[Looking for Charlie's main web site?]

Speaking this week at cf.Objective(): Two #coldfusion sessions and a lightning round talk

Just a heads up for those at cf.objective, which starts tomorrow. I'll be presenting 3 times.

First, I'm giving two different sessions on Thursday and Friday:

See the links above for details on each talk. And as always, I'll post these talks (after presenting them) on my presentations page.

Then, on Thursday evening I'm giving a Lightning Round talk. Last year I did one on "Lies, Damned Lies, and Request Timeouts". This year, I will again do a CF-centric talk--someone has to talk about something other than beer, love, and other heartwarming or life-expanding talks. :-) This year, it will be "10 Things That Plague Most CF Servers, with Solutions". Yep, even in 6 minutes, I hope to share some surprises that many miss, but which I see daily in helping people in my CF server troubleshooting consulting services.

I'll be posting the presentation for that as well, but it will have additional detail (in terms of resources to learn more) on each topic.

Looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones. Please come say hello, and be gentle with me if I may not make an immediate connection of face to name. :-) With the blessing of attending and speaking at so many conferences comes the curse of meeting lots of people, only briefly, and often only once (or once in a great while!)

Finally, I'll note I am also presenting the first two talks above again next week, in a 5-city European tour. More on that in another entry to come.

What's new in #ColdFusion 10 that's only in Enterprise? or restricted in Standard?

CF10 was released today, and in my blog entry announcing that, I noted that there's been some surprise/concern by many over what aspects of new features in CF10 are held back as Enterprise-only, or restricted in Standard (meaning, has some limitation).

I want to highlight a few of those things, to save folks having to dig around.

You can see for yourself the comparisons in at least a couple of places:

What's new in CF10 but only in Enterprise?

Among the surprises some are finding are that these are held as Enterprise only (or the free Developer edition) and are not available in Standard are:
  • Some (though not all) of the CF10 scheduling improvements (such as listeners, chaining, app-specific tasks, clustering, and exception handling)
  • HTML 5 charting
  • ORM search
  • Dynamic custom fields in Solr my bad, I just read the column wrong. This is not restricted.
  • the data import handler for Solr

I obtained this list by looking at the first page above, noting what was listed as "new" or "enhanced" in the CF10 Enterprise column that was listed as "not available" in the CF10 Standard column. This may NOT be the complete list. We can for now only go on what's shown. There may be more, there may be less.

What's new in CF10 but "restricted" in Standard?

Similarly, some of the things that are "new" (or "enhanced") for CF10 may be available in Standard, but are "restricted" in some way. Typically, this means that the feature is throttled by the "Enterprise Feature Router" or EFR that was introduced in CF8. This change then meant that now such features were no longer limited to CF10 (as those above) but are available in Standard but throttled, so that only one concurrent request at a time can use such a restricted feature. There can be another kind of limit, too. See below.

Again, going by the list on the page above, we see these new or enhanced features are "restricted":

  • MS Office 2010 PowerPoint file generation (new)
  • PDF file conversion from MS Office 2010 Word and MS Office 2010 PowerPoint (new)
  • MS Office 2010 Excel support (new)
  • Support for web socket protocol on server (new)
  • Interface for publish/ subscribe using web socket (new)
  • Support for Microsoft Exchange 2010 (new)
  • Microsoft Exchange server integration (enhanced)

Again, I'm basing this on what things were listed as "not available" in the CF9 Standard column, but are listed as "new" or "enhanced" in the CF10 Enterprise column but listed as "restricted" in the CF10 Standard column. That's an imperfect way to judge things, but they didn't choose to list what's "new" or "improved" AND "restricted" in the CF10 Standard column.

Some of the limitations are not what they appear at first

There's been a fair bit of consternation today among some who saw that limit about web sockets being limited. The document there (in the footer) says that "Data can be pushed to no more than five clients on Standard, unlimited on Enterprise".

