Rob Brooks-Bilson
Tech, Photography, Stuff
Follow-on To Simon Horwith's Open Letter To The ColdFusion Server Team
July 23, 2006
First, I wanted to point out that Simon Horwith has written an Open Letter to the ColdFusion Server Team in which he outlines 25 features he would like to see implemented in ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio). I have to say that I agree with most of what Simon's asking for. In fact, if you take a look at My Blackstone Wishlist, which I put together back in 2004, you'll see many of the same feature requests (some of these made it into Blackstone, and some into Merimack).
This leads me to the question, what are the most important features Adobe customers would like to see in the next version of ColdFusion. Each new release brings with it a trade-off of cost vs. benefit. What's the biggest bang we can get for the buck in the next version of ColdFusion?
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7/23/06 6:39 PM
I'd like some smart server diagnostic tools that can point developers in the direction of the problem when performance or instability issues arrise. A user-friendly CF health and thread monitor would be really nice and it MUST work with multi-instance and clustered installations. That's the hardest configuration to set up but has the least amount of diagnostics available when problems manifest.
If I could have Adobe's ear to request a programatic feature it would be a line count for CFDocument. And a "position of last line" too. I need to limit PDF files to just 1 page but forcing a max character limit on users is unrealistic because they can add extra line breaks and more paragraphics which takes up more space and moves nearer towards the end of the page. And when they add a graphic it's even worse. So some feedback from CF on the page layout would be useful. Even cfdocument.unusedVerticalSpace would be an ideal indicator. Is this request too obscure? :-)
7/24/06 4:11 AM
I'd like to see:
- the ability to read one line at a time from a large text file, without having to read the whole thing into memory.
- proper inheritance
- the ability to use named arguments when calling super.foo() functions
and many, many more - these are just the ones that spring to mind in a few seconds before mornign coffee :)
7/24/06 11:29 AM
Brandon Harper's list is not bad either:
http://devnulled.com/content/2006/07/wishlist-11-t...
7/24/06 3:02 PM
Al, Jeff Houser wrote a CFDJ article about reading line by line with some help from Java. http://cfdj.sys-con.com/read/86121.htm
8/1/06 11:30 AM
Rob, that BlackStone list was a pretty good list. I think you should vet out the ones that have been covered, and repost it so it gets picked up by things like fullasagoog again. Just reading it jogged my memory into thinking of another few things to add to my entry in that surveymonkey thing (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=354942405396), which now stands at:
- Broader implementation of cfscript.
- XSD support
- <cfzip>, <cfword>, <cfexcel> (writing and parsing), (etc)
- URL support for <cfquery> (rather than needing a DSN defined).
- Mappings @ application level.
- some way of dealing with application- and session- scoped variables on a cluster.
- equivalent of OPTION EXPLICIT
- being able to declare VARs without INITing them (and not necessarily @ the top of the method)
- clone CFC instances
- sort out whitespace issues PROPERLY
- expose API behind <cfchart>
- QoQ enhancements: INNER and OUTER joins. More functions. MAKE IT TYPELESS.
- <cfimport> ONCE for a request, rather than on every template using the lib.
8/1/06 11:51 AM
Thanks Adam, good idea. I'll see if I can pull something together today.