CFMX 6.1: New and Improved

Jul 19, 2003

by Judith Dinowitz

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 -- Macromedia announced the immediate release and availability of ColdFusion MX version 6.1 (formerly code-named Redsky), with a free upgrade to current registered license owners of ColdFusion MX and free installation support. This release contains a significant number of bug fixes for backwards compatibility, a completely redesigned installer, and some major speed and productivity enhancements. We interviewed Phil Costa, Senior Product Manager for ColdFusion, and asked him some detailed, highly technical questions about ColdFusion MX 6.1.

Simplifying ColdFusion: From Three to Two

Costa said that Macromedia worked hard to simplify ColdFusion and to make it much more user friendly. The first simplification that most customers will notice is that they've streamlined the product from three editions to two. ColdFusion MX Professional Edition is now known as ColdFusion MX Standard, and the J2EE and Enterprise editions have been combined into one ColdFusion MX Enterprise edition. This puts ColdFusion in line with the rest of Macromedia's product line, and makes the product less confusing for their customers.

(Please note that the 30-day Trial Edition, which you can download free to try out the product, becomes a local, single user Enterprise-level Developer Edition after the trial period is over. This means you can still use it to teach yourself ColdFusion, even if you can't use it for commercial purposes or for live Web development.)

A Better Enterprise

Nothing has diminished in the features of the ColdFusion MX Standard, but ColdFusion MX Enterprise now can make better use of the J2EE engine underneath:

A full version of JRun is bundled with Enterprise. This allows Enterprise customers to run ColdFusion as a standalone server, a server running on top of JRun, or a server running on top of an outside J2EE engine, such as IBM Websphere or BEA Weblogic.

The Enterprise Edition allows for multiple instances of ColdFusion on one machine. This means that one instance running code will not interfere with another instance, and a crash on one will not bring down the other. This does have a small overhead of about 40 megabytes of RAM, which is used to hold the information for each instance. There is no noticeable CPU overhead when using multiple instances. This means that a box with shared hosting does not have to be as concerned about CPU as it does about RAM - but these days, RAM is cheap.

This ability gives web development teams much more flexibility, allowing them to assign separate ColdFusion Administrator settings for different applications or sites by putting them on separate instances of ColdFusion. It also allows them to individually configure and tune each instance of ColdFusion and restrict administration access by instance.

CFMAIL and CFPOP

ColdFusion MX 6.1 now boasts built in support for multi-part email in CFPOP and CFMAIL. Moreover, ColdFusion MX Enterprise has moved from a single-threaded to a multi-threaded email delivery. Mail administrators will be happy to hear of the new controls for spooling, allowing them to spool messages to disk and then spool the mail, or to spool the mail directly from memory. The 50-fold increase in mail throughput is even more impressive.

CFHTTP

CFHTTP now gives much more granular control to programmers. Programmers now have complete control over the HTTP body and header content. In addition, in previous versions, the tag couldn't support HTTP operations other than Get and Post. CFMX 6.1 now supports a greater range of HTTP features, such as Head Operations, which retrieve important header information from remote HTTP addresses. CFHTTP also works better with proxies and SSL.

Other Improvements

Macromedia has updated their platform and web server support. CFMX 6.1 now supports Windows 2003/IIS 6, Red Hat 7.3, 8, 9*, SUSE 8*, Solaris 9, and AIX 4.3.3 and 5.1.

Other features include an update of the core engine to Apache Axis 1.1, increased interoperability with .NET sources, and increased support for internationalization.

A Redesigned Installer

Macromedia has also redesigned the installer, making it much simpler to use. The community on the whole seems to be agreeing with that assessment, as evidenced by threads on CF-Talk such as "Here Here! Red Sky Rules!" and "CFMX 6.1 Upgrade - Smooth as Butter!" (Look for our special coverage on the CFMX 6.1 Customer Experience in a future issue.)

Costa spoke to us at length about Macromedia's efforts to make CFMX 6.1 as user and migration friendly as possible. Macromedia focused on the migration path from earlier versions of ColdFusion to MX, streamlining and simplifying that process.

"We were concerned that we had made the migration path too difficult for people, so we set out to lower the barriers to migration," said Costa.

"We wanted to make sure that what we thought of as a great product would be seen that way by the community," he said. To that end, Macromedia conducted extensive research on ColdFusion MX, heavily fine-tuning the runtime engine. They gathered a library of customer applications from their ColdFusion MX customers and generated a list of the top 20 tags and functions that were in use. Macromedia then focused on these tags and functions, optimizing and streamlining them and rearchitecting the internal code in the CFMX engine. When they were finished, the benchmark tests they conducted showed an improvement in speed of 172% between ColdFusion MX 6.1 and ColdFusion 5, and of 162% between ColdFusion MX 6.1 and ColdFusion MX.

It can be said that Macromedia is really making a concerted effort to show those customers currently on ColdFusion 5 and earlier that ColdFusion MX is the "true" successor to these versions. They seem to be dedicated to making their customers feel comfortable with migrating to ColdFusion MX. Speed and feature set improvements are nice, but if people are in fear that their current applications are going to break in their move to CFMX, then they're not going to move. Macromedia has gone out of their way to make sure that the upgrade is as smooth and clean as possible, losing no features.

In truth, we have only really found one thing that stands out as missing between ColdFusion 5 and ColdFusion MX. This was such an obscure piece of code that it was not caught until 4 iterations into the MX process (i.e. Redsky). This has to do with UUIDs and CFPOP and using them for delete, which one or two people on the planet may be using. Of course, because one of those people was in the beta, and noticed it after Redsky went gold, it was not included, but he was told, "It's on the list for the next update." (And we hear that it's already been fixed for the next update.) This response is very telling to the level of detail that Macromedia has tried to put into making ColdFusion MX the "true" ColdFusion. No matter what the feature, no matter how small it is, and no matter how many people are using it, they're going to make sure it does what it's supposed to do.

For more information and coverage of ColdFusion MX 6.1, check out the following articles:

Macromedia ColdFusion MX 6.1 Now Available

ColdFusion MX Product Page

ColdFusion MX 6.1 Product Editions

Detailed Feature Comparison Between ColdFusion MX 6.1 and ColdFusion 5

Copy This Article's Url To Clipboard