Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software delivers significant performance improvements over all earlier releases of the product.
ColdFusion 8 performance brief (PDF, 489k)
ColdFusion 8 introduces the new Server Monitor and Multiserver Monitor. By providing information about the server — including requests, queries, memory usage, and errors — the Server Monitor allows you to troubleshoot and fine-tune applications in development and in production. You can also set alerts and other actions to help prevent memory problems, slow pages, or other issues that would negatively impact a user's experience with the application.
ColdFusion 8 applications can dynamically generate and interact with PDF documents and forms for a printable, portable way to intelligently capture and share information.
ColdFusion 8 can easily provide data to existing Ajax applications and frameworks. You can use simple tags to access a large library of prebuilt Ajax user interface components such as rich text editors, data grids, tree controls, tab navigators, and more.
With ColdFusion 8, you can specify any .NET object — either local or remote — and use it in your ColdFusion application, just like any Java™ or other object resource.
ColdFusion 8 applications can programmatically access Exchange Server functionality such as calendars, tasks, and contacts.
ColdFusion 8 introduces an Eclipse™ plug-in debugger. Use it to set breakpoints, watch variables, and step through code, making it easier to debug all your application code.
ColdFusion 8 now includes Adobe LiveCycle® Data Services ES (formerly Flex™ Data Services) and other data exchange improvements to simplify the data-enabling of rich Internet applications (RIAs) you build with ColdFusion and Flex.
ColdFusion 8 allows you to set ColdFusion mappings and custom tag paths on a per-application basis.
ColdFusion 8 introduces the new CFTHREAD tag, which allows you to create, end, join together, or temporarily suspend the processing of specific ColdFusion threads.
ColdFusion 8 adds more than 50 new tags and functions for creating and manipulating images, from simple to sophisticated. For example, the new CFIMAGE tag provides shortcuts to the most common image actions, including reading, writing, resizing, rotating, and converting images.
ColdFusion 8 allows you to dynamically create multimedia experiences and eLearning courses with animation, audio, and video. These high-quality, on-demand presentations are generated on the server with up-to-the-minute data and content from multiple external sources.
View a demo of this new functionality
ColdFusion 8 introduces the new CFFEED tag, which can read and create RSS and Atom feeds in commonly used formats, so you can quickly and easily create complex content syndication applications.
ColdFusion 8 introduces two new tags, CFZIP and CFZIPPARAM, so you can manipulate ZIP and JAR files for working with file archives.
ColdFusion 8 allows you to create multiple ColdFusion Administrator and Remote Development Services (RDS) accounts with individual permissions, so you can tailor Administrator and RDS access to fit your specific security needs. The roles assigned to a user determine which pages in the ColdFusion Administrator and which functions in the Administrator API a user can access.
ColdFusion 8 adds several new file manipulation functions to the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), most notably the ability to read and write large files in defined segments, rather than in a single operation.
ColdFusion 8 supports common JavaScript operators such as ++, ==, ||, <, and > so they can be used in CFML expressions.
ColdFusion 8 adds several highly requested improvements to ColdFusion components (CFCs), including the ability to create interface definitions, use J2EE session replication in a cluster, have access to the CFCs in session data across all the machines in a cluster, and use the new onMissing Method function.
ColdFusion 8 now includes RSA BSAFE Crypto-J libraries, which provide FIPs 140-certified strong encryption.
ColdFusion 8 introduces a completely new version of the ColdFusion Report Builder. Use it to create high-quality, structured reports with more output choices and a more consistent look and feel throughout your applications. You can also create and apply cascading style sheet (CSS) definitions to reports, export your reports in HTML or XML format, and create report styles for all of your reports.
ColdFusion 8 supports nested transactions, provides a new DBINFO tag to programmatically access information about a data source, allows stored procedures and queries using CFQUERYPARAM to be cached, and much more. Plus, there is expanded database driver support with new options for SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10g, Sybase ASE15, MySQL 4 and 5, PostgreSQL 8, and others.
ColdFusion 8 makes it much simpler to code tags with many attributes. You can now specify an argumentsCollection attribute in most tags to specify the tag's attributes in a single structure.
ColdFusion 8 allows you to create arrays and structures implicitly in assignment statements without using the ArrayNew or Structnew functions. The result is cleaner code with less typing.
ColdFusion 8 offers broad platform support with notable additions of Mac OS X on Intel®, JBoss, 64-bit support on Solaris™, JDK 1.5 and JDK 1.6, and support for VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server.
