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Michaela Light 0:01
Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with rack chic. Naresh, who is the senior product manager for ColdFusion at Adobe. And we're going to be talking about cold fusion 2021 that just released a few weeks ago. Very exciting. And he is the man who talks to all the cold fusion customers figures out what new features to have decides the future of cold fusion among with all the other people in the Adobe team. Welcome Rakshit.
Rakshith Naresh 0:29
Thanks a lot, Michaela. It's great to be a part of CF Live podcast again.
Michaela Light 0:34
Yes. Great to have you back. I wish we were talking in person like we did in India last year. But unfortunately, this year has been a bit weird. But the ColdFusion team, Adobe persevered through the lockdown and the kroner and the economic craziness, and managed to get ColdFusion 2021 out before CF summit, which was last week. So congrats on that.
Rakshith Naresh 1:02
Thanks a lot. Yeah. And congratulations to all of us on this new release.
Michaela Light 1:06
Yes. And thanks to all the beta testers in the ColdFusion community who helped out with it, too. I know there were a lot of how many people were on the beta test, you know,
Rakshith Naresh 1:16
it was definitely in the 100. So 400 to 500, folks,
Michaela Light 1:20
yeah. Yeah. Wow. Now, what we're going to talk about today is, we're going to talk about, like, an overview of what's in there, but there's so many new features in this release that I don't think we can do it justice in one episode. So we're gonna have to come back to you or other team members to dig down in detail on some of that stuff. Is that cool with you? or?
Rakshith Naresh 1:43
Yeah, absolutely, we can do that.
Michaela Light 1:46
Okay, but let's, what we're gonna cover today is we're going to have a look at an overview of what's in there, we're gonna look at some of the story of, you know, how you guys got this out in these trying circumstances this release, and also why the name of the release changed at the last minute. And then I've got some questions that CFS have sent me online through the ColdFusion programmers Facebook group. So we'll have a look at those two, because a lot of people are really interested in this new version of ColdFusion, and are curious about some of the new features and the new licensing or old licensing they didn't realize was. And you know, the move to the cloud and microservices and so on. So that's the plan for the episode. So let's dig right in. Let's just talk about what you know what what is in ColdFusion 2021? What are the new things I keep hearing the word cloud? And I don't know if I know you have a vision statement for it. I don't know if you have that ingrained in your brain because Ashish has been repeating it daily.
Rakshith Naresh 2:59
Absolutely. So yes. So I can talk about that. So yes. So when we envision the next version of ColdFusion, a couple of years, it was sometime early last year is when we kind of started trying to envision what the new version is called, is going to be all about. So we were focused on addressing some of the key challenges out there. Right. So we were talking to a lot of customers trying to understand what are the key challenges. And we wanted to ensure that ColdFusion has survived for like 25 years now, right? And it's doing well. In fact, Ashish also spoke about in recently the keynote, right? So so it continues to do well for Adobe and Adobe is more than ever committed to ColdFusion. So we wanted to come up with a release, that's kind of game changing for the rest of the decade as well. So we are in the beginning of a new decade, we wanted to ensure that called V, this will be a game changing release for the next decade as well. So if you look at the history of cold fusion, cold fusion has always been able to evolve itself to accommodate how the web is changing over the world is changing around us. So we wanted to make such shifts at this point of time around the cloud and microservices story. Because every new application that's being built out there, it's what's most probably a micro service based application. And every new application that's being built out there most probably has some kind of a presence on the cloud, right? So when we spoke to our customers, it was clear to us that in our customers are moving to the cloud, they will build a new application, they go about not building the huge monolith application of the past, but break it down into tiny pieces like a micro service. So the question to us was, okay, so our customers are doing this, what are the problems that they're facing? So when we dug deeper and try to find out what those issues are, the number one issue on the cloud was, there was no easy way for ColdFusion to talk to various cloud services. For instance, if you're an AWS or an Azure, there was no easy way to talk to those services. with ease in ColdFusion, because there is no ColdFusion specific SDK available, whereas Java and other languages have