ColdFusion 9 is out. Upgrade? Not this time.

After nearly a year of alpha and beta testing the latest release has hit the streets. It’s available to download as a 30 day trial or as a free developer edition (limited to 2 IP addresses as per usual). The new features are listed on the Adobe site.

The license has changed for the better which allows you to run the full version of CF on your development and test environments for free providing you’ve bought a new CF9 license for your production environment. Therefore if you were previously limiting your dev and test systems to 2 pesky IPs you can lift that restriction, but the new license only applies to CF9, it cannot be retrospectively applied if you own CF8 and earlier editions. Well done Adobe!

The question everyone is asking is shall I upgrade our existing servers to CF9? I made the decision a while ago to skip this edition. You have to ask yourself what business benefits it will bring to the table and if that will enhance your apps sufficiently to pay for itself. Here’s my take on the new features. Obviously it’s different for every app and every business, but needless to say our new apps being launched in the months to come will be using CF9, but our existing ones will not.

• cfspreadsheet: Let’s you read from Excel files and update them too. Good if you work with xls files. I can see benefits for intranet apps. Previously to create xls files you had to create data as an HTML table but CF8 was unable to read or update existing Excel created files.
  
• Word to PDF: I really like this conversion facility but it does not officially support Office 2007 or 2010 docx files which is somewhat of an oversight. However, it will make a reasonable attempt at converting them but chokes on the more elaborate docx files as explained in this blog. OpenOffice needs to be installed for this feature to work. (While OpenOffice is free I’m not comfortable installing a bloaty desktop app onto production servers)
  
• ColdFusion as a service: Access CF features such as cfhart, cfdocument, cfimages, etc, as a web service. Perfect for offloading tasks to other servers or opening up CF features to .NET or PHP apps.
  
• Adobe AIR database synchronisation: If you’re into AIR this sounds like a useful addition.
  
• Virtual file system: Save files to RAM as if it were an ordinary hard drive. Good if you have a load of files that need to be regularly written to or read from or if your network drives are already a bottleneck for performance. Don’t forget all files in the virtual file system are wiped when the server is rebooted or crashes.
  
• Integration with CF Builder: If you’ve tried the beta of Builder (the new IDE from Adobe) then it will work better if you have CF9. I don’t like Builder. Sorry. I wish they had enhanced Dreamweaver instead because I also need access to design tools as well as coding tools, plus DW has a very good GUI.
  
• ORM: It sounds clever – CF will interface with your database without having to write a single line of SQL. Admittedly I haven’t got into this too deeply but I fail to see how it can write SQL as intelligently as a human or work with the many complexities of our stored procedures and data intricacies. I like to know exactly what’s happening at the CF<>SQL layer so ORM would worry me. Maybe ORM is for non-enterprise apps and RAD? I’m sure someone will enlighten me.
  
• New AJAX controls: I have a real problem  with this. Why are Adobe wasting their time adding a CF layer for JavaScript when the JavaScript library becomes outdated within a matter of months? If developers use a highly flexible JavaScript framework such as jQuery (which is really easy to learn and oh so sexy) then they can always keep their apps up to date with the latest features instead of having to wait a year or two for the next CF update (which also updates the built-in Ext JS library). jQuery is less bloaty and give developers much finer control over ajaxy things, ready-to-go menus, slick UI panels and interactive data tables etc.
  
• SharePoint integration: This is fantastic if your business or client uses SharePoint. It makes it so much easier for CF apps to take part or become the hub of new SharePoint apps. My biggest client has made a massive move to SharePoint which would have got me excited if they hadn’t banished all non-Microsoft technology from their organisation. Doh.
  
• Server Manager: Administrate multiple CF servers from a central console. Very useful if you have a large server farm or regularly tinker with the Administrator on a couple of servers. Definitely good for rolling out new CF servers. Otherwise check out Merlin, an AIR based administrator for managing multiple servers running CF 7, 8 or 9.
  
• Enhanced Flash Remoting: Never used Flash Remoting or Flex, I am not a Flash developer as I find using DHTML/jQuery fast and effective for enhancing the user experience, but obviously this is welcomed by those who use Flash Remoting. (I wonder what percentage of CF developers do use it?)
  
• Speed enhancements: Other blogs have run tests to show that CF9 is faster than CF8. So if your current server is under strain maybe you can buy it some breathing room by upgrading? But realistically, new server hardware may be cheaper than a CF upgrade and if your server is 3+ years old a new Intel 55xx based server could quadruple your server’s speed and/or capacity. (We’re going down the hardware upgrade route)
  
• 64 bit Edition for CF Standard: Yay!
  
• Cache enhancements: The popular Ehcache technology is now integrated into CF. Rob Brooks-Bilson talks about this in detail over 4 blog entries so I’ll leave him to explain since he’s done such a fantastic job. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.

Finally, Adobe have produced a useful product matrix showing the differences between CF7, 8 and 9 for both Standard and Enterprise editions of each version.