like functionality 2) connectivity to other technologies to ease development and 3) increased server administration and developer IDE tools. Below are a number of links that will give you a better understanding of the features requested and how the community is perceiving them.

ColdFusion 8 Feature Survey (House of Fusion, July 28, 2006)

Open Letter to the CF Server Team (Simon Horwith's Blog , July 23, 2006)

Follow-on to Simon Horwith's Open Letter to the ColdFusion Server Team (Rob Brooks-Bilson's Blog, July 23, 2006)

Wishlist: 11 Things I'd Like to See in ColdFusion MX 8 - Scorpio (Brandon Harper's Blog, July 23, 2006)

Adobe Should Stop Trying to Make CF Like Java (Brian Kotek's Blog, July 24, 2006)

What is in your Wish List? (Sean Corfield's blog, July 24, 2006)

cf_gagMe: Wishlists and Features and Fixes, OH MY (Jared Rypka-Hauer's Blog, July 25, 2006)

How Slowly the Wheels Turn... Maybe I did lose touch with CF. (Jared Rypka-Hauer's blog, July 26, 2006)

What I want in ColdFusion 8 Part I (Michael Dinowitz's Blog, July 26, 2006)

The Secret History of ColdFusion MX (Michael Dinowitz's Blog, July 26, 2006)

My One Wish for ColdFusion (Doug Hughes' Blog, July 27, 2006)

CFThread and CFJoin

Damon Cooper talks about a proof of concept that Rupesh Kumar, an Adobe CF Computer Scientist, put together to test out two new tags he was playing with, CFThread and CFJoin. The proof of concept showed that an example of file copying run in a loop 50 times in a serialized fashion takes approximately 10 seconds versus .25 of a second using the new tags and running the 50 threads concurrently. Damon makes it quite clear in his write up that this is an unsupported technique and is shown here merely to get feedback and to share the idea with the public.

CFTHREAD and CFJOIN Proof Of Concept Tags

ColdFusion Report Builder

In case you didn't miss the recent release of the ColdFusion 7.0.2 update, there is also an updated ColdFusion Report Builder that was released on July 17th. According to a direct inquiry made to a number of ColdFusion staff members at CFUnited 06, they don't anticipate any regression problems in the 7.0.2 update relative to the 7.0.1 version of ColdFusion. You should investigate the server upgrade and make sure that if you upgrade the server you upgrade reports using the 7.0.2 Report Builder to make sure the reports synchronize with your servers.

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

High-Traffic ColdFusion Site Running on CommonSpot

PaperThin and Fig Leaf Software announce the deployment of a massive CommonSpot (which runs ColdFusion) based website, Voice of America (VOA). According to a July 24th article in the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, the updated VOA website handles '120 million hits per month generated by 2.4 million unique monthly visitors' in more than 44 different languages. Learn more about this amazing overhaul that shows that ColdFusion can meet the high uptime and traffic requirements of even the largest sites.

Announcement: http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/251023.htm

PaperThin and their CommonSpot system: http://www.paperthin.com

Fig Leaf Software

Security News:

There has been a recent vulnerability that has been attacked in Flash Player 8, which includes code execution and denial of service vulnerabilities. A set of public advisories has been released, and the popular social networking site, Myspace (http://aralbalkan.com/664), has been encouraging their users to upgrade their FP8 installs to FP9.

Since websites that utilize ColdFusion Flash Forms and other Flash Player based client renderings may be at risk, this is a good reason for ColdFusion developers to upgrade their version checking scripts to encourage users to upgrade to Flash Player 9. According to Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer of MySpace , Adobe recognized this vulnerability in Flash 8 and fixed it in its latest version, which is why we're urging all members to upgrade to Flash 9.

MAX 2006 - Las Vegas, October 23-26

Adobe Announces MAX 2006 and Fourth Annual MAX Awards

Adobe Announces MAX 2006 and Fourth Annual MAX Awards (Businesswire)

Additional information on Max 2006 can be found at http://www.adobe.com/events/max. Note that registration is now open, but registration for sessions will not open until early August.

Director/Shockwave Under Development

According to Tom Higgins, product manager or Director and the Shockwave Player, both the IDE and the player are actively being worked on and contrary to rumors are not dead.

Director Coming to Mactels (Macnn.com)

FusionReactor 2.0 and FusionDebug

Having problems with your ColdFusion server or wanting to learn more about what happens in the background when your server is being loaded? Check out the new release of FusionReactor 2.0 to monitor your server (http://www.fusion-reactor.com). A competing product, SeeFusion 3.3 is available (http://www.seefusion.com/) and will include a Flex 2 front end when version 4 is released.

If you are a developer using Eclipse to build your ColdFusion applications, you should read more about FusionDebug, a debugging tool available soon at http://www.fusion-reactor.com/fusiondebug/. See the new Fusion Authority article discussing both FusionReactor 2.0 and the new FusionDebug features.