With Adobe at the wheel, ColdFusion demand is increasing as reported by Hostway. This is great news for Adobe and the ColdFusion product team.
Personally, I think that when CF9 comes out is when you will really see adoption jump. Adobe gets it with this product, and with Adobe DNA being integrated more and more into the product, is going to make for some amazing features in the products future.
Now on Adobe.com there is a great educational resource for learning Adobe ColdFusion 8. The curriculum is geared toward web developers with some experience how to create dynamic web applications using ColdFusion.
There are two courses available for download, "Introduction to ColdFusion 8" and "Advanced ColdFusion 8 Development".
ColdFusion 8 has always been a great investment in productivity for your organization. A friend, colleague and fellow Adobe Developer Connection author Steve Rittler made a great blog post a while back about investing in ColdFusion.
I recently showed a new client some examples of how easy it was to create dynamic PDF's and charts in ColdFusion, they were amazed at how simple it was. This feature alone along with all the others, made ColdFusion 8 an obvious choice.
Great presentation on creating dynamic presentations with ColdFusion.
Using simple tags you can create great looking presentations very quickly.
Proving Adobe ColdFusion 8 is as strong as ever, the 2008 Codie Awards name Adobe ColdFusion 8 "Best Web Services Solution"!
Pretty good for a "dying technology" don't ya think, Computer World!
Flex 3 is now out and it's an exciting time to be a ColdFusion developer. In this article I walk you step by step to using Flex 3 with ColdFusion and the integrated LiveCycle Data Services. There is also a section about using the ColdFusion wizard to quickly build the backend ColdFusion CFC's to get you up and running.
LiveCycle Data Services gives you the ability to create robust applications with very little work, I encourage all ColdFusion developers to get familiar with this technology as it's a great tool on your development belt.
Hope you enjoy the article, and if you have any questions or problems feel free to drop a comment here.
Not to take anything away from the ColdFusion 8 launch just recently. But Adobe is starting on the next version of ColdFusion codenamed "Centaur"! I'm sure as the months roll on we will hear more about the next release.
I have been getting many errors from the blog so you may have been getting errors when clicking links when DB requests are made.
I have talked with Host My Site (my hosting provider) and apparently ColdFusion 8 and MySQL 5 do not always play nice together. The connection gets randomly dropped between ColdFusion and MySQL 5. Host My Site development teams are looking into this issue, but no ETA was given on when this will be resolved.
So what is the solution for now? If you are a HMS customer and you are having this issue here is how I resolved it. Call Host My Site and have them login to the ColdFusion 8 Admin and open your DSN connection info up. There is an option called "Maintain connections across client requests". Make sure this is unchecked.
What is this setting: "ColdFusion establishes a connection to a data source for every operation that requires one. Select this option to improve performance by caching the data source connection."
What I think was happening from the error messages I was getting, was that the connection is getting dropped, I assume from the MySQL side. Because ColdFusion had this connection cached, it does not know the connection has dropped, tried to run a query, and you get this error.
"No operations allowed after connection closed. Connection was implicitly closed due to underlying exception/error"
This is only a workaround!!
Doing the above will give you a performance hit, but I choose performance hit over errors for the moment. As soon as the original issue is resolved, you should turn this setting back on to take advantage of the performance you get.
As the Adobe MAX conference has now kicked off, Adobe has released a whole bunch of new beta's on labs.
What are you waiting for! Go to labs and check out the new Adobe technology releases!
ColdFusion 8 has another feature that allows a ColdFusion developer to leverage .NET inside their CF applications.
It allows you to call .NET classes in your ColdFusion code. ColdFusion 8 allows you to access and use these classes as CFML objects in the following ways.
- Direct access and control of the Microsoft products like Word, Excel PowerPoint and so on.
- Use existing .NET components
- You can use .NET assemblies to leverage features that may not be available in ColdFusion or Java. Note that because ColdFusion is a J2EE application, its more efficient to create what you need in Java then .NET
Also, your .NET classes you want to use do not have to be local. Your ColdFusion application can access .NET components that are on remote systems.
You may be asking, but we run Linux or OSX and do not have the .NET runtime installed. Not to worry, you don’t have to have the .NET runtime installed on the same machine as ColdFusion, you can still access .NET assemblies on remote systems even though your local system does not have the .NET runtime installed.
Here is a simple example from the docs of how to use .NET classes.
Also note that if you make a change in the .NET assembly, ColdFusion will recognize the change and use the new version. You can also secure communication to .NET from ColdFusion using SSL.
