The many new and improved features in CF2021
Note: This blog post is from 2020. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.You may have heard that the newest version of CF has been released, ColdFusion 2021. If you've not yet taken a look at what's new, you may be very surprised to find how much there is: from substantial support for several cloud services, to significant changes in CF installation/configuration/deployment, to dozens of new language features, as well as single sign on/SAML support, new kinds of databases supported, several enhancements to the PMT, cf admin-related changes, and more.
As with each CF release, there are features great and small--ones that may "sell" it, and ones that may simply make your life easier.
This is a follow-up to my post from last month, Getting started with "Project Stratus" public beta, aka CF2021. In that I highlighted some key info one would need to get started USING the prerelease, which came out in August, but I only briefly mentioned then some of the key new features. (I also explained why I had referred even then to it being CF2021, given info I'd found in the prerelease.)
In this post, I want to highlight more clearly what those new features are, nearly 60 of them in several categories!--just with a brief mention of the feature and perhaps its sub-features--and most important with a pointer to where to find them discussed in far more detail.
And I should note that Saurav from Adobe happened to post a discussion in the CF forums that presents a different take on summarizing the changes, and linking to the new online docs. It's at:
https://community.ad...
And I have already started updating my post here with those links to the online docs. For now I will keep the page numbers for the release notes, in case it helps anyone with that PDF, and while I get all the links to docs updated (where possible).
I must say that had I waited even 12 hours, I don't know if I'd have bothered posting my note, given his. :-) Still, there are indeed ways that our lists differ, so I'll certainly keep this here, for future reference and posterity if nothing else. :-)
Again, I was already doing a lot of the research and organizing in anticipation of my hidden gems talk next week anyway, so I don't regard it has having been a waste of time. Just wish I'd gotten it done much sooner for folks.
But I HAVE been updating the post to link instead to the online docs for the final release. Are you seeing those? :-) If you need one you don't see, let me know.
Have you seen any updates on the licensing model for this release. It's pretty clear they are pushing to allow Docker/Cloud deployments, but they haven't published updated licensing terms yet. I can only find the licensing restrictions/notes from the previous release, which still has the unfriendly cloud restrictions (counting CPUs on the host, etc).
I'm also seeing that activation is now required to license CF. I'm wondering how that works with the Docker setup, since it seems that you need to login to the CF Administrator to activate that process every time you launch the instance (I might be mistaken in that, but the docs aren't really clear).
As a TLDR, the EULA is indeed available (more in a moment), but I'm afraid nothing suggests they improved things, especially as was asserted (by some at Adobe) that things would get better at least with respect to Docker licensing. And I agree that there are important questions about the (surprising) new activation feature especially with respect to container. I have thoughts on all these.
1) First, as for finding the EULA, I have a post covering that, including finding it online or on your local machine if you have CF installed or unzipped (per the new Express/Zip installer). I have updated the post today to discuss that. It's at https://coldfusion.a...
2) As for docker licensing, that's not mentioned in the EULA specifically, but I had also done a post in the past on the CF Docker licensing, and I'm sad to report (as I also updated in that post today) that things have not changed:
https://coldfusion.a...
I don't know if it's that the assertions (which so many of us had high hopes about) were dashed by others in the company, or just that someone forgot about it.
2a) Folks concerned about these matters should make noise. Don't just "vote with your feet" and leave. If everyone with such concerns does that, nothing will improve. (And I don't think there would be enough doing it that Adobe would notice some great drop in revenue.)
But press the point. They need to hear from more than me. And they don't likely see my posts.
3) Finally, as for the new activation, yep that was a surprise when I saw it today. There was no mention of it during the beta (perhaps understandably). And I agree that it's not quite clear, on a few points.
First, note that the "usage" tab there clearly is about Docker container usage, and that being PRODUCTION use (development use of CF and CF Docker images remains completely free). But the UI says that the usage info is only populated if you have a license key installed in that CF instance. (I don't yet have a CF2021 license key to try things out.)
A first question I'd have is whether it's that whatever license key one puts into the CF instance showing that Admin, is it monitoring for containers using that same license?
A second--and it's yours also--is how will the activation work AT ALL with Docker containers. I can't imagine that they will have to be "activated", the way a server/express install of CF would be (the docs for that even acknowledge how challenging that is for those who may be very secure or firewalled environments, and they offer a manual approach which could take 72 hours to take effect).
That clearly won't work for Docker containers.
Again, I don't have a license to try things, and they have not elaborated on it beyond what's in the docs on activation. My sincere HOPE is that the Docker containers will NOT have to "activate". That would be painful--indeed a veritable nail in the coffin for their use.
3a) And then I wondered "maybe it would just broadcast to the activation service that the license is 'in use', and then someone using that same license key in another deployment could see it in their CF Admin."
There are at least 2 problems with this: it lacks security (beyond the randomness of licenses) to ensure the usage is visible only to an "authorized" person holding the key.
And of course, if the Docker container can't access the internet (or is configured so as NOT to), what would happen then? Judging by the docs about activation in general, it's indicating that the instance would revert to the Developer edition. That might be disastrous in some deployment scenarios--though some other would accept it as "better than not working at all".
