As an enterprise customer one of my favorite new features of ColdFusion MX 6.1 is the new licensing. It will give us much greater flexibility in changing our installations from their current CFMX Enterprise traditional installation to a real J2EE solution.
Also many new features and fixes in CFMX 6.1, aka RedSky. Here’s my views on those.
New Enterprise License
The new enterprise license means all enterprise customers will now receive the traditional CFMX Enterprise package, a new integrated JRun plus CFMX4J2EE package, and the CFMX4J2EE package all in one. Users can install whichever they choose and switch to another at any time.
Many customers, ourselves included, are using CFMX Enterprise and have not switched to J2EE partially due to lack of an upgrade path and licensing complications. Those are now completely resolved and even administrators that don’t have a strong J2EE administration background can use the integrated installer to install both JRun and CFMX4J2EE at one time.
CFC Improvements
The Macromedia developer that implemented the CFC improvements told me he had a little chuckle when he received his February CFDJ with my “Reviving Super” article. Turns out that at the same time the article came out, he was implementing Super for real in CFMX. If anyone used the technique I proposed in the article, I hope they also included the rollback mechanism I specified.
Super is great for CFCs and all the scope issues were fixed. I had a chance to really put these to the test and was very pleased with the enhancements.
Speed
I’m not going to duplicate what you’ve probably read a few dozen times already. Besides the development/compilation speed, there are also speed improvements at runtime. Even though the new classes are generated directly from CFML, if you compare the Java code generated by CFMX gold and Java code from a decompiled CFMX6.1 generated class file, the decompiled code is actually cleaner and more direct than earlier generated code. This will definitely provide speed enhancements at run-time.
Links
So if you’re in a black hole and haven’t seen the official CFMX 6.1 data, here are some links.
Good thing is that CFMX 6.1. I do recommend.