ColdFusion MX 7.0.1: Mac OS X Support, Java CFCProxy, Flash Functions in CFFORM, and More!

Sep 22, 2005

by Judith and Michael Dinowitz

Last night Macromedia released the ColdFusion MX 7 Updater (ColdFusion MX 7.0.1), available as a free download to all ColdFusion MX 7 customers. To get a better understanding of this updater, we spoke with Dave Gruber, Macromedia's ColdFusion Senior Product Manager.

Gruber said that the biggest news of this updater is brand new Mac OS X and Mac OSX Tiger platform support. This includes full turnkey installers and runtime production support. A Mac OS X installation of ColdFusion will include everything that's in a Windows installation, except for the Report Builder Tool that comes with ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise.

This will open up ColdFusion to a new audience of Mac users, and should increase the reach of ColdFusion in the marketplace and in the programming world. Macromedia and Apple will be working together to promote the updater for Mac users. "We're jazzed to get Mac developers on the ColdFusion platform," said Gruber.

Beyond the new Mac support, this updater might best be described as "polish for ColdFusion MX 7." It provides updated platform support, fixes and patches, and refinements on some of the new features of ColdFusion MX 7.

Platform Support

With the release of 7.0.1, ColdFusion MX 7 support includes the following major platforms:

Windows 2003 Service Pack 1
Red Hat Linux AS 4.0
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
AIX 5L v5.3
IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) Network Deploy (ND)
Oracle Application Server 10g
Oracle 10g RDBMS support --Note that 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC) are not supported with the Updater.
Some basic support for IPv6

The most notable of these are probably Oracle Application Server 10g and IBM Websphere Application Server Network Deploy, which were previously unsupported. Macromedia will be also doing joint marketing with Oracle, as they have with IBM in the past. The increased marketing between Apple, IBM and Oracle, as well as the forthcoming Adobe buyout, will do much to raise Macromedia's profile in the corporate world.

Fixes and Patches

The updater also contains the recent fixes, security fixes and patches that have come out since the release of ColdFusion MX 7. Gruber said that so far, there have been no known major bugs with this release, only minor issues. "Macromedia is happy with the quality of the release to date," he said.

Refinements on Features

Lastly, the updater contains further refinements on some of the new features of the product. Among the more notable refinements are:

RTF support for cfreport -- This was something that Macromedia had originally planned for Blackstone, but they ran out of time. As RTF can be opened directly into Microsoft Word, cfdocument now has the ability to create content in the major document formats.

New attributes on the cfreport and cfdocument tags

Java CFC Proxy support (for calling CFC's directly from Java in Enterprise Edition). This is another feature that was supposed to be in the initial MX 7 release, but wasn't fully documented, and was probably not feature-complete. This did not stop people from using it, but with the Updater, it is now fully formed and documented.

What exactly does it do? It allows ColdFusion code to be incorporated directly into Java applications that are running in the same Java context as ColdFusion. As it is substantially easier to write ColdFusion code than Java code, CFC implementations in Java applications should become commonplace. The value of ColdFusion in shops that make use of both ColdFusion and native J2EE code is limited by the amount of interplay between ColdFusion and Java. Previously, ColdFusion had access to Java objects but Java had no access to ColdFusion objects. This has changed, and the value of ColdFusion in such an environment is greatly increased.

Flash Forms Enhancements -- Macromedia has expanded the capabilities of ActionScript in Flash Forms, allowing for the use of onFocus and onBlur events. They've also added the onLoad attribute, which means that you can "define a function to call when the form is loaded to help initialize different parts of your form." (Source: CFForm.com)

Download Options

When talking to various people, one sometimes hears the complaint that when downloading ColdFusion, you may get a corrupted copy instead of a good file. The reason for this is that normally, when someone tries to download the ColdFusion installer, they're trying to download a rather large file over HTTP. If the HTTP times out or has a network problem, there's no indicator that the download has failed. What happens is that someone has received, or thinks they've received, a file, but the file has been corrupted. There's nothing that can be done about that from the Macromedia side.

In the release of this updater, Macromedia has provided the option to download the file through FTP, which will automatically resume if there's any network problems. The FTP version (expected to go live tonight) has the updates, while the web version has the updater and the full ColdFusion MX 7 installation. (Please note that trial versions of ColdFusion are still only available by HTTP download.)

The Expansion of ColdFusion

According to Gruber, Macromedia has seen a big increase in upgrades from customers who had previously been running ColdFusion 5. "The ColdFusion 5 audience is really starting to move. There are a lot of folks who didn't upgrade all of their ColdFusion 5 servers, and there are a lot of upgrades from 5 on the way." Gruber said that there is also a tremendous amount of expansion in ColdFusion code within the current ColdFusion customer base. "People who have been staying with legacy programs in ColdFusion are now looking at what they can do with new projects."

Gruber has seen other signs of growth in the ColdFusion market. "ColdFusion has been sort of reborn with this release. The job postings are heavily picking up," he said. "A lot of people are calling me and saying, 'We need top quality CF people.'"

The adoption rate of MX 7 continues to be very high, both on trial downloads, conversion rates, and people putting it directly into production.

Gruber said that he is still very excited about ColdFusion MX 7, and he sees great things for the future of the product.

Scorpio: The Next Version of ColdFusion

Macromedia is already starting the cycle of development for the next version of ColdFusion, codenamed Scorpio. The ColdFusion development team is looking into the latest technologies, seeing how they can be incorporated into ColdFusion. "The team is putting together some incredibly cool stuff," said Gruber. "In the next 6-8 weeks, we will be nailing down what our key themes are for the next release." To do that, they will be speaking with customers to get a good idea of what they want.

For now, Macromedia has provided the updater, something they urge all of their customers to download. Below you'll find the links to download the updater, and blogged writeups of the release.

ColdFusion MX 7.0.1 Updaters

ColdFusion 7.0.1 Report Builder

ColdFusion 7.0.1 Release Notes

ColdFusion MX 7 Updater FAQ

Welcome to Merrimack (Damon Cooper, "Logged in" Column, Macromedia.com)

CFFORM.com

Installing ColdFusion MX 7.01 Server Configuration on Mac OS X (Steven Erat, September 27, 2005)

Just Released: ColdFusion MX 7.0.1 (Ben Forta, September 27, 2005)

CF 7.0.1 Updater -- Features I Dig (Simeon Bateman, September 27, 2005)

ColdFusion MX 7 Updater Released (AS Fusion, September 27, 2005)

CFMX 7.0.1 (Simon Horwith's Blog, September 28, 2005)

ColdFusion 7.0.1 Released -Me Too, Me Too (Rob Brooks-Bilson, September 27, 2005)