CF 5 versus MX

[scripter73]

My company will be purchasing software in the very near future and I’m doing research.

I am accustomed to using CF 4.5, and didn’t really have a problem with CF 5 when it came out. I haven’t had any experience with CF MX, and wanted to pick the brains of the Tek-tips community out there. If I love 4.5/5, will I hate MX?

I have to make a purchasing recommendation to my IT staff, but don’t want to get “strapped” by purchasing MX if 5 is the better way to go. Also, I’m concerned about future upgrades, and since MX is basically CF 6.0, I don’t know what’s best.

I guess I need from the community your opinions, advice, experiences, and any kind of links/tutorials addressing MX that you can offer. I’ve already been out on Macromedia’s site, but I’m looking for a more general opinion. Also what worries me is that I’ve seen a few complaints on this forum about MX having installation and compatibility issues.

Any feedback you can provide is appreciated.

Thanks,
Scripter73



Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.

 

[jdaniels]

By and large I've had no problems migrating applications to MX. There are a few differences though, specifically:

1) SQL Debugging: I can't get this to work at all
2) Archiving: This useful tool (which, if it is on CF5, I can't find it) allows you to archive not only cfm files but ODBC mappings, and all the rest.

HTH,

Jonathan Daniels

 

[ecobb]

There are several bugs and known issues with MX. I, too just left a CF 5 environment and started working with MX and I'm finding serveral things that are causing problems. Personaly, I don't think it's as stable or reliable as versions 4.5 - 5. In my opinion, Macromedia pushed this out too fast, without thoroughly testing it. I'll put it like this, there are so many bugs in CFMX that Macromedia has code named the next update for it. It's called "Red Sky" (not "service pack 4" or "updater 4&quot. If the update is so large that it has it's own name, it might as well be considered another version.

That being said, CFMX does have a lot of new features and functionality that previous versions don't have. I've been learning some of them and I'm looking forward to learning some more, I only hope that "Red Sky" helps to stablize the MX server.

Just my opinion, I'm sure some will disagree.

 

[csteinhilber]

Hmmmmm... I've found that MX is infinitely more stable and reliable than 5 or 4.x.

The trouble I had in migrating was directly related to poor coding on my part in the first place. Things didn't work immediately upon upgrading to MX... but, aside from a few obscure things, like regex's behaving a little different, and the fact that they suddenly took my CSV driver and DSN-less connections away, the problems I had were caused by stuff I really shouldn't have been doing in 5.0 anyway.

Ecobb... code-naming any release in no way signifies the extent or size of a project. Nor does it quantify the number of bugs (or lack thereof) of the previous release. Whether Red Sky is an minor, or a major release, it's just a milestone in the product lifecycle. And it was on the product lifecycle roadmap long before MX was even released. Product releases do not come along simply because there are bugs in the previous version. They come along to incorporate new functionality, and address technology advances.



-Carl

 

[dakota81]

The administrator that runs the server I use has said that ColdFusion MX really wasn't working well at all under linux, and thus runs CF 5 instead. Maybe MX is just more stable on a Windows server?

 

[bhightower]

I don' think that the current version of MX is stable enough, but Red Sky will be a major fix with bugs and other misfortunes.

the following is from the beta site for Red Sky....


Simple, Solid, and Very Fast!
Red Sky was supposed to be a simple update to ColdFusion MX - fix a few bugs, tweak a few features. But you just can't keep a good team of engineers down! So we're very excited to bring you this Release Candidate beta release of what is set to be a must-have update to the best Internet application development product around. It's easier to install, easier to configure, more backward-compatible, and much, much faster. Plus, we've added support for newer operating systems and added some great enhancements to CFMAIL, CFHTTP, and CFCs.

The Release Candidate represents a significant step in delivering Red Sky to the ColdFusion community. Given the scope of change to ColdFusion, it is vital that we receive focused feedback from you, our beta testers. Use the forums, submit any bugs you find, and most of all, really put the product through its paces!

What's New in the Red Sky Release Candidate?

Significant Performance Gains: Runtime performance has been dramatically enhanced over CFMX (and RedSky Beta 2) delivering superior application runtime performance under load. Significant performance improvements have also been made to the CFML compiler, cutting initial compilation time during development by an order of magnitude.

Redesigned Installer: The installer has been rebuilt from the ground up to streamline the installation process and to provide greater reliability
OS Support has been expanded to include Windows 2003 (and IIS 6.0), Red Hat 8 and 9, SuSE 8, and Solaris 9

CFMAIL* enhancements deliver a new industrial-strength, high-performance mail handler, supporting over 1,000,000 emails per hour. It features new multi-threading, connection pooling, server failover, spool-to-memory, support for multi-part mail messages (HTML & plain text) with the new CFMAILPART tag, support for SMTP authentication, and improved character set encoding.

CFHTTP enhancements including support for the full set of HTTP 1.1 operations (GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS), full control over the content of any http request (headers and body) and timeout and proxy support.

CFPOP now supports retrieval of both text/plain and text/html message parts

Web Services: Powerful new Web Services invocation functionality including the ability to specify time-outs and proxy settings and invoke over SSL

CFC Fixes and improvements that address a number of outstanding issues, improve the use of scopes, and allow access to overridden methods with the “super” keyword.

COM Object performance and interoperability improvements

UNICODE in Access: New Microsoft Access Driver with UNICODE support

Improved Migration: Enhanced Administrator Migration Wizard and Code Compatibility Analyzer and enhanced CF5 compatibility

Updates to integrated products
Latest version of Flash Remoting (Updater 1)
Latest version of JRun 4 (Updater 2)
Updated CFCHART engine
Axis 1.1 Web Services engine
Updated versions of the DataDirect JDBC drivers (3.2 SP1)
DataDirect SequeLink 5.3 ODBC Agent, Server and JDBC driver updates
Jintgera 1.5.3

CFLogin is now tied to sessions and supports NTLM/Digest security.

Character set Fixes: Red Sky improves the Chinese-Japanese-Korean customer experience by removing the need to explicitly declare charsets/character encodings in most situations.

More than 400 general issues fixed

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brannonH
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