HostMySite Offers Free ColdFusion 8 Beta Hosting Accounts

by Derek Vaughan

Interested in taking the beta of ColdFusion 8 for a spin? HostMySite is making free accounts available to users who want to try it.

Tim Buntel, Senior Product Marketing Manager of ColdFusion at Adobe and Monish Sood, Director of Marketing at HostMySite.com, spoke to this reporter about the new features of ColdFusion 8 and how to get started with a free beta account. What makes the beta so compelling? Buntel said, ColdFusion 8 shows what happens when you inject ColdFusion with Adobe's DNA. It's really about making this great experience for the application user, with a whole slew of new features: PDF's, rich Internet applications, and multimedia presentations – simply a much more meaningful experience for users. There is also a lot more integration in the enterprise. We're doing for .NET what we've done for Java in the past. Plus Exchange integration. Then also enhancing the developer's experience.

One feature that's getting considerable attention is ColdFusion 8's ability to invoke .NET components directly from ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). This is true for both local and remote .NET components. The new feature works much like using cfobject/CreateObject to make use of Java. Here's how Tim Buntel describes it: "There are organizations that have both Java and .NET development work going on, whether through acquisition or size or different divisions or different areas of the world. ColdFusion has been in a great position over the years. To build an application with ColdFusion, if you were doing Java development as well – no problem. ColdFusion can take advantage of those Java assets within the ColdFusion language. So now we're able to do the same thing for .NET. If some group in your organization is writing a specific piece of business logic in .NET – up until now the ColdFusion application couldn't take advantage of that development work that the .NET team was doing, except maybe with SOAP services, but there were some issues with that. Now your ColdFusion team can leverage that business logic that the .NET team developed within ColdFusion in a much easier and efficient way than you could have with web services.

"For the .NET guys the important thing to them is that they don't have to change their code. Today, the primary way to bridge Java and .NET would be with .NET remoting, but that would require the .NET team to change their .NET. They would actually have to compile .NET assemblies to use remoting, but they don't want to have to do that. ColdFusion 8 will allow you to access .NET directly from ColdFusion without the .NET team having to do any additional work. We're unique as a Java into .NET bridge without using either web services or .NET remoting."

Other new features of note include the ability to create on-demand presentations with a customizable look and feel, improved Flex/ColdFusion connectivity through data exchange simplification and a simpler architecture, and the ability to monitor the server applications in production. The server monitoring will permit developers to diagnose slow pages queries and threads, track memory usage, manage active threads, and monitor database usage.

But Mr. Buntel explained that there are certain performance benefits beyond the new features that make upgrading to ColdFusion 8 worthwhile. "There are compelling reasons to move to ColdFusion 8 even if you don't rewrite a single line of code that you're currently running in ColdFusion version 7 or 6.1 or 6. Simply moving your applications to ColdFusion 8 will yield a whole range of benefits. It's going to be faster, it's going to be more stable, and you're going to have the ability to monitor those applications in production.

Existing ColdFusion developers are going to be able to take advantage of all of these features very quickly and easily. As well, people who are getting into rich Internet application development, and want to find the easiest and most productive server side compliment for a rich Internet app. So if you're doing AJAX or you're doing Flex, or Flash for rich client, ColdFusion 8 is going to allow those applications to talk to databases and object services and enterprise infrastructure very easily and make you productive.

While it's easy to download ColdFusion from Adobe Labs on your own computer or workstation, Buntel noted that the new hosting accounts give developers a second option. If you don't want to install or are unable to install the product on your machine for any reason, then with a ColdFusion hosting partner such as HostMySite.com, you'll be able to go sign up for a small account that is running on ColdFusion 8 that will allow you to start writing code and use the features that environment. Those accounts are free as well.

Monish Sood, Director of Marketing at HostMySite.com, explained the details of the beta accounts. The ColdFusion 8 Beta comes fully loaded with features, including a 600 MB MS SQL Server database, 4 GB of disk space, and ASP.NET 3.0 framework access. We want developers to be able to test the newest release of ColdFusion in real-world situations with features that are available with our ColdFusion developer edition plans, Sood said. We have worked closely with Adobe throughout the beta process to transfer all feedback from participating developers. The developers get access to production level features to test in a beta environment. HostMySite.com provides the same level of support and service for the beta as any production plan.

For further details on the new beta release of Coldfusion 8, please visit Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion8.

To sign up for the free ColdFusion 8 beta account with HostMySite.com, please visit http://www.hostmysite.com/CF8.

This story appears courtesy of The Hosting News.

Derek Vaughan is Chief Marketing Officer with TechPad Agency, LLC - a full resource advertising and marketing agency, specializing in products and services for the web hosting industry. Mr. Vaughan's writing appears courtesy of the dedicated web server experts at www.thehostingnews.com.

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