3c) Here again, we who are interested in these topics need to make noise about it. And again I'd recommend that my blog here won't be the right place to get Adobe's attention. One could reach out to the [email protected] email address, as that's about free installation support--and this fits into that, as it's about initial setup of a Docker container.
I really hope we get clarity on this, because otherwise it will be a big black eye for CF and those who wanted to promote its use in containerized deployment. The EULA issue for containers in CF2016 and 2018 was bad enough, but this may push some over the edge (even just the news of it, and even if later there is clarification, correction, or improvement).
And certainly, if anyone learned of anything new about this, please DO share it here, as I will try to remember to do. Thanks.
Like most in IT, I suspect, we just like to organize things--and see them presented in a reasonable order. When I saw that TOC in the huge release notes doc, it just kept turning me off and kept me from wanting to dig in. But then I HAD to, and so I set about tracking this info and organizing it, then finally presenting it.
Hope it benefits many.
It looks like they just updated the EULA after I posted and I was able to find the one dated for 2020. And as you noted, nothing really changed. That is disappointing, since it really steers people away from the product if they are paying attention.
I had a brief conversation with my reseller about the licensing -- more out of curiosity. His guidance was that was given to him was that if you are deploying on Docker or the Cloud (or really anything other than a bare metal server), you need to enter a custom agreement with Adobe. Enterprise or Standard won't do. With most servers shipping with 8-20 cores these days, I'd argue /most/ people would still run afoul the letter of the agreement unless they specifically buy a smaller server.
The conversation about custom contracts gets interesting. One of the first questions they need to ask is about your revenue model. He said that he would offer a contract of 15% of our revenue as an initial offer. As a GovRamp customer, that model is not a thing, and I didn't really bring up alternatives if I wanted to go down that route.
I don't know what we have to do to have Adobe hear us on this licensing issue. The community has been screaming about it for at least 10 years -- and I know I've brought it up before that. I had some home when I heard they were going to figure it out for this release (which, at least means they heard us), but the fact nothing has really changed really stings. They are really putting people who want to remain legal into a corner (or more likely, they don't want to have a set license cost they can publish and just want to sell it custom each time, depending on the use case).
But the wait is at least now over and I can go on.
Thank you for the info, it's most useful.
Just a question - have you heard anything about access to the CF2018 packages being discontinued? We are trying to download a copy of CF2018 for a legacy system, but the links to CF2018 at Adobe all now redirect to CF2021.
https://www.adobe.co...
I am hoping this is just a mistake on the website?
Once the new version comes out, the old is removed and no longer accessible on the Adobe site (except at licensing.adobe.com, if you bought a license). They also no longer sell it, but instead from that point forward one can only buy CF2021.
It's an odd choice, though it happens with some other Adobe products and also with some other companies.
As for what one can do, if they really want CF2018, note that you can find it and other older versions of CF (almost to the start of CF) at cfmlrepo.com.
As for this info, I need to do a new blog post, to follow-up on this first one, to share things like this that we couldn't know FOR SURE before the final release.
Also I have one question. Is Adobe working on enhancing the report delivery to match BO (Business Objects) Crystal Report or Webi Report or Power BI used for Dashboard Reports/ Data Analytics?
I think it's safe to assume that the decision has been made that this need of reporting is provided by other tools with integration points like REST or Java which cf supports, so that there seems little reason for them to build one in.
Add to this the very small percent of the cf user base who seemed to bother with the report feature, either crystal reports from before the turn of the century (to cf5) or the report builder that wasn't updated much after cf7.
That's just my conclusion, not from any firsthand knowledge of any firm plans from them, pro or con.
For example, in the Jedis (Redis driver), the Pub/Sub implementation requires that you _extend_ a Class in the Jedis library. I am hoping that Lucee CFML picks this up for a future release.
And yep, as for CF2021 I understand there is a document that the Lucee team/community are using to track what things they may want to add to Lucee. Spy vs spy...or is it coke vs pepsi...or it it just that each makes the other stronger. Let's hope so.
But again, besides what's new in 2021, there are indeed things that were new or changed in CF2018, or 2016, or even 11 or 10, where sometimes CF is held to "not do something" by people who a) left it some years ago (whether for Lucee or leaving CFML entirely), or b) who are using it but simply "keeping old apps running" and not paying attention to what's new.
Happy new year, and here's to more folks on both side of the Lucee/CF fence paying more attention to what the other does, for all our sakes.
We are only now getting around to update to ColdFusion 2021. We recently ran into a bug though. Have you or anyone you know had an issue with a switch statement not executing the proper case? We have some old code that stopped functioning properly once we updated. It seems to be when there is a case that is immediately followed by the default case and they are not last.
When this is the situation the case following the default is what executes if the switch matches the initial case. This is probably an odd case. I assume most would put the default last and then there is no need for the explicit match, but this functioned as expected in all previous version of CF.
I enter a bug through the tracker, number CF-4217854. I was just curious if you had seen anything like this.
I would recommend that additional comment on the matter be directed to the ticket rather than as comments here. Still, I do appreciate you pointing it out in case it may help others who find this post in assessing a move to CF2021.