this SDK. Now the question to us was, okay, we can come up with a really nice interface for this services. Can we do it better? can we can we differentiate ourselves from the SDK is out there. So when we, when we actually dug deeper and tried to find out what can be done there, we realized that ColdFusion has always been about productivity, right? So can you come up with a productive interface to these cloud services better than the best? For instance, if you look at all the SDKs out there for the cloud services node seems to be doing relatively better than the rest, with Java being the most bulky. So for us, the benchmark was node. So we have done a better job than node in terms of the number of lines it takes to talk to those services that Wantage that ColdFusion has is we also have the language right, so we can introduce constructs that we need to make sure it's a productive interface. Now, how do we differentiate ourselves from competition? So one of the other challenges that we understood was CIOs are actually thinking about, you know, not banking on one single cloud provider anymore? They are worried that Okay, my entire business is now on AWS on banking on AWS. So they would like to kind of do it's not a current problem, it's a future problem that they're thinking about, how do we solve this, can we move some part of our application to a different cloud provider as well, perhaps Azure, so that you can, you can take advantage of both the clouds and not completely have your eggs on one single cloud provider. So that was a huge opportunity for us. So we came up with not just a productive interface, but something that none of the other technologies offer us a common unified interface that can talk to Azure, as well as AWS. So if you're, if you're trying to use those really neat interface that that we have in cfml. Now to talk to AWS s3 storage interface, you can use the same interface to talk to Azure Storage, as well as your blob service, as they call it. So it's so simple, you just need to make that one flip. And it works like magic. So that is the differentiator. And that is what ColdFusion can give our customers, you're not just locked into one single cloud, you can actually expand into other clouds as well. So that is the cloud story. I would say that. So that's one part of the story. But it's not just about cloud. So, you know, I don't want people to kind of assume that ColdFusion 2021. It's only for the cloud. No. If you're on the cloud, yes, you can take some advantages of services that we have. But the next big significant one that we have done is to be microservices friendly. So the entire ColdFusion server itself was a monolith, it was a huge server. The installer itself is like to mod more than one gigabyte. Now our installer is just a zip installer of less than 200 Mb, including the Java runtime. So if you take off the Java runtime, the ColdFusion runtime is much much tinier. So it's less than 200 Mb stocks up in like under five seconds.
Michaela Light 8:03
That's much quicker than before. That's like an 80% improvement.
Rakshith Naresh 8:07
Absolutely, you're right. So it's a significant improvement. And we have broken down the runtime into tiny pieces. And this was a huge, huge Engineering Task you spoke about you were asking me about the challenges, right. So when we envision the new version of ColdFusion, we never knew that, you know, the world would be down like the way it is right now. So all of us had to shift to a remote workplace. And despite that, we are proud of what we have been able to accomplish, because this was no insignificant task, breaking down the runtime into tiny pieces and bundling. Basically, you're creating your own ColdFusion runtime with ColdFusion 2021. So if you're making use of database, and nothing else, you just use the database component and the and the core runtime. And that's about it so that you get a tiny run time to build your micro services on to me, these two are the key pieces that will take ColdFusion well into the next decade and do a really good job of it. So this is the beginning I would say this is. So the vision that we have around cloud and micro services. It's not one single release, we made significant strides in ColdFusion 2021. But there's lot more to be done. And that's coming up in the subsequent versions. Going through a name change, I'll just touch upon the last point of view spoke about. So yes, earlier, it was supposed to be ColdFusion 2020. But it was so at the way end of the year, to give it a fresh, fresh feeling. We actually named it as ColdFusion 2021. That was the only reason. So Adobe does this, particularly when there is it's at the back end of the year and you have a launch coming up you generally use next year's version numbers so that you bring that freshness around for the next year as well. Otherwise 2020 is gone. And you know, that version already kind of feels stale, though. It's just a few months old. So to make Use that we named it 2021. It's got nothing to do with the whole scenario right now.
