Dec 16, 2020
Rakshith Naresh talks about “ColdFusion 2021 Revealing Details on How it was Created” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light
Show notes
- Today we talk about some of the challenges the Adobe CF team overcomed with corona virus lockdowns In India and the complexities of implementing multi-cloud and containers which are totally new features for ColdFusion.
CF 2021 new features
-
Game-changing release for the next decade
-
Cloud
- Easy cloud coding - even less lines of code than Node.js cloud
- Multi-cloud support
-
Microservices
- Why?
- More efficient scaling apps
- Easier REST
- CF Image size and load 80%+ better
- Huge engineering task achieved
- New master runtime to do this
- Command-line installer (GUI optional)
- Custom runtimes
- Why?
-
New Language features
- IIFE (Immediately Invokable Function Expressions)
- Lambda
- Rest and spread operators
- Parallelism
- Destructing assignment
- Identity operator
- Dynamic switchcase
- Iterator support
- Java integration
-
Performance
- Way faster than CF 11 or CF 2016
- End of Life: CF11 already in 2019, CF 2016 in April 2021
-
Security
- Separate security team inside Adobe
- 3rd party vendor security certification
- All team devs certified in security coding best practices
- SSO SAML
-
Backward compatible
- Old CFML code runs fine
- CF still works great on dedicated servers (not just cloud)
-
CF admin
- All settings are scriptable
Why the change from CF 2020 to CF 2021 name
- Because released at end of year
- Next release code name announced
Testing it out
- Free development version
- CommandBox is the fastest way to download and install
When will the first hot fixes come out?
- This was release last week
Questions from CFers
IDE support
- - had used it for many years and migrated to other languages and frameworks due to IDE support (one of the major factors.)
- I believe that a new version of CF Builder was announced at CF Summit last week - due to release in the first half of 2021. I will clarify in the interview. Thanks for the question!
- PS have you checked out the free VSCode - it has EXCELLENT CFML support extensions.
- New version of CF Builder built on VSCode
Front End tools
- What are improvements is Adobe doing in competition with Angular, React and Vue.js?
- how does CF 2021 work better with these front end technologies than CF 2018 did?
- These are front-end frameworks and CF is server side. Both are independent of each other and can not be each other's competition. You can easily connect any front end framework with server side CF with rest calls which CF already supports.
- JavaScript better data type preservation
- Easier REST coding
- Possible future auto generation of REST services
Licensing
- SaaS
- I'm good with the license price but for 2020 they attempted to collect a license for EACH site (application) we hosted on a single server and we moved to Lucee. We would love to use ACF (as we had since v 3.5) but their license change nearly bankrupted us.
- Pay for EACH SITE??? where does it say that in
the licensing?
- See detailed response and discussion at https://community.adobe.com/t5/coldfusion/adobe-coldfusion-license-bait-and-switch-for-saas-companies/td-p/10614494?page=1
- “Yesterday we had a call with the Coldfusion Technical Marketing Manager who sincerely apologized for the experience we have had the past several months. By the end of the conversation, our position that we are not a service bureau and should not be subject to a custom agreement was accepted by Adobe, and we are able to continue to use the perpetual licenses we currently have. If others experience something similar to what we did, you may contact adobecoldfusion@adobe.com to escalate the issue.”
- huge debate over this when they altered the
license for 2020. It's how they classify a business as a Software
As A Service. Essentially if you develop a website for a client and
host it you are a SaaS.
- Thanks on the details. I think the SaaS pricing was in CF 2018 and maybe 2016 too. But perhaps they did not notice your site until now.
- I agree it is unfair and crazy. I think the Adobe legal folks overstretched on this item.
- So you are saying that if you are using CF and businesses pay you for your application/service, Adobe is trying to push you to a custom agreement claiming that you should pay per business customers you have? How is that possible? They have to move almost every CF customer (unless they are using it for a hobby) to a custom agreement. How is that custom agreement structured? What if I have 10,000 customers each paying $100 vs 100 customers each paying $10,000?
