Ben Forta and Tim Buntel on CF8 - 8 Reasons you want it now

The W8 is almost over.

Ben's slides were GR8! Well for those who are there you will know what I mean.

For those who weren't there here is the reasons why CF8 is a must have release.

• CF8 Goes beyond the language making it easy to build CF applications. It contains a collection of Eclipse Plugins which will include productivity enhancements and the the debugger.
• Have confidence in you applications with Server Monitoring. Developers will be able to see what works and what doesn't work so well before you deploy. It will help you to build better applications from the start, with help during load testing. CF8 is also very backward compatible with existing CF6.1 and CF7 code.
• It runs on more platforms with VMWare, MacTel, 64bit Solaris and JBoss support. VMWare will allow CF to run in a virtual server. JBoss will provide an alternative J2EE platform with an open source solution.
• Users will be happy, with Flex and Ajax Support, Image processing, PDF applications and On Demand presentations. You will will be able to create and read PDF forms. Image processing has been added with high quality image processing.
• Security. Multiple RDS and Admin accounts allow the ability to restrict Users permissions by account and linked to sandboxes. Eclipse plugins can be restricted. Strong encryption has been added to the application.
• CFML improvements include Javascript Operators, Argument collections, File handling functions in cfloop, CFC Interfaces, Array and structure creation and CFC serialisation.
• CF8 will play well with other technologies like .NET Exchange Server, RSS and Atom News feeds, Flash Media Server and Live Cycle Data Services.
• Overall Server Performance is faster.

2.4 Million lines of code in real applications have been tested and used to identify places where tweaks could be made to improve the application.

List applications are now 3 to 4 times faster.

cfswitch is now 3 to 4 times faster.

cfparam is 10 time faster.

Date functions are 5 to 6 times fasetr.

Regular expressions are 2 to 3 times faster.

CFC creation is 20 times faster than CF7.

A typical application will likely to be 30 to 40% faster than before, withouth using any new functionality.

New features like cfthread will allow apps to be written in a better way too.

Release D8 of CF8 will be soon but they failed to anounce it today. Very disappointing!