Michaela Light 10:07
Yes, I was talking to Jorge relase autists about the into the box conference and they decided to make just like Adobe did with CF summit being free. And you can get the recordings from CF summit, which maybe we'll talk about a bit later or I'll put them in the show notes. Free as well. autists decided to make into the box lat ham free and one of the reasons for Hey, gays apart from it was a Black Friday, Thanksgiving, you know, special. He also said this was the horrible year in Spanish I annual Anna Anna back, I forget the exact Spanish my Spanish isn't perfect. But yeah, it's probably best to call it 2021. That totally makes sense. Now, you mentioned future versions, because one of the things people ask is, well, you know, are there going to be future versions? So you're confirming here today in the revealing in the podcast that there will be a future version? And what's the codename for that?
Rakshith Naresh 11:03
Absolutely. As I said, Adobe is more than ever committed to ColdFusion core vision continues to do well for Adobe, just look at the investment that we have done with this version. This was a significant task, right of breaking down the modules coming up with this cloud.
Michaela Light 11:17
What was the maniere investment on the development team? You had like 20 people working on this or?
Rakshith Naresh 11:25
So generally, we don't talk about it outside of Adobe, though, but still, it's way more than 20. So it's not just me, it's a way? Well,
Michaela Light 11:33
let me ask the question a different way. Because you can't give it I understand you have to be confidential on some things. But how was the investment compared to previous releases? Was it a much bigger task to get this one done? Because of all the change? Yes, it
Rakshith Naresh 11:46
was, it was way bigger. Yeah, it was way bigger considering you know, breaking down a monolith, I'm sure any many of our developers out there who understand the challenges of breaking a monolith application into a micro service application, they understand the challenges, right? That to mean does. And this time, you're talking about a runtime that used to support basically everything, right intrusion is like an enterprise of the top two tops to a whole range of services. Now, if you have to break that down into tiny pieces, it's a significant effort. And in fact, we actually planned this over two releases, we didn't want to get to the 100% state with ColdFusion, 2021, we had actually envisioned that, okay, let's go maybe 50% with 2021, and come up with the next release, and then accomplish it. But our, as I said, the team did a fantastic job of that and actually accomplished the full fledged modularity in 2021. itself. And yeah, and despite this current situation, having accomplished that is something that is commendable.
Michaela Light 12:49
That is amazing. And, you know, just for listeners, it's not just breaking up the code, it's making sure it's still actually works correctly, are broken up into pieces, you know, it's pretty easy to break up code, having it still work reliably, you know, in a dynamic way, like it does now. Now, in addition to getting, you know, adding the easy cloud support, and I just want to say, you know, I think over the whole 25 years, I've been involved in confusion, I the number one key word for me is easy development, you know, rapid application development, you know, agnostic as to what database you use, or what email provider you use, or I think you've continued this tradition with the multi cloud support that you don't have having your code out to switch. And then making the REST services for, you know, easier to use. I saw that in one of the presentations, let's see if something. And then in addition to all that enormous engineering effort you added, you know, must have been nearly a dozen new language features. Right, you know, for parallelism, and, you know, identity operators and better Java support and immediately invoked function expressions in functions, lambda support, and all kinds of really cool things in there that I don't think we have time to come back to one of your other incredibly talented engineers to talk about some of those in detail, I think, but I'm just very impressed that you not only got all this new release out, totally re architected under the hood, you know, and it still performs better than older versions of ColdFusion as well. Is that true?
Rakshith Naresh 14:36
Yes, absolutely. So performance is something that we constantly strive towards. But this time around, though, we did not significantly focus in performance, but performance was kind of innate, because we are now breaking down a monolith into tiny pieces. So you get that innate performance improvement, less resources, less startup time, so just that startup time itself and a memory consumption. That is an insult was a huge boost. But along with that, the performance, it wasn't given as much importance as it was in 2018, though, because there was so much other stuff to do. But still, there will be some improvements depending on.
