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034 What’s New In CF 10, 11, And 2016 That You May Have Missed? with Charlie Arehart

By Michaela Light 1 Comment

Charlie Arehart talks about “What's New In CF 10, 11, and 2016 That You May Have Missed?” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. In this presentation, veteran CFer Charlie Arehart will help fill these gaps for you, highlighting the top features of 10, 11, and 2016, along with some hidden gems. (Whereas his classic “hidden gems” talks have gone deep to uncover a few dozen features per release, this talk will necessarily focus on just some key ones.) With demos and resources for learning more, you'll be in a better position to take full advantage of your new CF installation.

Episode highlights

  • Why should CFers care about new features CF10?
    • When it was released 5 years ago and has gone end of life earlier this year
    • Because some people may only now be moving from 9 or earlier to 10 or later
    • Or people on 10 or above may not have paid attention to what was new then
  • Highlighting the top features of CF10, CF11 and CF 2016 along with the hidden gems
    • Tags, functions
    • Admin features
    • Security features
    • Installer improvements
    • more
  • Don’t some updaters also add new features? Yep, as well as bug fixes, security fixes
    • Sometimes functionality is removed in updaters (like YUI-based features removed with new CF2016 installer released in Dec 2016)
  • But what about Compatibility issues?
    • Adobe tries to remain backward compat, but some problems in each version
    • In CF10 especially, charting engine changed, causing many issues for some
    • Good news about trying updates: single click to install AND to uninstall
      • If update fails, try stopping CF and doing manual installation
  • Licensing issues differences between versions
    • There are changes related to this in each release
    • Some missed that in CF9, Adobe allowed for use of prod license for dev, staging and testing (in addition to long-existing Developer edition)
      • Some aspects of that tightened up in CF 11, 2016
    • Also often changes about cores, vm’s, cloud deployment
    • Read the ColdFusion EULA to know what’s changed
  • JVM updates: each release comes on latest JVM version at the time of CF installer build
    • Adobe always supports updating to latest available jvm update for that version
    • Certain updates also support moving to next major JVM version
  • Learning what’s new/different helps you take full advantage of your CF installation
  • Resources for learning more
  • Charlie and Michael also talked about some recent travels

Are you moving up to CF2016, or maybe 11? In doing so, are you skipping over 11, or perhaps even 10, in that move?

Shops often drag their feet upgrading from one version of CF to another and may well skip multiple releases in the process, so that they may not have paid attention to what was new in the release(s) skipped. Can you name the top 5 or 10 features/changes in these three most recent releases?

Mentioned in this episode

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.

What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.

And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.

You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.

All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.

Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.

No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.

√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!

 

Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Bio

A veteran server troubleshooter who’s worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart (@carehart) is a longtime community contributor who as an independent consultant provides short-term, remote, on-demand troubleshooting/tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes and experience levels (carehart.org/consulting).

Charlie Arehart

Links

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Charlie Arehart, veteran ColdFusion expert and he helps optimize ColdFusion service that are sick or slow. And he also does an enormous amount for the community on his website and on the CF411 website. And one of the things I've noticed him doing over the years is telling us about all the cool new stuff in different versions of ColdFusion.

And what we're going to talk about today and he's actually giving a talk on the C.F. objective on this is what's new in C.F. 10, 11 and 2016 that you may have missed. And we're going to talk about why you might even care about that because some of you listening maybe thinking; C.F. 10, you’re kidding?

But we'll address that and we'll look at some of the cool features you may have missed out on that came out in those. And we'll also look at some compatibility issues you might want to be aware of. And also how Adobe changed the licensing between versions that some of you may have missed.

So, we’ll have lots of resources if you want to more about. So, welcome Charlie.

Charlie:            Howdy sir! Long time no talk.

Michael:          Yes, must have been last week. Yes but you know, you've got such useful info and you’re giving two talks at the C.F. objective. I think I figured you deserve to have two podcast episodes. And so, let's just get the elephant in the room out of the way. You know C.F. 10 it came out years ago. I mean you were telling me before we started recording it was five years.

Charlie:            right

Michael:          Feels like more like eight or ten to me.

Charlie:            Right someone might think it was much longer. It’s only five years ago. And so, the whole reason that I'm doing this talk is that in the course of the troubleshooting that I do with people sometimes, they're coming to me saying hey, we've just implemented C.F. 2016 or hey, we just implemented C.F. 11. And I go cool, that should be pretty straightforward you know to go from eleven 2016 or 10 to 11. And then they’ll go, we were coming from C.F. 9. We’re coming from C.F. 8 and you may be surprised how often true. But it is really very, very often that people are making that big of a jump.

And so, I will frequently help people with the problems that can happen between 9 and earlier and 10 and greater. And we’ll talk a bit about that. But that's why I'm doing the talk back to what was new.

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