Introducing Adobe ColdFusion (2021 release)

[Saurav_Ghosh]

Adobe ColdFusion (2021 release) is finally here!

The completely reimagined Adobe ColdFusion (2021 release) offers a modular, secure, and containerized approach to building applications that can run across multiple cloud providers or on-premises. You can now switch between cloud service providers without having to rewrite your application.

For more information, see What’s new and changed in ColdFusion (2021 release).

Take your applications to the cloud

Seamlessly manage your infrastructure and reduce downtime by quickly connecting to the Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS) database, storage, messaging, Amazon RDS, and email services. Move services from one cloud service provider to another without having to rewrite your application each time.

• AWS SQS
• AWS SNS
• AWS S3
• Azure Blob
• Azure Service Bus

Modularization

You can now install only the services your application needs, and nothing more. Modularization lets you continuously integrate small pieces of code and deliver applications quickly and seamlessly.

Use the ColdFusion Package Manager to manage, install, uninstall, upgrade, and downgrade packages.

Lightweight installer

Get up and running in minutes with an all-new installer that lets you automate repeatable installations of only the services you need. You have absolute control over what you install at all times.

For more information, see ColdFusion (2021 release) Express Installer.

NoSQL database

Optimize the scale-up architecture offered by AWS DynamoDB and MongoDB to handle large volumes of data with the built-in productive interface to NoSQL databases. Store unstructured, semistructured, or structured data, and enable easy updates to schemas and fields.

• AWS DynamoDB
• MongoDB

SAML

With SAML, all users have a single point of authentication, which gives the enterprise a birds-eye view of user-level access into the ecosystem at all times.

For more information, see Use SAML in ColdFusion.

CFSetup configuration tool

Deploy server settings from one instance to another, manage them through a console, and automate your admin tasks seamlessly with CF Setup. Uniformity of applications across servers is now a given.

For more information, see CFSetup configuration tool.

Language enhancements

CFML has evolved over the years. Developers can now incorporate modern OO programming and functional programming standards when developing applications. The following is a summary of what is new and changed in ColdFusion 2021.

• Support for parallel programming in arrays, structs, and queries
• Immediately invoked function expressions (IIFE)
• Iterable objects, via Spread and Rest operators
• Iterator support for CFCs
• Support for static fields and methods for CFCs
• Identity operator, "=="
• Case-sensitive and ordered structs
• "Destructuring assignment" feature for structs, arrays
• Dynamic switch case
• Create and execute Java within CFML
• Support for implementing/extending Java Interfaces
• …and many more!

For more details, see New and changed functions in ColdFusion (2021 release).

Other enhancements

• Licensing and Activation
• Multi-cloud RDS
• CosmosDB
• ColdFusion Administrator Changes
• Performance Monitoring Toolset changes

Support matrix

• ColdFusion (2021 release) Support Matrix

Bugs fixed and known issues

• Bugs fixed
• Known issues

[EvanSinceCF31]

Trying from Canada to download and getting nowhere using Chrome or Chome Icognito or Firefox across 2 different computers in different networks.  My colleague is trying the same and nothing happens...

https://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads.html#cf2021productdownloads

leads me to 

https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/coldfusion/download-trial/try.html

"Adobe ColdFusion (2021 release) Start your 30-day free trial"

I fill in the form (again), click the blue DOWNLOAD button and it sends me to 

https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/coldfusion/download-trial/get-started.html

No download starts automatically, there is no link I can see to download, I am totally stumped.

[evanc37990683]

Tried creating a new profile and telling it I'm in the United States and still nothing ... 

Virtual Assistant is virtually useless and I'm in the chat queue forever for a specialist. 

I've been using CF since 3.1 and this is so frustrating ... I get tired of defending CF when I can't even get the latest version and Adobe provides no help

[kishore31]

Hi Evan,

We are sorry that you are facing this problem. Could you please change the country to US or try downloading from this URL https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/download-trial/try.html? I would ask the web team to look into this ASAP.

Regards,

kishore

[Priyank Shrivastava.]

Hi, 

Could you please try incognito/private window.

[evanc37990683]

Thanks folks  

As indicated above I have tried a Chrome Incognito window with no success.

I've also tried Opera using the VPN function to appear from either the Americas (I'm really in Canada a few miles away from a tall building with ADOBE on the roof) and to try appear from Europe with no success.

[Priyank Shrivastava.]

can you please send an email to me at priyasha@adobe.com

Please do mention if you installer for Windows/Mac/Linux. 