Michaela Light 15:13
Well, and, you know, I just to be honest, actually, I talked to a lot of ColdFusion customers, and they're not all on 2018, he probably. So anyone listening who is on 2016 2011 or older, first of all, those are, you know, 2011, when end of life quite a long time ago, you should not be running older versions of ColdFusion. And 2016 goes, end of life, I want to say next April. So you need to be looking at upgrading your 2016. But the point I was trying to make here is if you're running an older version of ColdFusion, it's going to run you know, maybe 50% faster, just without changing a single line of code, you just update the cold fusion, and now it is more efficient in running code. And that still is true for 2021. So absolutely, you know, I don't think you should shortchange yourself on the performance. And then there's the other secret feature that you guys work really hard on that hasn't been mentioned in any of the talks you gave, that I'm aware of, which is you really focus on having excellent security, I think is the best security in any of the web development platforms out there. According to Cvent not Cvent CEO, Mark, I forget name, I'll put the link in the thing. But there's an independent organization that looks at language security, and ColdFusion came out top on that. And so I just want to recognize that, you know, you still have your securities are behind the scenes, making sure that all developers are writing secure code. And I think it's correct the all the code, people developers on the ColdFusion platform, you know, get they get trained on how to write secure code.
Rakshith Naresh 16:52
Yeah. Right. Absolutely. I think that's a great point that you mentioned Mugello. So yes, yes, the entire team is security certified. And it's not just that, one of the advantages of being in a such a large company, like a company like Adobe is we have top quality security experts. So they are so we have something called as the product security incident response team, and a group of security experts as well within Adobe who manage security across all the products. So one is if there is a security vulnerability in the wild, they are the first ones who come to know about it. And they are the ones who interact with the product team and make sure that the fix is released as quickly as possible in the best possible manner in the most secure manner as well. And every release, we actually worked with a group of security experts within Adobe, this was not the product team, though this is outside. So we also have access to Oh,
Michaela Light 17:44
they're independent, within Adobe,
Rakshith Naresh 17:48
Adobe level. So Adobe has
Michaela Light 17:50
but they're not they're not part of the development team. So you can't move them around. They, if there's a security issue, they'll bring it up and it can't be ignored.
Rakshith Naresh 17:59
Yes, that's correct. That's correct. So they so they do they look at the code or look at the design. And this time around, though, we did some some something additional for security, we also got a third party vendor to certify the security organization to actually certify or find issues, basically to find any potential issues considering we're making serious architecture changes, right. So we didn't want any potential security issues to come up because of that. So we did, we actually hired an independent vendor, a security vendor to take a look at all our all our new architecture, new implementation, and they actually gave us a public facing report. So we will make that available as well, very shortly. It's a public facing report that talks about how secure code vision 2021 is.
Michaela Light 18:50
I will look forward to that I'm going to give you I'll give you three thumbs up on that. But I've only got two thumbs up. But I think for a lot of CIOs, particularly in education and government, but also in large enterprise organizations, security is very, very important. You cannot believe the amount of egg that gets on people's faces when their server gets hacked, or this right, some kind of, you know, blackmail thing going on, or, you know, confidential info is leaked, it's, it can close the company down if or an organization. If that happens, I just want to mention one additional secret feature that you guys I don't think talked about, and that's backward compatibility. As far as I know, if you've got existing code, it runs just fine on 2021. And there's a compatibility, you know, check a built in, right, where you can look for any, you know, really ancient code that you might have in your code base that needs tweaking. But generally speaking, if you've written good code is going to run just fine in 2021. And in addition, although it's raw, raw, go cloud, and you know, we know that 70 odd percent of you know, new apps being written with cloud in mind or being run on a cloud server, there's still 30% of new apps running on dedicated boxes or virtual private servers is confusion still run on, you know, those dedicated servers?
