How much has Cold Fusion changed in the last several years?

dlnw wrote: I last used Cold Fusion around the time it was bought by Adobe. I started concentrating on learning PHP. Now my local college is recruiting me to teach a beginning class in CF. Has it changed dramatically in the last several years?

Listen to Adam Lehman, the ColdFusion Product Manager at Adobe. He talks about the changes in recent years, and what motivated them.

I find it odd that you were not able to find anything on Google which answers this question, but... oh well.

The enhancements, version by version, are summarised here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldfusion

Performance was dramatically improved between 6->6.1 (however 6.0 was not fit for release in my view, so 6.1 just got it up to minimum expectations of a product describing itself as "version 6") and 7->8.  It was also improved between 8->9, but in more targetted areads (CFC instantiation).  Cf8 was a dramatic improvement over CFMX7.

That said, I don't think the Java-based implementation of CF caught up with CF5's speed until CF8, so you'd probably not see much improvement there, other than the fact all the kit running it these days would be orders of magnitude faster now too, so intrinsically it'll seem quicker.

--

Adam

Some of the big changes I noticed since I started with version 4.5 are:

Query of Queries - version 5

User Defined Functions - version 5

Components - version 6

cfdocument - can't remember the version

cfthread - version 8 or 9

Go to the feature pages for Coldfusion 8 and 9

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/coldfusion8/features/

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-enterprise/features.html

The basic syntax hasn't changed that much, but there are a lot of new features which bring along additional syntax.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software