ColdFusion Article

Introducing ColdFusion MX 7

It's been three years since we released Macromedia ColdFusion MX, the most dramatic and ambitious ColdFusion update ever. ColdFusion MX marked an important milestone in the ColdFusion story. It was a chance for the team to take a big step back and rebuild ColdFusion from the ground up, taking into account everything we had learned about web applications and how they are built.

ColdFusion MX was primarily an architectural release. It featured things like the following:

• A brand-new, Java-based engine
• A true compiler
• Deployment on top of industry standard J2EE servers
• Better support for XML, SOAP, and other standards
• Access to the world of Java

Of course, ColdFusion MX (and ColdFusion MX 6.1) also boasted important new features, language enhancements, improved performance, as well as greater scalability and reliability. But at its core, ColdFusion MX was all about architecture, an incredible investment in the inner workings of ColdFusion so as to facilitate a world of new functionality.

ColdFusion MX has been an incredibly successful product, and a large portion of the ColdFusion user base is already taking advantage of all it has to offer. And so with ColdFusion's new engine proving its mettle and developers busily exploring the opportunities it presents, the ColdFusion team was able to spend time building new features and functionality that were not possible in the past.

For over a year we met with and spoke to thousands of ColdFusion developers. We presented ideas and previews to hundreds of user groups worldwide, brainstormed with countless partners and customers, waded through mountains of wish-list feedback, and chatted with numerous users (both current and potential). When the dust settled, a series of goals emerged:

• Make new users far more successful. ColdFusion has always appealed to new developers. There is no other language or product as well suited to their needs as ColdFusion. New users (primarily those with a background in building web pages and static sites) are an important part of the ColdFusion user base, and ColdFusion must remain dedicated to making successful development easier for these users. This involves the creation of Dreamweaver extensions and configuration screens, providing better out-of-the-box education, delivering more usable value, and more.
• Provide existing users with feature and functionality that they can use immediately. Developers are never shy about what they want. We need to deliver the features and functionality they ask for.
• Help developers (our users) make their users happier. Consumers of ColdFusion applications have common requests—things they'd like to see in the applications created for them. Many of these requests revolve around how the application captures and presents data. You said that ColdFusion must provide powerful new capabilities for forms, reporting, and printing.
• Improve reliability and deployment options. ColdFusion's Java internals opened up all sorts of powerful and important deployment and reliability options. Now ColdFusion needs to make this more available to you and your applications, more than ever before.
• Innovate, innovate, innovate. ColdFusion pioneered rapid development on the web. Indeed, there still is no quicker way to build web-based applications. The ColdFusion development experience needs to be applied to new platforms and technologies, making them just as readily usable.

These are significant, even lofty, goals. We invested tens of thousands of development hours, launched the largest beta test program to date, and maintained regular contact with our customers so that they could keep us focused and on track.

The result is the most customer-driven ColdFusion version ever, a feature-rich release that solves real problems for real developers building real applications, a product that meets and exceeds the enumerated goals.

And so I'd like to take this opportunity to formally introduce you to ColdFusion MX 7.

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