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107 ColdFusion 2021 Revealing Details on How it was Created with Rakshith Naresh

By Michaela Light Leave a Comment

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

  • 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?
  • 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

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

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Bio

Rakshith Naresh 

Rakshith Naresh senior product manager for ColdFusion at Adobe. He decides the future direction of CF there.

Links

Interview transcript

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.

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Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview, she asks "What Would It Take to make CF more alive this year?" The answers still inspire her to continue to write and interview new speakers.

Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for more than 20 years. She founded TeraTech in 1989. The company specializes in ColdFusion application development, security and optimization. She has also founded the CFUnited Conference and runs the annual State of the CF Union Survey.

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