- Exactly. How is it structured? For us, it was very close to their standard Enterprise agreement. I've been approached by a couple people lately saying that Adobe is trying to base the price on a percentage of the product/service income - a royalty like structure. I have not seen this myself, that is what I was told.
- I've been told that they have backed off somewhat and that you would need to secure an explicit exemption from them to make sure you don't get a surprise bill or legal issue. It just upsets me that we've used CF since 3.5 and then suddenly we get told there is a large penalty for our loyalty and success.
CommandBox
- Is it possible run ColdFusion Standard Edition
on production server with CommandBox or we need Enterprise
Edition?
- Few month ago I read "running any version of Adobe Coldfusion through Commandbox will cause CF to detect a J2EE/WAR deployment which is only supported in the Enterprise edition".
- I hope the License of 2021 fix this expensive issue
- you sadly need enterprise. This is because CommandBox is a j2e install. Adobe said they would change their licensing to accommodate CommandBox, but they never followed through
- It prevents a lot of people from being able to use CommandBox to easily manage their installations.
- RN: I had indicated that we will evaluate it. There were not more associated pieces that had to be enabled even if the goal was just to enable the WAR deployment on standard. So the decision was not to support this.
Lambda Pricing
- A lot of us would like to know what the Lambda pricing for ColdFusion 2021 on AWS will be. I haven't seen it announced.
- Where can I download the cf2021 lambda packages
there not on the download section of the website!!
- RN: The answer to this is that we are working with Amazon and the idea is to make the lambda package directly available via AWS and not via the server installation. This is taking some time but we will get there.
Future roadmap
- What is the Future roadmap since to have a reason to stay, have to look at the future too. Many choices arise.
- Here is an interview and show notes on CF roadmap with Ashish Garg, VP of CF development at Adobe https://teratech.com/podcast/adobe-coldfusion-2020-roadmap-multi-cloud-micro-services-and-more-with-ashish-garg/
- also here is the CF 2018 roadmap https://teratech.com/podcast/revealing-coldfusion-2018-roadmap-details/
- Ask why new CF realising. In 2012 it was told
2020 is last release.
- that is false news or has changed - they are already working on CF 2023 release. They have roadmap through about 2030
- I've never in my life heard Adobe announce an "end" to CF releases. Do you have a link to back up this claim? Adobe has always had a 10 year road map, which is very important for govt and large corporations who don't want to invest in short term tech.
- World was supposed to end in 2012 as per some claim made in some year 🤣
- 5 years full support + 2 years extended support
Date format issue
- 1) Adobe please fix this date format
issue https://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2020/11/24/breaking_change_in_cf2021_dateformat_D_vs_d
- Suresh Jayaraman: Technically it’s not but we do are in line if though that it breaks backward compatibility and are exploring ways to address it , we may end up providing a flag for this
- Update: this has now been fixed in the first hotfix.
Marketing
- I'm curious if they have a plan to improve
marketing. Although a great product, it seems ACF has an image
problem. Many public agencies and universities are moving away from
ACF to more open source solutions or third party systems. New
developers look at it like cobol- it's still around but why invest
the time learning?
- When I say “coldfusion” thay whoooooo I know your age!
- I have been asking about this for some time and part of my CF Alive book is on this topic!
- related is getting more students in high school and college to learn CF
Wrap up
- Rakshith, you look so amazingly happy? What is
the secret to such amazing positive vibes man?!
- RN: Thank you 🙂 Well, I guess it has got to do with working with the passionate CF community. I am just reflecting back all the positivity.
- Why are you proud to use CF?
- He has been on the CF team for 13 years (during CF 8 build as engineer)
- CF is critical to 76% of our customers in their tech
- 70% of Fortune 100 companies use CF
- 50% of Fortune 500 companies use CF
- WWIT for you to make CF more alive this
year?
- New features in CF 2021
- CF Summit support
- Large customer and analyst (Gartner and Forrester) conversations
- Changing the perception of CF as being a modern and alive technology
- What did you enjoy about CF Summit?
- 5000+ attendees
Mentioned in this episode
Bio
Rakshith Naresh
Rakshith Naresh senior product manager for ColdFusion at Adobe. He decides the future direction of CF there.