Rakshith Naresh 20:14
Absolutely, it runs, and it runs way better, because of the architecture changes that we have done. Those are not cloud specific, right. So the whole, the runtime becoming more leaner, with only required components. And also do so one other thing that we do not talk about much is the ability to script the settings, every single setting in ColdFusion, you no longer have to log into the administrator, and then, you know, manually go ahead and enter from the graphical user interface, every single setting is scriptable. So what I mean by that is you can replicate. So let's say you have 10 different servers, you just need to create a one single script and replicate that script across all the different servers. So that is really powerful. Again, especially for our larger customers who have lot more servers and even microservices, if you have a lot of microservices, it's so much easier to just configure it once and reuse it whenever you need to. So that's one of the one of the things one other important capability of ColdFusion 2021. And also do from the security point of view, Michaela, we have also introduced single sign on as well. So using with any single sign on is the is pretty much a de facto I mean, it's a it's like a default capability in any application, right appear in an enterprise application or an end user application, you need to have the single sign on capability. Now, we have significantly reduced the effort needed to build Single Sign On applications, you just need to use a couple of built in functions. And you can talk to any SAML based Single Sign On server to actually get single sign on working with ColdFusion. And that's also the point when you want.
Michaela Light 21:54
That's great. I remember a couple years ago working on our SAML Single Sign On in ColdFusion. Oh, my God, was it headache? So I'm very grateful for you doing that. Are there any plans for other single sign on things? You know, I know the several other single sign on technologies out there.
Rakshith Naresh 22:14
Not at this point of time, SAML appears to be pretty much a standard right now for single sign on. So you know, octo or anything else. It's all SAML based. So, so at this point, I don't think there is a need, but if the need comes up, we will look at other samples, other single sign on servers as well. So SAML is basically a protocol more of a standard for single sign on. So we are we work with any SAML based server at this point of time. Excellent.
Michaela Light 22:45
So I've got a question for myself here. I must admit, when cold fusion new releases come out, I like to play around with them. And I will tell a tip to listeners, even though that the install from Adobe is really easy now. And cool. The easiest way to try this out on your own development laptop is to use Command box, and it's just a single command line to run it up. doesn't mess with any of your other installs of ColdFusion. It's running a little virtual thing. And that's already out there, thanks to Brad wood who got that out, like within I think, a day or two of confusion policing. So if you're curious about these new features, you're a bit concerned, hey, I don't want to spend time installing or I don't want to mess up what I have just use Command box to spin it up and get it running. And you can play with everything going on here in ColdFusion 2021. So you know, that's absolutely
Rakshith Naresh 23:39
a thing artist does a great job with command box. So yes, it was great to see that, you know, are released the ColdFusion 2021 version very, very shortly, as soon as.
Michaela Light 23:50
But I must admit, when it comes to production servers, I'm always a little nervous putting zero, you know, point zero releases out. And the question I'm curious about, you know, Adobe does a great job of getting hot fixes out, you know, roughly when there will be a hot fix out for this that addresses any? Not
Rakshith Naresh 24:08
sure. Exactly. And that's a good question. So yes, I do know that quite a quite a few of our customers wait for the first update to kind of move to production. Because just setting up the servers itself is quite a task for some of our larger customers especially, it takes quite a few months to actually move from one version to another by then you would typically have the first update coming out. So we don't have a specific date at this point of time. But we are working towards an update already. So we are in the process of prioritizing what issues to focus on. And we will I would say by the end of this year, we will have some idea about when will that happen? When will that come out? But yeah, I'm not sure about an exact date at this point of time, but it should be pretty soon so not so I would say definitely before the first few months of next year. We will have enough
Michaela Light 25:00
Let's just say quarter one,
Rakshith Naresh 25:03
quarter one,
Michaela Light 25:04
