Many folks on the CFDJ editorial team (myself included) have been observing and participating in the beta process for Red Sky since day one, and now the release is finally here. I'm proud to present what we've put together, along with Macromedia's help, to cover the first batch of new highlights in the product as it's being released.

Ben Forta and Dave Watts have written articles on Red Sky that are well worth reading. I've been itching to write about many of these features for weeks, as has our editorial team, and with the August 5 release now behind us, we have the official go ahead to do so. Also, I can report that at SYS-CON we're eating in our own kitchen and that CFDJ's Web site, along with most of SYS-CON.com, is now running off of Red Sky without a hitch. The release, by the way, is officially labeled as ColdFusion 6.1 for those keeping numerical count.

I've been running Red Sky on both my development machine and personal server for a few months now, and I can say unequivocally and without reservation that it's well worth the upgrade. Since it's free, upgrading is generally a no-brainer to most folks but it's still worth encouraging. In fact, if you're running CFMX, stop reading this column and start downloading it...right now. After a quick registration on Macromedia.com, if you're not already set up there, you can hit the download button and then come back and finish reading this editorial. By the time you get to "Till next month, happy coding" it should be ready to go. On the flip side, if you've been holding back on upgrading to MX, and are still on 4 or 5 waiting for the always expected .1 release in a product's life cycle, it's now here, so start testing your apps.

At the ColdFusion Developer's Journal Keynote Panel at CFun 2003 in Maryland this past June, the panel asked what everyone's favorite new feature of Red Sky was. Back then much of the product was under NDA though we still managed to get out a series of good and differing answers from the participants without raising any legal red flags (no pun intended.) My personal favorites, both then and now, are most notably the speed improvements - especially when files are compiled for the first time. I was doing some development work recently for a friend on regular MX, which I haven't used in months, and the difference was like night and day. That to me is in and of itself a worthy upgrade.

We wanted to get one other perspective on Red Sky, and that was from Mr. ColdFusion himself, Jeremy Allaire, who, while busy with his new position as technologist in residence at General Catalyst Partners, is still keeping up with the world of ColdFusion. When asked to comment on Red Sky he said, "The Red Sky release of ColdFusion MX demonstrates Macromedia's commitment to listening to customers by addressing longstanding feature requests such as mail and HTTP protocol enhancements, to just making development and deployment faster. The updated Apache Axis release combined with some minor yet very significant enhancements to CFCs will ensure that CFMX remains the easiest way to deliver Web services-based applications." You can't describe it much better than that!

Till next month, happy coding!