Here's good news: I've heard directly from the CF team that this limit was lifted to 100 before the final release, but this and other docs have just not yet been updated.

Finally, let me say also about the MS Office features above that although they list them as "new", I think what they're saying is that support specifically for Office 2010 is new. The features to create Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and such files (in older Office formats), such as CFSPREADSHEET or enhancements for Office docs in CFDOCUMENT and CFPRESENTATION were actually introduced in CF9.

Hope that's helpful.

Again, I may have something that will need to be updated. Feel free to leave a comment, and share the news of this list with others to help them learn more about the subject.

#ColdFusion 10 released today: maybe you've heard, for better or worse

If you've not yet heard, final production release of ColdFusion 10 was made available today (well, late last night, so the "day" depends on your time zone).

And if you have heard, you may have heard from people who (as is often the case) are raising concerns about something they do or don't like, or they see or don't see. I'd like to address a couple of those points briefly, along with sharing the general announcement.

For more, see all the goodness at the coldfusion.com web site. And yes, if you didn't know it, that's a nice easy-to-use domain name that redirects to the main Adobe CF page. There you'll find lots of content about what's new, including videos on various pages (some of which include yours truly).

What's new? Lots more than you may think

As always, the "what's new" pages are rather meager. You'd think there are only a dozen new features. Of course, Adobe is highlighting what they think may be most compelling to the most people (and to motivate upgrades/purchases.) But I'll note again that there are over 200 new changes or improvements, some little, some big.

I documented those that I'd found after working with the prerelease for some months, in an entry I did back in March:

Charlie Arehart's Ultimate List of 200+ New #ColdFusion 10 Features

I've not yet updated that per the final release, most notably because I can't as yet find any Feature Notes for the final release. The link to "CF10 release notes" currently offered on the CF release notes page (listing all releases) currently goes just to a "known issues document", which is not the same at all. There was a 200+ page true "release notes" PDF for the prerelease, that I hope will be offered somewhere soon, as updated for the final release. (I've raised this concern to Adobe, and will hope to update this when I have new info.)

What's Enterprise only?

As in each release, there will always be consternation with regard to what was released for the Standard Edition and what's held back for the Enterprise (or free Developer) edition. You can find that outlined in a couple of docs on the site. But I have created another entry that tries to save you the trouble: What's new in #ColdFusion 10 that's only in Enterprise? or restricted in Standard?.

Any licensing concerns?

And yes, there are some licensing concerns. Those, too, deserve their own post. More to come later. (Some matters are still being sorted out in terms of folks understanding what they're reading, and whether they're coming to the correct conclusions.)

All in all, CF10 adds lots of new features. Before you listen to any who assert "there's not much there", or "too much is held back for Enterprise only", or "the new licensing sucks", be sure to dig more closely and make an informed decision.

Where to keep an eye out for new info on CF10, created by the community

Just a quick update since I originally posted this: while you can and should check out the Adobe resources I listed above, and my "ultimate list of new features", I'll note that of course many are now (and recently,and will be) posting their own blog entries on what's new, etc.

you can try to keep up with them on twitter, various blog aggregators, etc. But I'll say the best place to keep an eye out is Akbarsait's list of CF10 tutorials, where he basically aggregates all the CF10 documents and blog entries that he comes across. It's an awesome list that he also did for CF9 (and if you may be skipping from CF8 or earlier to CF10, check out that list for mroe on what was new in CF9).

He's not updated his CF10 page in a couple of weeks (as of today, as I write), but I'm sure he will soon be kicking into gear to gather up all the great new stuff coming out today and in coming days/weeks. I just want to make sure people seeing this post know to keep an eye on hist list. I see him as a "brother in arms", as a fellow-resource gatherer, as I have done in my CF resources sites: CF411.com (list of CF tools and resources), CF911.com (list of CF troubleshooting resources), and UGTV (list of CF user group presentations recordings).

Keep up the great work, Akbarsait!

BlogCFC was created by Raymond Camden. This blog is running version 5.005.

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