Tell me more about yourself… 3

Posted by Neil on July 31, 2007

Over the last couple of days, all of the CF programmers out there surfaced for a communal cry of “CF8’s been released!”. I was scanning through all these posts today, and realised something. We don’t really know each other all that well, and how we work.

Do, I’ve devised a couple of surveys (back of a napkin job here) that will hopefully tell us all more about you all (if you get me). Basically there are two surveys, neither of which is more than ten questions. I don’t want any personal information from you, just a few ticks in a few boxes.

The first survey is focussed at your respective companies and what sort of CF deployments you might be running, the second is more focussed on how you code and what sort of best practises you perform. You don’t have to complete both, but if you do the results will be more useful.

Once I have a nice amount of responses I’ll post the accumlative results up here for all to see, and hopefully we’ll all learn a little bit more about each other.

How do you use Coldfusion?

How do you code?

My views on the new version of Coldfusion 1

Posted by Neil on July 30, 2007

OK, I think I need to make something clear after todays posts regarding the CF8 release (it’s been released if you didn’t know ;) ).

I have been a CF developer for a long time, a very long time, and I will continue to use CF for as long as I can.  Why?  Well, partly due to 2.5 million lines of legacy code, but also because CF allows me to slap apps together nice and quick and do it how I want.  I can get as simple or as complicated with Coldfusion as I like and it will just take it.  A lot of the new functionality of CF8 also appeals greatly, namely the performance improvements, tags like CFThread, plus some other small tweaks here and there, for instance, the .NET integration and upgrade to a core Java 6 JVM.

So what do I see as the downsides to CF at the moment?  Well, performance was one of my many bugbears, as was the price.  Other than that we’re talking petty stuff, namely the buggy report builder tool, and the stability of the server being a little ropey when in the wrong situations.

However, when you look as CF8 as I beleive it should be, i.e the display tier of a much larger application, there isn’t much that can beat it (money aside).  When it comes to display layer, Coldfusion is almost unbeatable.  It will let you Ajax-ify a site in a few minutes, as well as let you generate PDF’s without any dodgy markup positioning code.

So, Adobe, it’s good that you have released CF8, and I can see it being very useful.  Whether or not I’ll be upgrading or not is yet to be seen, I have managers who I need to convince for that (incidentally Feed-Squirrel will be getting the upgrade), but I do beleive for anyone sticking with CF for their build work, the upgrade is worth it.  Just don’t screw it up with little things as international pricing problems.

CF8 no longer shipping… 3

Posted by Neil on July 30, 2007

Yup, you heard me right. Assuming I’m not going insane, CF8 is no longer available on the UK Adobe store. (http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/coldfusion/). Right now (10:44pm), it’s showing me the old CF7 page, whereas the US store is showing CF8.

Is something afoot?

..An open question to Adobe 8

Posted by Neil on July 30, 2007

There’s been a lot of talk lately surrounding the pricing of Coldfusion, and it’s comparative cost with other application server products (ASP.NET, PHP etc etc). See Adam on Life, the crumb and even Feed-Squirrel for a small sample. This is why I was somewhat stunned to see that Adobe have decided to ramp the cost of the enterprise edition of the new CF8 up by 25% to $7,499.

I have been a user of CF since version 3, back in the old Allaire days. Since starting to use the product I can not recall any significant jumps (or drops) in price (IIRC), but I have seen editions coming in with significant upgrades to the product (anyone remember CF5 to CFMX?). This is why I would like to pose a simple question to someone from Adobe. Whatever reply I get I will post in-line unedited in this post for all to see (so, here’s your chance Adobe):

Q. Adobe. Given the current climate, the competition of Coldfusion, and the press that it has been getting recently, how can you justify a price increase of $1,500?

Now, before you answer, I want to share what I am seeing (and I hope I am wrong). Firstly, this price hike can’t be because of the new features, because we’ve been there before, and had more significant changes have been made in the past, CF Neo (6) was a much more drastic upgrade. Secondly, I don’t see how this can be due to dwindling demand (remember the rules of Supply and Demand) - as Adobe have been ramming down our throats how much more popular CF is these days. Thirdly, this can’t be due to Adobe believing that they can charge a little more due to more expensive competitors, as to be honest, there aren’t any.

So, the only conclusion I can come to is that Adobe are pricing up Enterprise to try and persuade less people to use CF 8, I.e. for some reason they would like the product to dwindle in usage (admittedly from a enterprise point of view). They, as a company, would like to focus on their original business, the black turtleneck brigdae. If this isn’t the intended move, then Adobe needs to open their eyes, because in an ever increasingly uncertain climate, people are not going to want to hear that they need to shell out even more money that before, they will just go elsewhere.

