CFUNITED Keynote Notes

Posted in ColdFusion | Posted on 06-27-2007 | 3,542 views

Here are my notes from the keynote. I'll be saving/updating as it goes on, so please reload.

The keynote is being done by Ben Forta and Tim Buntel. According to them - there will be new information released.

The theme is 8 (gee, wonder why).

Top 8 things you should know about in ColdFusion 8.

Reason 1 - Making applications is even easier: Eclipse plugins and wizard, Server Monitor. Idea is - what can we do to make things easier outside of the language itself. I can +1 the Server Monitor for sure.

Reason 2 - Having confidence in production applications. The server monitor helps out here again. Support for multiple instances of CF. Being stable and backwards compatible. The Server Monitor using the API (I blogged about this last week or so).

Reason 3 - It runs in more places. VMWare, Mac Tel (woohoo!!), 64 Bit Solaris, JBoss

Reason 4 - Your users will be happier: Flex/AJAX updates, reporting, PDF updates, on-demand presentations, images.

Reason 5- Nice and secure: Multiple admin accounts (going to blog on this later), multiple RDS accounts, strong encryption. (FIPS 140 Compliant baked into the product.)

Reason 6 - CFML Evolution: JS operators, argument collections, CFC interfaces, file handling funcitons, array and structure creation, CFC serialization

Reason 7 - Plays well with others: .Net support, Exchange, RSS/ATOM, LiveCycle, Flash Media Server

Reason 8 - It's fast. (Amen.) Here is the new stuff.

Adobe took 2.4 million lines of code from real world applications and analyzed them. All the bottlenecks were logged and identified. From this - hundreds of tweaks and changes were made to CFML tags and functions.

Structure manipulation. Showing a graph of cf6 to cf8. Requests per second in cf6 and 7, around 100. In 8, they can do 200 per second.

List manipulation - same chart (requests per sec). cf6: 33.6. cf7: 34.4. cf8: 103.4

CFSWITCH/CFCASE: cf6, 66, cf7 88, cf8: 244

cfparam huge - from 9.6 to 350 in cf8

date funcitons: cf7-251, cf8: 1423

regex: cf7 - 392, cf8 - 987

isdefined: cf7, 611, cf8, 1243

cfc creation (this is the big one): cf6 - 9.7, cf7- 3, cf8 - 69.4

blogcfc: cf6 - 271, cf7, 255, cf8 355

adobe.com store: cf6 - 275, cf7 - 290, cf8 - 435

cf code will run faster in cf8 - period. With no changes. (I can attest to this.)

You can run stuff even faster with cfthread. (Ditto - see my blog post on blogcfc and cfthread.)

Release Date: "Very, very soon" - Quote from Tim Buntel.

Flex Notes: Talking about various sites using Flex (like the Server Monitor). Flex SDK is now open source.

Flex 3 timelie. LiceCycle DS released a dew weeks ago. Public betas of Flex 3 SDK and Flex 3 Builder/AIR released already. Final release looks to be late this year (I'd bet MAX).

Major themes of Flex 3: Designers/Developers, Hybrid Desktop-Internet Applications, Working with Data, and Platform Evolution.

Advanced datagrid looks pretty nice (will try to find examples later). Charting improvements also look nice.

Web Services introspection added to Builder.

Flex apps can now be smaller in size due to caching.

New momory and performance profiling. Find bottlenecks, etc. Source code refactoring.

Deep linking support added.

Comments

[Add Comment] [Subscribe to Comments]

Daniel D said on 06-27-2007 at 8:25 AM #
	One note here. Some of the speed increase in CF8 is from the move to Java 6 which has a substantial speed increase by its self. CFC generation is for sure an example where Adobe has done work to improve performance. Which is awsome. CF8 has so much to offer and I love the speed increase with just an upgrade of the server and no code changes needed.

Ben Forta said on 06-27-2007 at 10:04 AM #
	Daniel, good point, the new JRE does indeed help and is part if it. One thing I did not point out though is that the Adobe.com store is faster in CF8, but they are using JRE 1.5, not 1.6 (because of compatibility issues with some other Java stuff they need to run). So even on 1.5 it is faster, on 1.6 it should be even more so. --- Ben

James Edmunds said on 06-27-2007 at 10:19 AM #
	Ray, if you're at CFUNITED, where do you plan to stand in line for your iPhone???!?

Kebab Dylan said on 06-27-2007 at 3:23 PM #
	Has anyone heard whether log4j is updated in cf8?

Ashwin said on 06-28-2007 at 4:42 AM #
	We've taken out the dependencies on Log4J for CF8 - you can drop in whatever version you want to, though you may also have to update your Apache commons-logging to a version which can handle the Log4J version you select.

Gary Gilbert said on 06-28-2007 at 6:31 AM #
	This is really exciting news! We have a lot of applications that will definitely benefit from the huge increase in CFC creation speed. Anybody that builds their applications using OO (doesn't everyone these days) will be as happy as we are.

Raymond Camden said on 06-28-2007 at 6:37 AM #
	Gary - I tend to repeat this story a bit, so if you have heard me say it before, forgive me. When I first ran RIAForge under CF8 - it loaded so fast I was convinced it was broken and I was looking at the error handler. I was -convinced-. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it really did run that fast - and ran well.

Kevin Kreuter said on 06-29-2007 at 2:58 AM #
	Ray, You mentioned charting improvements also look nice. I haven't seen any information about enhancements to the charting engine. Was there anything in particular (new) you can elaborate on? Thanks.

Raymond Camden said on 06-29-2007 at 5:35 AM #
	It was Flex 3, not CF. The updates were, if I remember right, to the animations and types of charts.

Kevin Kreuter said on 06-29-2007 at 12:29 PM #
	Ah, yes now I see the topic changed from CF8 to Flex3. I was hoping for at least some modest enhancements to CF charting, but dosen't look like that's going to happen.

Raymond Camden said on 06-29-2007 at 12:45 PM #
	Is there anything in particular you would like to see added? Don't forget - if you don't add an enhancement request (http://www.adobe.com/go/wish), Adobe can't respond to it.

[Add Comment] [Subscribe to Comments]