that gives you a bit of flexibility there. But soon is the answer. Because, you know, a lot of people celebrate holidays at the end of the year for Christmas, or New Year's or whatever. So, you know, I think early next year is, is good for that. And to be honest, people need to try out this stuff, you know, start migrating their app. So but right. So you know, I worked good for me. Now. Let's go. You know, let's talk a bit about some of these questions that came in. I know, you've got a limited amount of time today, because you're working from home, and it's late at night, and probably you got a delicious dinner waiting for you. So let's talk about some of these things. Now, one of the things that people are always interested in is about the ColdFusion. Id, the editor used your code. Now, are there any plans to update CF builder next year or any other editors? Absolutely. So
Rakshith Naresh 26:05
just like how the server has ColdFusion server has undergone a significant transformation. The builder is undergoing a significant transformation do that 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, actually. So when we when we started building an ID, ie, Eclipse was a great platform back then. But now we have a really powerful platform, which is VS code. So we will be the new version, the next version of ColdFusion. builder will be on VS code as a platform. I know that it's a really popular platform among our ColdFusion developers as well. So it just is Yeah, so
Michaela Light 26:41
that is amazing news. That because Yeah, I think that's the most popular editor out there vs. Code. It's a free editor. I think Microsoft publishes it, but it's open source, and has already has a lot of extensions. But you say you're gonna put out some Adobe extensions that make it even cooler. Right fusion development. And Wow, that's great. So yes, well, we got to do an episode on on that when it's a bit nearer to fruition. And then, any that so that's the news on CF builder. And then do you have is that? Do you know, when in 2021, that might appear? Or? Um,
Rakshith Naresh 27:21
so yes, so it's definitely not in q1 of next year, that's going to take some time. So, you know, the team was busy with the server changes that we had to do. So it's going to take some time. Definitely next year is what I would say, but I'm not sure about the exact date at this point of time.
Michaela Light 27:39
Okay, cuz let's see if summit someone said first half of 2021. But maybe that's moved around a bit.
Rakshith Naresh 27:46
Yeah. So yes, we are targeting first of 2021. But I'm not really sure if we can meet it, or if we can beat it as well. So I'm not so sure.
Michaela Light 27:54
Got it. All right. Now, let's see a lot of people do ColdFusion development with front end tools like Angular react or view. Were there any improvements made in 2021, for working with those front end technologies with rest or other things?
Rakshith Naresh 28:12
So, so yes, so very, when it comes to improvements of one of the improvements that we did, last time around, I think that applies even now is datatype preservation. So with JavaScript. So what used to happen with since ColdFusion, is pretty much title is, when you when the JSON data from either any of those popular frameworks used to come in the cold fusion, or when data goes out from cold fusion to those JavaScript frameworks. Sometimes it's only sometimes what used to happen was us, a number used to become a string and string used to become a number. So it was it was it was a messy behavior, that ColdFusion servers, the previous ColdFusion service had, now we came up with something called as data type preservation. So you can actually ensure that you know, the data coming in if you if you want that to be treated as a number only. Because ColdFusion continues to treat that as a number. And when the data is going back out, it continues to be a number. So that was one significant improvement. And I think that still stands with with 2021. And the rest of rest is the default standard, right for anything on the back end right now. So that's the that's the initiation, I would say. So it's no longer you know, your user interface is no longer written in ColdFusion. It's actually written in those popular it's actually developed using those popular frameworks out there. And we understand that and ColdFusion the initiation happens through a REST service. So the rest capabilities are already improved. And we are planning to take it to the next level as well and try to see if we can auto generate some of those REST services as a part of the next question, but it's still early days, I would say. So REST services continue. To be really simple in cold fusion, so you can easily invoke that from any of the any of the Popular Front End frameworks. So it's as simple as making a rest call to any other technologies. So cold fusion can also take the same, the same the same rest, rest calls, like other technologies. So it doesn't really matter whether you're using node PHP or ColdFusion, ColdFusion makes the REST services building really simple. And when you're invoking, invoking it from various front end frameworks, it's just like any other technologies, absolutely no difference.