Therefore, Adobe, after thinking about this, I would like to ask the above question, in the hope that there is something I haven’t seen. I know the product, and I know whats been added, but as yet I can’t see anything except the reason I have stated above. At the moment, I’m sure Vince Bonfanti is wetting his pants laughing at the good fortune he’s just come into (BD7 AFAIK is the old price of $5,999 as well as having free dev/test licenses).

CF8 Beta Terminated.

Posted by Neil on July 30, 2007

Looks like it’s been released:

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/

However, it would appear there has been a 50% price hike on Enterprise edition.

Continuous Integration with Coldfusion 3

Posted by Neil on July 24, 2007

Quote from the CF Development team:

“On the ColdFusion team, we have a fairly rigorous checkin/build/test process. Every time anyone checks something in to the source control system, the build machine gets it,
attempts to do a full build and runs a series of automated regression tests against it, just to make sure that nothing obvious has been broken”

Has anyone managed to achieve anything similar with CF, and have it rolled out and in production?  I’d be interested to hear your experiences.

ColdfusionBloggers.org 3

Posted by Neil on July 24, 2007

I’ve been away on Holiday for a bit, but one thing of note I have seen happen while I have been away is that Ray Camden has popped up a another new CF blog aggregator coldfusionbloggers.org.

Whilst I’d love to say that feed-squirrel is the better one that you should use, I do like the site, and impressed by the performance of the server (it’s CF8 on Win2K3). So, check it out (but then come back again ;))

CFML and JSR 223 3

Posted by Neil on July 06, 2007

Just using the blog to ask a question today.  Now that we have JSR223 allowing us to run more languages in Java, does this mean I can somehow write Groovy / JRuby / Jython code directly in my .CFMs?

CF 8 and Performance Comparisons 3

Posted by Neil on July 01, 2007

Last week, Ben Forta posted up some figures from the Adobe testing of CF8 running various tags over and over too see what sort of numbers came out the other end.  The result?  In Forta’s eyes, CF8 is “fast, really fast”.

Not being one to just take this, I decided to do my own testing. Admittedly not the same sort of testing, but consistent across the three platforms I decided to test: Coldfusion 7.02, Coldfusion 8 (current Beta), and Bluedragon 7.0 .NET.  All these tests were carried out on Windows Vista and IIS7 on my laptop (hardware etc all exactly the same for each test).  All tests were run several times, and an average taken. Below is the various snippets of code I ran, and how long each system was taking:

<cfloop from="1" to="10000" index="i">
<cfset foo = createObject("component","foo")>
</cfloop>

CF7: 14000ms        CF8: 2100ms            BD.NET: 950ms

<cfloop from="1" to="10000" index="i">
<cfparam name="myName" default="dave">
</cfloop>

CF7:  31ms           CF8:16ms                BD:NET:135ms

<cfloop from="1" to="1000000" index="i">     
<cfset foo = "poo">
</cfloop>

CF7:  47ms           CF8: 31ms                BD:NET:1755ms

<cfloop from="1" to="100000" index="i">     
<cfset foo = arrayNew(1)>     
<cfset arrayAppend(foo, "This is an item")>
</cfloop>

CF7:  350ms          CF8: 1500ms             BD:NET: 500ms

<cfloop from="1" to="100000" index="i">     
<cfset foo = structNew()>    
<cfset foo.poo = "1">
</cfloop>

CF7:  500ms          CF8: 1266ms             BD:NET: 800ms

<cfscript>     
for (i=1;i lte 100000;i=i+1)     
{        
foo = structNew();        
foo.poo = "1";    
}
</cfscript>


CF7
:  157ms          CF8: 78ms             BD:NET: 851ms 

Now, you must realise that these are not a good way of testing how an application will run on any given server platform, but it does give you an insight into how they directly compare at a very simple level.  You should always test the performance of your own application on each to see how they fly (In theory you can do this for free using the 30 day trials CFMX and development/testing licence of BD.NET which happens to be free (Hear that Adobe??)

After running through these tests, CF8 does appear to be the fastest overall, but is still hampered where it counts (for me, Array and Structure manipulation need to be as fast as possible).  BD.NET seems to be lagging somewhat behind (although I get the feeling that real world apps might run faster on this platform).

Anyone else have any findings?