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Macromedia Releases Coldfusion Mx 6 1

Posted on 04 Aug 2003

in News

by Jeff Howden (Jeff Howden)

Rated 2.62 (Ratings: 15)

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Jeff Howden

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User since: 14 Dec 1998

Articles written: 21

After thousands of messages exchanged on the private beta-testers discussion list, a flurry of build releases, and tons of feedback from ColdFusion developers, Macromedia has done a fantastic job with an update to ColdFusion MX. The release notes go into great detail, but I'll cover the high points here.

Performance

Compilation

The compiler went through a major overhaul and now compiles templates at break-neck speeds. Compile time is now so fast that there's now the option to cache compiled templates or compile every request.

Run-time

Run-time performance is now better than 4.5, 5, or previous versions of MX, improving response time and scalability.

Installer

The installer for MX has undergone significant changes. The process has been greatly streamlined.

Platform Support

Operating system support has been increased. ColdFusion MX now supports Windows 2003/IIS 6.0, Red Hat 7.3, 8, and 9, and SuSE 8.

CFMail

Gone are the days of less than enterprise-level cfmail performance. ColdFusion MX is now capable of sending over 1,000,000 emails per hour. Some additional enhancements include support for multi-part mail through the use of the new <cfmailpart> tag, multithreading, connection pooling, server failover, spool-to-memory, support for SMTP authentication, and more.

CFHTTP

ColdFusion developers no longer are stuck with only a subset of the HTTP protocol when using the <cfhttp> tag, which now supports the full set of HTTP 1.1 operations (GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, and OPTIONS). In addition, developers now have full control over the entire contents of any HTTP request (headers and body), among other enhancements.

Unicode

ColdFusion MX 6.1 includes a driver for Microsoft Access which supports Unicode.

Bug Fixes

Beyond all the enhancements to ColdFusion MX, 6.1 also includes over 400 bug fixes beyond those addressed in the latest release, Updater 3.

Conclusion

I've been a part of the beta program practically since the beginning. I've been very pleased with the work that's been done to arrive at this release and applaud Macromedia for issuing this as a free upgrade to existing customers. If you're running ColdFusion MX, get upgraded today. If not, now's a good time to get familiar with it.

.jeff

Jeff Howden (.jeff) is a web developer working for Vos & Howden, LLC in Portland, Oregon where he's partnered with long-time colleague, Anthony Vos. His skills include ColdFusion, JavaScript, CSS, XML, relational databases, and much, much more. His biggest professional accomplishments include, but are not limited to:

  • building a ColdFusion-based e-commerce solution for Mt. Bachelor that transacted over $1.62 million dollars in September 2001 with 0 (yes, that's zero) ColdFusion errors and then an almost completely rebuilt version transacted $2.86 million dollars in September 2002.
  • being asked to be a Technical Editor for the ColdFusion MX book, Inside ColdFusion MX from New Rider's Publishing company.
  • being asked by BrainBench to perform quality control on their JavaScript 1.5 certification test after receiving the highest beta test score out of 200 testees.
  • managing the server that hosts evolt.org and withstanding a slashdotting that brought over 1,000,000 hits to the site, over 10 gigs of data transfer, and an average in excess of 2300 unique visitor sessions per hour, all within a 24-hour period and the server never hiccuping once.

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