Michaela Light 30:35
That is great. Because you know, a lot of people are doing really cool front ends in those front end technologies. So better integration there. And I think we should just clear up a confusion because one person said, you know, it's cold fusion in competition with these technologies. And it's not in competition at all, we're just a totally different way of doing things, you know, Angular, or react or view have focused on the front end that replacing lots of JavaScript code, you'd have to custom write. And cold fusion is on the back end. And it's doing all the heavy lifting behind the scenes that's feeding API's to those front ends. apparantly
Rakshith Naresh 31:14
works well. But it gels well with any of those technologies. It's definitely not in competition. Yeah.
Michaela Light 31:20
Excellent. So so I know we've only got time for one more question here. And I'd love to have you come back another day, because we have so many questions from people interested in ColdFusion 2021? Are you okay, doing that another time? Do another episode with wrapping up these questions?
Unknown Speaker 31:42
Sure, I
Rakshith Naresh 31:42
can do that.
Michaela Light 31:44
Excellent. So I one question several people have asked in different ways is, is there a roadmap for the future of cold fusion? Or is cold fusion? 2021, the final version?
Rakshith Naresh 31:57
Not at all. So we are actually working on the next version already. So we just finished the I mean, we just we just wrapped up cold fusion 2021. Right. So we're already working on the next version. It's called Project Athena. And as I said, the vision that we have, it's a multi version vision. So it's not just for ColdFusion 2021. So you will see significant parts of it rolling out in Project Athena as well. So that's the codename for the next version. Stratos project. Stratos was the codename for ColdFusion 2021. The next one is called Project Athena. So I we also have a public facing roadmap. I think it's already ready, and it should be up. Else I'll have to go back and check if it's not up. So we will have a public facing roadmap as well, the docs about you know where we are with Project stratas. And project Athena as well, it talks about the focus areas as well. So So yes, so we are we have a public facing roadmap as well that anybody can take a look at. And that's that's Adobe's commitment. So if you think about it, with every version of the product, we killer, we have like five years of goals, support, and do years of extended support with every with every version of the product, 40 years of core support in two years of extended support, actually. So if you're talking about project Athena coming out, maybe next year or the year after, we are talking about a commitment, like perhaps 2028. And that just shows the long term commitment that Adobe has for fusion as a product.
Michaela Light 33:28
Well, I'd love it. If you can send me that public facing roadmap. I'd love to include that in the show notes and get that out there. Because I haven't heard of that. And I don't imagine other people have this. Oh, sure. Great to see that. I'll add that into the show notes whenever it's available. And then I just want to I think you said, you know, five years full support two years extended to support that. So if we take seven years and 2021, negative 2028. But you said there's already a future version, you guys are planning, you're taking suggestions from customers for project Athena, and I'm, you know, we don't know exactly when that's going to release, but let's just imagine it's released in 2023. Another seven years old, that gets you to 2030. Right. So, really, if we put together what you just said and read between the lines, there's a commitment from Adobe through the end of the decade. And probably beyond that, but certainly this corporate commitment to that. So I, I think you know, the reality here is that ColdFusion is incredibly successful as a programming language inside Adobe, if I don't know if Adobe has any other programming languages that are more successful than ColdFusion I'm not aware of them. And there's no reason they would stop doing it. Right. It makes lots of money. You have a great team together. You've got lots of cool customers. It integrates well with your other technologies. You know, I I mean, I sort of I'm kind of confused at this. Point, people have been saying confusion is gonna die for over 10 years. It never does. And it gets better and better, and you guys have more and more success with it. I think we need to put that horse to bed or whatever the appropriate is. Absolutely.
