Rob Brooks-Bilson

The wait is over - you were waiting, weren't you? The much anticipated book, Adobe ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit: ColdFusion 10 Enhancements and Improvements, is now available and shipping from Amazon. I had the pleasure of working on the book along with Ben Forta, Chandan Kumar, Charlie Arehart, Hemant Khandelwal, Kenneth Fricklas, and Ray Camden.

If you're looking for the difinitive guide on what's new in ColdFusion 10, this is the book for you.

Interested in helping to test the next version of ColdFusion (code name: Splendor) and/or ColdFusion Builder (code name Thunder)? If so, Adobe wants to hear from you. To sign up to be considered for the pre-release programs, simply fill out the ColdFusion Splendor Pre-release Survey.

There's no official word on the exact start date of the pre-release program, but this post on the official Adobe CF Blog indicates "soon".

The title says it all. The much anticipated ColdFusion 10 (Zeus) has entered public beta and is available for download from Adobe Labs.

ColdFusion 10 represents a leap forward for ColdFusion with a nice combination of updated infrastructure and libraries as well as lots and lots of improvements to existing features. While they were at it the engineering team went ahead and added a slew of new features and language enhancements as well. Here's a small sampling of what's new:

• Apache Tomcat replaces JRun - I was almost tempted to put a blink tag here.
• Overhauled scheduler - Quartz scheduler under the hood. Lots and lots of new functionality.
• Security - Adobe implemented the OWASP ESAPI library under the covers and it's now pervasive throughout ColdFusion.
• AXIS2 upgrade - Much improved support for SOAP web services.
• RESTful web services
• HTML5 WebSockets
• HTML5 Charting
• ORM Search
• Caching updates (updated ehcache, caching functions, query & login cache moved to ehcache).
• Hotfix Updater - Keeping up with and installing hotfixes and updates has never been so easy.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. For a really nice overview of what's new from engineering team member Sagar Ganatra, check out his site.

If you happen to be in the Phoenix area on Wednesday, January 25th, stop on by the University of Advancing Technology at 6:30 pm to catch a preview of my upcoming cf.Objective presentation: Ten Steps to Move Your Use of Caching Beyond the Basics. Here's a short description of the presentation:

We all know that caching plays an important part of any performant and scalable application architecture and that with ColdFusion 9 caching is easier than ever. This session explores 10 steps you can take to move your use of caching beyond what ColdFusion provides out of the box.

*Please note that this presentation won't be recorded/streamed. You have to be there in person to see it. Normally I'm all for recording and streaming, but since this is a preview of a talk I'll be giving at an upcoming conference, I want to limit the audience out of respect to those attending the conference.

If you've been following my series on caching in ColdFusion 9, you know that ColdFusion 9.0 includes the powerful caching platform Ehcache from Terracotta. What you may not know, though, is that in ColdFusion 9.0.1 Adobe upgraded the Ehcache engine from version 1.6 to 2.0. This brings several new caching capabilities to ColdFusion and makes them dead simple to implement. If you're interested in learning more, Mike Allen from Terracotta and I are presenting a webinar on August 12, 2010 at 11am Pacific time. Here's the official announcement:

Join me and Mike Allen, the head of product management at Terracotta in a discussion about simple and effective ways to scale and boost the performance of ColdFusion applications using Ehcache.

In this webcast, you'll learn:

• Why caching is important
• How ColdFusion leverages Ehcache to boost performance
• Tips and tricks to leverage the newest features of Ehcache in ColdFusion
• How to take advantage of the ability to snap in Enterprise Ehcache to scale out your applications

Please register for this webcast even if you are unable to attend and you will get an email with a link to the recording.

Register for the webinar

I just received word today that I'll be speaking at cf.Objective() 2010. This is the one ColdFusion conference I've wanted to attend for years now but have never been able to.

If you've been following my blog lately, I've been working on a multi-part series on caching in ColdFusion 9. I also spoke about this topic at Adobe MAX 2009. Caching is something I've been very interested in for the past few years now.

The presentation I'm planning for cf.Objective() is a little different than the one I gave at MAX. There will be some overlap, but the focus of the cf.Objective talk will be on caching for scalability as opposed to a general presentation on caching fundamentals.

I hope to see you there!

Lots and lots of hard work by the ColdFusion Engineering Team has resulted in today's announcement that ColdFusion 9 (formerly code named Centaur) and the new ColdFusion Builder IDE have hit the public beta milestone and are now available on Adobe Labs:

• ColdFusion 9
• ColdFusion Builder

Also tucked in with the release is the availability of the new ColdFusion Public Bugbase.

If you haven't had a chance to download the public betas, you should really give them a try. ColdFusion 9 focuses heavily on developer productivity enhancements. I'm not going to list everything out here, but let me just say that lots and lots of things people have been clamoring for are included!

Looks like the Lightroom 2.1 update has officially been released. For those waiting for it, the 2.1 release includes Adobe Camera Raw 5.1 as well as a long list of bug fixes. For the full list, see the ReadMe (PDF).

Windows Version

Mac Version

I realize that this is another "me too" post as the news has already been widely reported. However, it's good news, and it's too good to pass up. Just in case you haven't heard yet, Adobe ColdFusion 8 just won the 2008 Jolt Product Excellence Award for Web Development, presented by Dr. Dobb's Journal.

What makes this particularly nice is that the winners are "selected by a panel of judges consisting of industry insiders, columnists, and technology leaders.", lending much more credibility to the award.

Congratulations to the ColdFusion Engineering team and to Adobe!

This one has been making the rounds around the ColdFusion blogosphere, so I thought I'd add to the mix and help get the word out. Todd Sharp is running a nice contest over at the new CFSnippets website designed to get developers working with the new Snipex features in CFEclipse. If you haven't been to CFSnippets, it's a public Snipex server with several libraries of open source snippets you can use within CFEclipse to speed up development of common tasks.

The contest runs through November 30th and includes some pretty cool prizes. For more information, click the banner below.