CFMX 7 - Should I Upgrade? When?
posted under category: ColdFusion on February 9, 2005 by Nathan
Well CFMX 7 is out already. Good work MM folks. It looks pretty seamless with my existing apps, and I can't wait to start using the new application events. Hopefully we'll upgrade our Enterprise licenses and I'll get to play with event gateways too.
Now down to business, Is there really any reason to upgrade? Yeah new programming toys are nice, but we've been doing fine without them so far. CFDocument will please the higher-ups, as will the built-in script protection, but how about a magical ability to keep JRun from crashing from too many queued threads? Does it have that? What about invincible database drivers that won't choke up? What about a connector that stays connected to IIS, finds out if it gets disconnected (starts throwing JRun errors) and re-connects itself. I've had to restart IIS and/or CF way too many times.
I'm not going to say that CF isn't enterprise-ready, or that it won't scale, because it is and it will. It always will, depending on how you code your sites and tweak your servers. I just have a few reservations.
Anyways, we're probably not going to upgrade, at least not the majority of our servers, unless there's actually something more than neat features.
Hey here's a marketing idea for Macromedia. Put out a service pack early, only a few bug fixes, whatever's blaringly obvious. Do it in a month after the release date so you can say you've fixed any initial release problems. How many people and companies wait for Microsoft's SP1 or 2 before investing in a new enterprise OS?
As a side note, I think the excel format on cfdocument will probably win us over in the short-term, but that's just for our intranet. Strange, I never really liked the idea of calling an excel spreadsheet a 'document'.