That’s all fine and dandy, but the whitepaper gets really interesting once it gets into future developments. It provides some early details on where Adobe is heading with future versions of ColdFusion. For ColdFusion Server, Adobe has two new releases on the horizon that will add a number of features and enhancements:

Adobe has discussed the broad outline of the next two releases of ColdFusion server — Splendor and Dazzle. In between releases, the team has continued to work on other aspects. For example, support for the popular Amazon cloud in the form of a Splendor AMI was released in early 2013, providing users with a quick and simplified approach to deploying ColdFusion applications in the Amazon cloud. The key thematic areas of improvements for Splendor include bringing ColdFusion into the era of mobile
application development and support for social applications. Special emphasis is planned for additional security features, building on the significant security work done for release 10 and taking its priorities from the OWASP Top Ten Project. Improved manageability and deployment as well as revamped and new PDF integration functionality are also planned.

For the Dazzle release, expansion of the mobile platform support capabilities and support for multiscreen content are planned. Dazzle is also expected to carry the water for Adobe’s aggressive push into the digital marketing space by introducing deeper Web, mobile, and social analytics functionality. A customizable enterprise video portal is also planned, and capabilities that will enable ColdFusion to run in cloud environments in major cloud platforms are expected in the Dazzle release. Finally, the improvements are expected to be accompanied by a strong focus on security, extending the work done with Splendor and prioritizing mobile security according to the OWASP Mobile Security Project.

As for ColdFusion Builder, Adobe plans to also release two new versions to coincide with the Server releases:

Adobe has also identified key work areas for two future releases of ColdFusion Builder. The Thunder release is expected to play a key role in the end-to-end development workflow for mobile application development as well as provide a professional JavaScript authoring experience. Focus on new developers will be delivered with new workflows around a “getting started” scenario. The following release, code-named Blizzard, is expected to coincide with the Dazzle server release and to feature one-click multiscreen support, deployment support in line with Dev/Ops integration trends, and improved test and debug workflows.

The rest of the whitepaper catalogs the various challenges facing ColdFusion, and how Adobe can turn those challenges into opportunities. It also contains a variety of case studies from various software development houses. You can read up on all of that here.

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The ColdFusion 10 – New Platform Support Prerelease program is intended to get feedback from the pre-release participants on the new platforms that we are supporting for ColdFusion 10. The scope of this prerelease is to ensure that ColdFusion 10 is functional on the new platforms – Windows Server 2012, Windows 8 and OS X 10.8 just as on the existing platforms that ColdFusion 10 is currently supported on.

“If you are interested in participating in this pre-release, send an email to rakshith@adobe.com indicating that platform (Windows Server 2012/Windows 8/OS X 10.8) that you will be able to give us feedback on. The pre-release will open to a limited number and for a very short duration. So do send in your interest soon. We are also looking to get a balanced feedback across all the three platforms and that is the reason indicating the platform that you will be able to test on becomes important.”

One person commented, “That’s a great way to help out folks on those O/S.”

Another added, “With CF10 was possible to install the latest JRE (NOT the JDK) 6 over the installed version used by CF. (after stopping the CF and Jakarta services).Yes happily running JRE 6 Update 39. Does this apply with the Jave 7 JRE? Don’t want to break a happy server (having CFSHEDULER ISSUES however).”

It’s unclear whether the “very short duration” to be accepted into the pre-release is already over.

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So, did you find one that you liked? Or did this stir up memories from long ago with languages you thought were dead and buried? Again, if there is a language you believe belongs in this list, please leave a comment and a wikipedia or official site link for the language.

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That was on September 11th.

As Michael Lee at ZDNet noted at the time, “The fix is not available in a patch, meaning that administrators will need to follow Adobe’s set of instructions for their specific version of ColdFusion and mitigate against the vulnerability manually.”

“The hotfix has been rated as important and has a priority rating of 2, so administrators need not apply the fix immediately but should do so within 30 days.”

Well, it’s already October, so if you haven’t addressed this by now, you may want to start thinking about it.

This applies to versions 10, 9.0.2, 9.0.1, 9.0, 8.0.1, and 8.0.

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In ColdFusion for example I regularly find myself adding cflog tags to my code in order to get a view into what my code is doing. Having to open and close log files constantly can be tedious at best, but luckily there is a really simple way of displaying a live view of the most recent entries using the standard Unix tail -F command.

Whereas tail on its own simply displays the last part of a file, the -F option will not stop when the end of the file is reached but will keep monitoring the file for new lines and displaying them, thereby giving you effectively a live console view into the file.

Taking ColdFusion logs as an example, here’s how you’d monitor a particular log file (mine are typically named according to the site or application I am working on):

cd /Applications/ColdFusion9/logs/
tail -F playingornot.log
"Information","jrpp-4","02/21/12","17:40:30","PLAYINGORNOT","/index.cfm"
"Information","jrpp-5","02/21/12","17:40:33","PLAYINGORNOT","/index.cfm"
"Information","jrpp-5","02/21/12","17:40:35","PLAYINGORNOT","/cfc/Auth.cfc"
"Information","jrpp-5","02/21/12","17:40:35","PLAYINGORNOT","/cfc/Players.cfc"
"Information","jrpp-5","02/21/12","17:40:36","PLAYINGORNOT","/cfc/PlayTimes.cfc"
"Information","jrpp-1","02/28/12","09:37:37","PLAYINGORNOT","/index.cfm"
"Information","jrpp-1","02/28/12","09:37:40","PLAYINGORNOT","/cfc/Auth.cfc"
"Information","jrpp-1","02/28/12","09:37:41","PLAYINGORNOT","/cfc/Players.cfc"
"Information","jrpp-1","02/28/12","09:37:42","PLAYINGORNOT","/cfc/PlayTimes.cfc"
"Information","jrpp-2","02/28/12","09:40:30","PLAYINGORNOT","/cfc/PlayTimes.cfc"

As my application runs I can see new entries being displayed in real time in my log file – very handy. This particular log is produced by adding

< cflog file="#this.name#" type="information" text="#arguments.targetPage#" >
to my Application.cfc’s OnRequestStart handler.

