The long awaited ColdFusion 8 made it public today with much fanfare in the ColdFusion community. It’s been two years since the release of ColdFusion 7, the last major release, and in the meantime more features have been added than most people know about. So what’s new in this release and what would make you want to upgrade or switch to it?

• Integrates with Java, .NET and Exchange
• Talk to Flex or Ajax applications natively with Flash Remoting/JSON support
• Create and manipulate PDFs, create PDF Form take image snapshots of PDF pages and more
• Powerful server monitoring with hooks and alerts. Also able to monitor clusters of servers.
• Eclipse Debugger and Ajax debugger
• Ability to set just about all settings per application. Meaning one CF Server can power completely different applications without overstepping configurations.
• Image manipulation tags that mirror much of what you had to step into Java to accomplish.
• Ability to create Atom and RSS feeds easily using cffeed.
• Zip and Jar support
• Faster object creation than ever before.
• Lots of syntactic sugar including inline array creation, loops, arguments to objects and more.
• Fun additions like onMissingMethod
• Threading and Asynchronous Gateways
• Read about more features

So how much do these features cost? $649/$1,299 for the upgrade/full version of CF8 standard, $3,750/$7,499 for the upgrade/full version of CF8 Enterprise. I hate to see ColdFusions price tag so high, but that’s the audience it’s for. It’s slowly getting to the point of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”. Although I do think the language by itself offers more features than anything else I’ve ever seen, I hope the climate of the community at that price continues to thrive and provide open software. At the price so much of what many ColdFusion developers write is behind closed doors and cannot be shared openly, which has limited the openness of the community. CF8 doesn’t change that status either way, so I don’t see the community going anywhere but up from this release. I’m looking forward to when we upgrade at work!

The gatherings in Orlando keep on coming! The guys over at the Orlando Ruby Users Group have put together a Bar Camp right here in my own backyard. Although I’m still getting my feet wet when it comes to Rails, their presentations are always worth showing up for. If you live in the central Florida area and have been wondering where the developer community is, here’s a great chance to find it.

Lists seem to draw the most attention. Much more attention than things like research and journalism. These reporters can get away from their criticism for the well known reason that any press is good press. I don’t think Corfield’s ever common quote “If you’re not annoying somebody, you’re not really alive.” is true in this case. The post I’m referring to of course is the recently Dugg Ghosts in the Machine: 12 Coding Languages That Never Took Off (link to Digg, they’re not getting the hits) which lists 12 languages they claim have, obviously, never made it big. The ColdFusion community struck back in force on the Digg post which had me wondering. Are they wrong? Did it “take off” compared to other technologies in the market? Well, Indeed.com to the rescue!

Odd, it seems as though 3 of the 12 languages have a decent amount of jobs currently. The other 9 are admittedly on the low side with .001> of all jobs using these. What’s funny to me is that not only is ColdFusion the most popular on the list, but ColdFusion spelled wrong is more popular than the others. The number of ColdFusion, Delphi and Powerbuilder jobs have slightly declined in the past two years, which in all cases could be only the beginning of an eventual fall from “grace”, but these are still interesting numbers. Where do these three compare with other scripting languages?

Here’s some other contenders, albeit in a slightly different realm. Python, Ruby and Ruby on Rails are outshine ColdFusion on the Tiobe index, but when you combine the two spellings of ColdFusion it has the largest number of jobs of the bunch (or very close). What does this mean? It means the article is wrong, and not well researched; unless they make the claim the others never took off that is — especially since Ruby came out the same time as ColdFusion, and Python even before that. This doesn’t deny the fact though that Ruby and Python are growing rapidly while CF is not. While we can blame poor marketing by Adobe, the high price or sensational reporting like this for the lack of growth, the real reason could just be that the others are a better fit for more places. With more smaller companies getting into the web now than ever before, and initial startup cost being such a prohibitive part, things outside a LAMP stack are a luxury better spent elsewhere. But that’s the obvious reason – what if more people coming out of college with java backgrounds just click more with tagless languages? These reasons are enough to get many people to steer away I’d think. I might be getting a little off track. Whatever language you choose, good for you; they all do the same thing. Just get something done and call it a day.