Rakshith Naresh 35:14
I think it is time. It was time and it is time again. So I think it doesn't make sense at all anymore. Because, you know, when Adobe, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe, people started saying that Adobe is gonna kill or fusion and all of that. So I was 15
Michaela Light 35:31
years ago, I mean, internet years. I mean, I don't know how they say dog years. It's like, is it seven years or something? And I don't know, internet years is let's say it's five years between technology evolve. Yeah. That was 15 years ago, folks, that's free lifetimes in terms of software development years. And the latest release of ColdFusion is embracing the fear not just embracing the future, it's leading the future, it's better than any other language and multi cloud support. And a lot of this microservice stuff, I would say if this was a horse race, the ColdFusion horses now edged ahead of Node JS and those particulars, and it was way ahead of Node JS and other features. In fact, Nolan gave a great talk on a comparing Node JS and cold fusion. And basically, anything you can do we can do better is basically how it came out. So you can compare it, if you compare it to dotnet, or Java, and I've talked with some CIO, I talked to a CIO and we'll wrap this up because I know you have to go but I talked to a CIO, recently who'd he came in you, he said, let's get rid of this confusion stuff and go to dotnet. He spent 18 months millions of dollars recoding it and dotnet it never got completed, finally had to come back with his tail between his legs to the ColdFusion team, it was still maintaining the existing confusion happens. Hey, guys, could you update this and like, within three months, they had it all updated. They done everything he was trying to do, you know, far less cost far less time. And he kind of finally admitted, you know, I shouldn't have ever done this rewrite thing in dotnet. It was a nutso idea. You know, you drink the kool aid from Microsoft, Oracle, you think these other technologies do everything, but they don't? You know, I'm sorry to say that. I mean, you know, I don't like saying that. Sometimes companies put out fear, uncertainty and doubt, but they do.
Rakshith Naresh 37:30
Have loony Eddie, I think you said it. Right. So I've heard similar stories as well, a killer. So it's, so what you heard was the dotnet, a habit stories with Java, moving out from ColdFusion to Java, then coming back to cold fusion. So I've heard a lot of such success stories for cold fusion is in a similar fashion.
Michaela Light 37:48
Cool. Well, we will put the show notes up but the terror attack site, we really appreciate you coming on the show today, you're looking radiantly full of health, it must be all that yoga you do out in India?
Rakshith Naresh 38:05
Yeah, picking up after talking to you. So yes.
Michaela Light 38:07
Oh, well, there you go. I'm glad I spread some good things. I mean, I picked it up from India. So you know, only came full circle. And if people want to reach you online, what are the best ways to do that? Actually.
Rakshith Naresh 38:20
reach me online. I would say Facebook used to be I used to spend significant amount of time on Facebook, but not so much anymore. Definitely on the blog post. So we do we keep making those blog posts, the community portal, I would say those are definitely the right avenues. So make a post, ask a question on the community portal? I would say that's the right way to go. So I would say that's the best route I would say so that others in the community can also contribute. It's not just me talking about it, but others who can also pitch in I would say the community builder is the right is the right way to go reach out to
Michaela Light 38:58
me. All right, well, I'll put the link to that just for the few people who don't know about the Adobe ColdFusion community portal great place to be and if you post and comments a lot, they give you prizes, you can get a free copy of various software they have or, you know, other things. So and then if people have suggestions for either ColdFusion 2021 issues they're having or or if they have suggestions for future versions ColdFusion. What how should they tell you or other people on the team about that?
Rakshith Naresh 39:31
I think the community portal again, make a post saying that, you know, I know that the next version is coming up. So these are the set of things that that they believe are the ones that Adobe should look at. We'll be more than welcome to take a look at. We also receive a lot of enhancement requests on our bug tracker, we do have a public bug tracking system, right. So we do have a lot of folks who log in hansmann saying that, hey, can you do this as part of the next version We are quite done on all of those. But we do try our best to honor all quite a bit of those. So that's also a great way to let us know that. These are some of the enhancements that you're looking at. From from Adobe.
Michaela Light 40:13
Yeah, I will put the link to the public bug tracker in the show notes, too. I really appreciate you coming on the show and telling us all about the exciting new release of cold fusion and look forward to talking to you again, to answer more ColdFusion developer questions and talk to other members of the Adobe development ColdFusion team about in depth on some of those cool new features. Thanks so much. Rakshit.
Rakshith Naresh 40:37
Thanks a lot. Thanks for this opportunity, because it's always great to be in conversation with you on this interviews.
