I know I’m quite a few days behind on this story, and every CF blogger and their mom has already posted about this, but I do at least have my own personal spin on this.

But, for those of you that don’t know, the holy grail of ColdFusion MX, CFMX 6.1, has been released!

I’ll be honest– I think that CFMX until updater 3 was not production ready. I’d used it on another couple of smaller projects, and frankly there were quite a few things in it which were bad news. The biggest bug I came across was with SQL Server connections being randomly dropped. Sometimes cycling the service would work, sometimes it wouldn’t.

Once updater 3 came out, I was reasonably satisfied, but still not necessarily excited other than being able to call Java classes directly and the whole CFC thing to a point. Then I got onto the Red Sky beta team, and I started getting excited.

Now that all of the major bugs are worked-out, other than the strange/limited web services support, it makes me happy. The speed difference is really incredible– and I don’t mean just the initial compile time. I wrote a quick little script when I was doing performance tuning for CFMX on FreeBSD which was pretty FPU intensive, and it was really quite amazing to watch the execution time slim down through the various betas and release candidates. On my XP workstation, that script that would on average run in around 320ms at the start of the betas now consistently runs between 20-30ms. Outstanding! I really couldn’t believe it, but I knew it wasn’t a result of some strange caching as the calculations it was doing are dynamic.

Another big stepping stone in CFMX 6.1 is that the CFC Page Context bug has been squashed. What’s that you ask? Well, essentially when trying to access more than one shared scope within a CFC method, it would get very unhappy. Now that this problem is fixed, as well as some inheritance issues being cleared-up, I decided to finally use CFMX on a big project including CFC’s with multiple inheritance goodness. The initial performance tests look good, and this app really needs to be bulletproof, and I think it will be.

Where can you get the update? Well, at Macromedia of course.

My hat goes off to Macromedia for this big update. Thanks guys!