Coldfusion 8, the next iteration of the underperforming (in terms of market share) web application server platform/framework, is now live! Many hints have been thrown about but this post by Ray Camden in his blog on over the weekend, I personally expected it to be on 30th July or 1st August or 8th August (Scorpio/ 8 August(8)).When Tim Buntel was at WebDU (Sydney) in March, he did say expect it in the middle of the year, which technically was 21/22 July. Although a few days off, it is understandable considering the extra bug fixes and goodies that were thrown in.

Regardless, I am just glad it is finally out of the door and looking good.
Some of the additional features CF 8 has over 7 which i feel are worth mentioning over the others are:

• Server Monitor
• Doing dynamic realtime presentations(real plus for doing fancy presentations, web based presentation from anywhere using up to the minute data, better have a good internet connection and server though)
• Improvements in both CFC and CFML including: CF tags which does the AJAX for you (i believe most of the AJAX should be based on Adobe’s own AJAX Framework Spry)
• RSS and Atom feeds out of the box
• Improved performance from new JVM and engine (suppose to be at least 30% faster and in ‘certain’ scenario up to 300%, personally 30% for 1 generation is enough, i think 300% performance increase is few and far between personally.)
• Exchange Server Integration (this is the only one that I have not seen or read about so far but this will help doing CRM type applications and tracking email via exchange for one, or at least thats what i hope it means!)

There are many other features which can be viewed at the product page here.

Disclaimer – Adobe have not paid me to write that CF 8 is available, I have not seen any news so far on many of the CF blogs i keep up with so I thought I blog a little about it first.

I will post about why Coldfusion 8 has its own place and its actually not that expensive to run shortly.