• CFMX 7 New Features

In this exclusive "sneak preview" from the new monthly CFMX 7 column in SYS-CON Media's ColdFusion Developer's Journal written by the development and QA engineers who actually built the new release,  Macromedia's Tim Buntel writes: 

I get excited every time we release a new version of ColdFusion.  I usually hit the road and talk about the release to customers at their companies, user group events, and conferences.  I start the conversation by saying, "This is the best ColdFusion ever!  Wait till you see what you can do with this!" Well, ColdFusion MX 7 is here and this time, I won't need to say a word.  All you need to do is take a look at this release to see that I am not exaggerating whatsoever. More than just being the best release of ColdFusion ever, this is the release that will make you a hero again - just like the first ColdFusion did when we began this incredible journey ten years ago.

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Initial feature research began over two years ago and now, after countless hours of customer interviews, scores of development hours numbering in the thousands, 10 months of alpha and beta testing with more than 3000 testers, and over 15,000 regression tests, we are incredibly proud to introduce ColdFusion MX 7, the easiest way to build and deploy powerful Internet applications.

ColdFusion MX 7 will dramatically improve the experience your users have with your web applications, save you hours of time and complexity in creating those applications, and allow the applications to run in the most easy-to-manage, scalable, and reliable environment ever.  In addition, this latest release will allow you to take your ColdFusion skills into an incredible new world of opportunity with development for mobile devices, instant messaging clients, and more.  Let's take a look at each of these areas.

A better experience for both users and developers

There are some chronic problems with the experience of web applications today, but ColdFusion MX 7 delivers an incredible collection of key features that can help you overcome them. 

Printing web content is poor at best using today's browsers.  We've all experienced trying to print from the web - content gets chopped off in the margins, page breaks are in the wrong spots, you have no control over headers or footers, and so forth.

The new CFDOCUMENT tag feature in ColdFusion MX 7 will change all of that by allowing you to dynamically transform web content into high-quality printable, portable documents in PDF or FlashPaper 2 formats using a single tag.  Your users will be able to print web pages as they see them in the browser, or your can write documents to disk for offline viewing or to send as attachments to email messages.  Best of all, it works with all of your content - there's no need to re-write pages or use carefully formatted XHTML.

Most web applications also suffer from the poor capabilities of HTML to display structured, formatted data.  Classic dynamic database-driven applications presenting repeating-groups of data are today displayed in simple HTML tables and scrolled into long, poorly presented pages. This poor display impacts the productivity of users, as they attempt to consume this information in simple HTML rows and columns.  And, once again, the ability to print, save, or e-mail this information is almost non-existent.

In order to solve this problem and deliver data in high-quality reports, many developers have had to resort to third-party product add-ons outside the web application development environment.   But often this approach is costly and doesn't integrate well with the rest of the web application.

With this release, ColdFusion delivers integrated business reporting capabilities, providing unprecedented access to important business data. This will enable high-quality, structured reports to fully integrate into your web applications, providing users with well-formatted data that is easy to understand, print, and email.  Also included, the ColdFusion Report Builder - a free tool that you'll use to design your reports. It lets you include sub-reports, charts, and graphs, as well as automatically generate subtotals and totals, and much more.

ColdFusion reports integrate seamlessly into your web applications.  You can use ColdFusion queries to create exactly the data needed for a dynamic report or pull data from anything else that ColdFusion can access including UDFs, CFCs, web services, XML, databases, and so on.  The reports are then delivered in PDF, Macromedia FlashPaper 2, or Microsoft Excel format.  You can also generate and save reports to disk for reuse and portability, and easily add the ability to email reports from within applications or let users view the reports offline.

Finally, when it comes to capturing information through the browser, users are constrained by the use of web forms.  They have to wait for page refreshes to get simple field-level validation, and often lose data between multi-step forms.   For many ColdFusion developers, creating these HTML forms is one of the most time consuming and difficult parts of your job.  You spend more time trying to make form inputs and labels line up nicely in HTML table cells than you do in writing the form's logic.  ColdFusion MX 7 delivers a better experience for both you and your users by allowing you to build accessible, high-quality forms in minutes using the new, rich Flash and XML forms capabilities. Using familiar CFML tags, you can easily create complex, multi-step forms with tabbed or accordion interfaces. Your applications can use Flash controls that aren't available in regular HTML such as data grids, tree controls, and calendar date pickers.  And best of all, your forms will look good and be intuitive for your users without the need to code any of the presentation-tier information.

These are just a few of the features in ColdFusion MX 7 that will make your life easier in developing web applications.  I think you'll find plenty of other gems as well, including application events, a full administrator API, form masking and parameter validation, a powerful new version of CFCHART, improved web services and XML support, and incredible new Verity search capabilities.

Better management, scalability, and availability

All of the great applications you build with ColdFusion MX 7 will only be successful if you deploy them into a scalable, reliable, and secure environment without requiring tremendous complexity or incurring greater administrative costs.  So we've made key enhancements to the way that applications are managed and deployed too.

As we looked closely at how customers were deploying ColdFusion, we realized that it was much too complex to create multiple instances.  So we created a simple, web-based user interface that anyone can use to generate new instances of applications and application servers on individual physical servers.  This Enterprise Manager will provide companies the ability to easily add higher levels of availability to their applications through application isolation and clustering. 

EAR and WAR files are a single file used to package an application for easy deployment, and they're the standard for deploying applications in J2EE environments.  New in ColdFusion MX 7 is support for packaging and deploying applications in this standard J2EE manner expected by system administrators.  With an EAR or WAR file, you can easily package your entire application into a single file for deployment onto any J2EE certified app server.  The archive contains all of the application's logic, resources, and the ColdFusion runtime required to run it.  From the J2EE perspective, it's just another Java application.

Finally, while ColdFusion has compiled CFML templates to Java byte code since version 6, the human-readable source code was still required on the server.  ColdFusion MX 7 allows you to deploy your applications as Java byte code only - you can now choose to leave out the unencrypted CFML source files.  We call this Sourceless Deployment, and it allows you to protect your source code investments and allay security concerns when sensitive information may be present in an application's logic.

A New Class of Applications - Introducing Event Gateways

ColdFusion applications today respond to HTTP requests coming most often from a web browser or web service call.  Event Gateways in ColdFusion MX 7 allow your ColdFusion applications to respond to or initiate events from a nearly limitless range of other protocols: SMS text messages on mobile applications, instant messaging clients, TCP/IP sockets, file systems, and more.  And if the technology that you would like to integrate with ColdFusion doesn't have an Event Gateway already, you can create your own.  With the same, easy-to-use CFML used to create web applications today, you can now build gateway applications that can interact with virtually any device or protocol common in today's networked world.

One particularly powerful and exciting gateway included in ColdFusion MX 7 is for creating SMS applications.   SMS, or Short Message Service, is a way to send short text messages to and from wireless devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, and pagers.   And with projections that the world will have almost two billion mobile telephone users by 2006, there are a lot of potential users of your applications!  Event gateways will allow you to leverage the productivity of ColdFusion to bring applications to this vast new market with unparalleled ease.  

What's to come in this series

These brief explanations of course can't begin to explain all the power of this release.  So we're going to have a regular column here in CFDJ that will go more in-depth into these and many other feature areas over the next few months.  Best of all, these feature articles are going to be written by the development and QA engineers here on the ColdFusion team who actually built them.  It will give you an opportunity to learn firsthand why this time I can really say, "This is the best ColdFusion ever!"