This technique works for any kind of text based log file on operating systems that have the tail command or similar available.

WebSocket, quoting wikipedia,

is a web technology providing for bi-directional, full-duplex communications channels over a single TCP connection. WebSocket is designed to be implemented in web browsers and web servers, but it can be used by any client or server application. The WebSocket protocol makes possible more interaction between a browser and a web site, facilitating live content and the creation of real-time games. This is made possible by providing a standardized way for the server to send content to the browser without being solicited by the client, and allowing for messages to be passed back and forth while keeping the connection open. In this way a two-way (bi-directional) ongoing conversation can take place between a browser and the server.

WebSocket is just a protocol–its only dependencies are TCP and a handful of browser capabilities–so anyone’s platform of choice ought to be able to support it. I’ll begin Part 2b by showing how other popular platforms speak WebSocket, and then conclude with a treatment of Coldfusion’s approach and a few nifty example applications to motivate further exploration.

Enter Coldfusion 10, which we surveyed
in our last article, and whose support for these new approaches to push communication is what we’ll spend the rest of this series exploring.

Here’s the plan:

Part 2 [WebSocket]

• Background
• How to do it ‘by hand’
• How to do it with Coldfusion 10
• Example application

Part 3 [Server-Sent Events]

• Background
• How to do it ‘by hand’
• How to do it with Coldfusion 10
• Example application

Part 4 [Alternatives/Conclusion]

Adobe announced today that ColdFusion 10 is available to Web developers. If you’re familiar with ColdFusion, then you should know that it’s Adobe’s server side technology for developers to create Web applications using the Java EE platform. The big addition this time is increased HTML5 support.

Adobe boasts that the newest version of ColdFusion 10 accelerates the Web development process by reducing “complex business logic into a few lines of code.” It does through the power afforded by HTML5 including Web-sockets, video players, geo-tagging and interactive charting.

“In the world of rich internet applications, the latest HTML5 standards are pushing the limits of what developers can achieve on the Web,” said Tridib Roy Chowdhury, senior director of Products & GM-Web and eLearning, Adobe. “With the increase of content consumption on mobile devices and tablets, it has become critical for companies to provide a rich and consistent brand experience on mobile. Adobe is at the forefront of the HTML5 revolution, and ColdFusion 10 delivers the first server side solutions to help develop interactive HTML5 applications to deliver richer user experiences across multiple screens from desktops to tablets and smartphones. In ColdFusion 10, we’ve focused on helping enterprise Web developers improve their productivity in development, deployment and maintenance and helped them easily leverage the latest technologies of the day.”

As mentioned, the biggest new feature is HTML5 integration. While providing all of the above technologies powered by HTML5, it also gives developers a choice in terms of publishing. They can either push out data to multiple clients or go for a point-to-point data push.

ColdFusion 10 also promises to be the fastest version of the software yet. It has replaced Adobe’s JRun software with the open-source Tomcat to increase the performance of ColdFusion. The move to Tomcat brings with it a large development community that will keep it up to speed with the latest Web standards.

The newest version of ColdFusion also comes with access to a large repository of client-side HTML5 charts. Developers can easily implement them into their apps using the built-in chart functionality. These charts can also run in Flash so more reason to integrate CS6 with ColdFusion 10.

Following the example of Flash’s latest update method, the ColdFusion Administrator will now notify developers when updates are available. Developers can also opt-in for the one-click Hotfix installer to save time.

As always, new versions of Adobe products come with a wide range of security enhancements. ColdFusion 10 is no different as it utilizes the latest security standards to protect applications from cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery.

ColdFusion 10 is available in three editions with one of them being free. The Enterprise edition of the software will set you back $8,499 while the standard edition is a bit more manageable at $1,499. The developer edition which can only be used for development purposes is free to download and use. As with other Adobe products, customers who have previous editions of ColdFusion will be able to upgrade at a much lower cost.

If you want a more visual guide to the new features in ColdFusion 10, check out Adobe’s video guide.

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Stephen O’Grady over at RedMonk compiled a ranking of programming language popularity based on an interesting set of metrics: StackOverflow questions and GitHub projects. Comparing Stephen’s findings from September 2011 and February 2012 show a significant improvement in ColdFusion’s position.

There are two ways to interpret these scatter plots. On one side, we can assume that ColdFusion’s move up in rankings in both StackOverflow and GitHub indicates an increase in usage. However, we also see that the February 2012 graph includes additional languages on the plot. Whereas the original September plot included 53 languages, the more recent February graph includes somewhere around 70 languages. Although numerically higher in rank, ColdFusion appears in a relative position with regards to the other programming languages. It seems that ColdFusion may have simply benefited from the inclusion of less popular programming languages.

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It is being reported that over a million websites were infected and this has alarmed many security experts. The malicious link has been seen in both ASP and ColdFusion sites with a MSSQL backend.

The injected script is rather simple, as it adds a script tag to a site which direct browsers to JavaScript loaded on the malicious site. The infection has been appearing in a wide variety of countries, in North America, Europe, and Asia.

According to a security expert, Mark Hofman, this injection might be the work of many people or someone who was prepping it over a long period of time, “The manual component and the number of sites infected suggests a reasonable size work force or a long preparation period”

If you want to check and make sure your site hasn’t been infected, just do this search in your source code: “