[EvanSinceCF31]

Email sent to you Priyank, thank you for listening into the forums.

[SharedDynamics]

I love the OSGI manager!

[John.Nelson]

I noticed that the support matrix only lists Postgres 11. When will Postgres 12 support be added? Alternatively, does anyone have any idea what might break if we just drop in the latest JDBC driver for Postgres?

[Charlie Arehart]

While you await any reply from Adobe, John, I'll note first that (as you may know) they don't tend to make announcements in advance of whether (let alone when)  they may be adding support for a new version of such a thing. But they may, so it's worth asking. 🙂 

Some "good" news is that when it comes to such things as new versions of dbs, OSs, web servers, or other integrated things, they do tend to get there eventually. We just have to wait. 🙂 

But, sure, some people can't or won't wait, and want to proceed ahead. At least with dbs, there are a couple of options.

First, sometimes if we point to a new db version with our existing cf dsn (and its underlying driver), things will just "work". But this is indeed where Adobe will list in that document what is known to work. 

Second, often that is referring to the jdbc drivers that Adobe provides which in the case of things like sql server, oracle, and others is about drivers they have licensed from Data Direct/Progress. In that case, it's really up to them Progress first to update the driver, then for Adobe to get and provide it in a cf update. 

But when it comes to postgres, as you may know later versions of cf provide a driver (and a postgres option in the cf admin dsn driver types). And while you could replace that driver (and it may work), there's still another option some may propose.

And it can be considered by anyone wanting to use an updated driver for any db. As you may already know, John (and I'm adding this as much for others), cf has long offered the option to configure an "other" jdbc driver type, when setting up a dsn.

That can be used with literally ANY jdbc driver and thus any database and version. Folks interested in that can see the cf docs (or any of many blogs) that talk about using that "other" driver option. Granted, there may be little on postgres specifically, but the steps are generally the same regardless of the db.

But one gotcha with postgres is due to the fact that later versions of cf come with their own postgres driver. That's nice. And technically you CAN get a new driver, but you can't have two versions of the same driver implemented in cf at once, meaning different versions of the same jar. There's no way for this "other driver" feature in cf to point at a different specific version than the one cf came with.

So that's where your plan to just drop in a new driver jar (and use the "postgres" dsn option) may be best. It's not formally supported to replace the jar (that I know of), but it may work. 

(For those curious, this wouldn't have come up in the last with the other cf builtin data direct db drivers because they were always too expensive for anyone to obtain and try to use a "newer" one.) 

Anyway, I realize you were  asking if anyone may well have done any of this with pg12 and had any experience to report. I'll say I have none to share. Perhaps others may report that here.

But really, you may do better on that by opening a specific question here in the cf forums, as they may not see this comment in this thread. You could then offer a link to it here, or maybe share a thought here later on how things went.

Hope that's helpful. I know it's more than what you sought, but the recent change in cf supporting postgres does change things a bit, and I thought others may benefit from thinking it through a bit.

[John.Nelson]

As always, Charlie, thank you for your response and advice. I think I will make a separate post. In the meantime though, I think we're going to try just dropping in the newer jar on a test server and see what happens. The worst case is probably that CF doesn't even start up and if that happens we just put the old jar back. I'm hoping there just haven't been any breaking changes between the two versions of the driver.

[Charlie Arehart]

John, how did things go?

BTW, I'd not expect that dropping in a new jdbc driver jar would stop CF starting, only that it may make queries fail. The "good news" is that yes, if they all fail you will readily see that. Worse would be if it was only some, and not readily observed.

Finally, one mor etip about dropping in any "new" jar for something: you want to be sure that you remove the old one...and that is NOT as easy as renaming it (like postgre-old.jar), becaue the way Java works it doesn't care AT ALL about the names of files. It looks through jars in its path looking for any which internally contain a path equal to the java "package" name used in calling a class/method. And it could just as readily load a given class from the "new" or "old" jar. (I've even seen it find a class in a few whose extension was not even "jar".)

So the best thing is to remove the "old" jar from the folder...technically to somewhere "outside the CF java classpath", whose full value can be observed within the CF Admin, on the Setting Summary page (NOT just what's on the Java & JVM page, which is a subset really).

I realize your problem may be long solved, and perhaps you did not hit this problem. I leave this here as much for others who may find it, and I really ought to create a separate blog post on this and my last comment. Somehow, commenting is easier...less "formal", and less "official". 🙂

[JCC-RRamachand]

Can you tell me about the licensing for 8 Cores.  How many Virtual CPU per 8 cores? 

[Charlie Arehart]

JCC, Adobe typically will not respond publicly to questions of clarification about licensing--especially when as in this case you are looking for more precise definition of what they mean by cores and compared to "virtual cores". They would point you first at the EULA (just google ColdFusion EULA), and the couple of paragraphs on that there.

And FWIW, one thing that is stated clearly there (and can be stated clearly here) is that CF Standard is licensed per 2 cores, while Enterprise is licensed per 8 cores. 

When people want more specifics than that, they always direct you to speak to someone on the CF team (where the answer is only ever private, sadly). And you can send such a question to cfinstal@adobe.com, which is the address for free installation support. They would get your question to the right people, who would get back to you.

If YOU then want to come back and share what you learn, I don't think you're asked to sign any NDA to hear their answer. 🙂 But there are often subtle differences between what one person is asking and another, even for what may seem "the same question". There are also differences (sometimes) between what one version of CF will say in its EULA, and another. I think those are additional reasons why Adobe tends never to answer questions like this publicly. But they could prove me wrong.

Hope that helps, in the meantime.

[Don35256079v9hl]

We are running and have licenses for CF 2021. The latest container version on docker hub is update 5. This appears to be the latest update in container form. I need to get up to at least update 11 to satisfy IT Security issues (Critical/High vulnerability). How can I do this. 

[Charlie Arehart]

Don, the latest image on Dockerhub for CF2021 is indeed update 12. You can see it on the site (https://hub.docker.com/r/adobecoldfusion/coldfusion2021/tags), or of course you can pull it:

docker pull adobecoldfusion/coldfusion2021:2021.0.12

If you might be instead running images using adobecoldfusion/coldfusion2021:latest do beware that until you do a PULL of that, you will continue to run whatever WAS the latest version when you last did a docker pull of that image (with the latest tag, or with no tag at all which then presumes to give you the then-latest). Indeed, if you do that last pull now (of adobecoldfusion/coldfusion2021:latest) you will ALSO get update 12 (until later updates come out).

BTW, if you ever wonder about a CF image version (and the tag doesn't tell you), you can always confirm what update you are on by running the image at the command line with its "info" argument, as discussed on that dockerhub page above, or in the CF Docker image docs (linked to also from that page).

Let us know if this gets you going.

[Don35256079v9hl]

That was MOST helpful. Thanks so much. I got the image and installed the new container and in the Admin panel it is indeed update 12. Thanks again!

-dB

[Charlie Arehart]

Glad to have helped. Thanks for the confirmation. 

[Don35256079v9hl]

One more thought, is there any methodology for applying "hot fixes" to an existing docker update image. For example, let's say a Day-0 CVE was announced - would Adobe just release a "hot fix image" or is it practical to issue instructions for modifying an running image (i.e. from the administrator page or something similar in the running product) or perhaps from doing a docker exec -it into the image and doing edits therein. Once modified that image could be locally "committed" to a new image for restarts/deployment.  The only reason I ask is that one of the CVE's I'm currently addressing apples to Tomcat earlier than 9.0.83 and I note that upate 12 shows Tomcat 9.0.78. I suspect that this CVE will again show in our IT-Sec scan and if they'll ask. If the answer is "we just have to wait for Adobe to address it..." that's ok. Just curious with the best practices are for the container format of the product.

[Charlie Arehart]

Could you do cf updates within a container? Yes. Should you? No, if you're of the opinion that containers are meant to be immutable (no such config changes once deployed).

Do you NEED to? No. Adobe creates new images when there are new cf updates. What most would do is obtain the new image and use THAT (and like a non-image deployment, one should do testing).

Finally, as for tomcat, that too is an issue affecting those running CF on OTHER THAN containers: if you run cf's deployment of tomcat underlying cf, only Adobe can update that deployment of tomcat correctly, as the Tomcat is customized. If you try to update it yourself, things in cf could break.

Does this mean that Cf users are subject to vulnerabilities due to tomcat, even when tomcat has released updates immediately? 100%. Can we do something about it? Sadly, no.

If you're adamant about the matter, you can instead deploy tomcat yourself, then deploy cf as a WAR file into that. Sadly, deployment of cf as a war for PRODUCTION would only work with a cf Enterprise LICENSE, not cf Standard.