1. Threading - I’ve seen a couple of requests for this but I’ve not found a need for it myself so I’m curious as to what problems this is a “blocker” for?

2. Image manipulation - there’s some good Java CFX tags and some 3rd-party CFCs that wrap Java so I don’t think this is a high-priority issue for the core product. I agree it would be a nice addition.

3. Export to PDF / FlashPaper - as you noted, PDF generation has already been previewed for Blackstone. FlashPaper would be a sensible and obvious option too.

4. CFC enhancements - I’d like to see interfaces since their absence is hard to work around. I’d like to see constructors but the work around is easier (init() method). Other than that, I think they should be left alone. Overloading and all that stuff really has no place in CF.

5. CFHTTP performance - I’d like to see a CF5 / CFMX6.1 comparison. I’ve done a lot of CFHTTP stuff in 6.1 and it seems fine to me.

6. ZIP support - again, easy CFC wrappers for Java integration abound so this doesn’t seem high-profile for the core product (I agree it would be nice though).

7. True escape character - you just double-up to escape a character “”"No, you’re the quote!”" exclaimed JacK” so I don’t feel ” is necessary. You’re second example doesn’t need it either: “red’s”.

8. Stronger encryption - as ecd observed, a little bit of Java and you have everything you need. Yes, would be nice to see in the core product too.

9. Better webservices - relies on Axis so CFMX can never be better than the latest version of Axis available around each launch (6.1 updated Axis and improved things dramatically so if Axis revs before Blackstone launches…).

10. Better whitespace - an aged-old battle and I agree something better would be nice.

So, generally good points. There’s a lot in Blackstone (based on what’s been previewed so far at the conferences etc). Ben Forta is touring in the Summer so make sure you get to one or more of his CFUG presentations!

I should of prefaced my entry by saying that there are certainly ways to get around several of these issues, however, they aren’t as seamless as they are in other languages. I’m someone who likes to simplify software as much as possible instead of having external dependencies which can be critical points of failure.

Throw all kinds of 3rd party dependencies into your software when you’re clustering, and it’s neither fun nor easy to troubleshoot intermittent problems when managing a couple dozen websites.

Also, by putting said items into the CF core itself, it would inherently be supported by Macromedia. That sort of thing make’s the PHB’s a little more comfy, and gives you a little more ammo when someone is comparing CF to some other language that already has all of these things built-in.

That said, here are my responses to your points which deem a response:

1.) I work in an environment which has lots of very, very large databases which use a database product called Omnidex. Essentially it’s a database server which works with flat files– our DB’s are so big (around 2 TB total) that it takes way too much horsepower to maintain them in a different format (at least for a company of our size). Given that, on average it takes a range of 1200ms-2000ms to return a query from one of these databases, and on a given request, we might need to search 6-10 of them with varying follow-up queries depending on what data was returned from the first set of queries.

For someone waiting for all of this to happen, it can easily get into the 30-45 second range on the client side just sitting there waiting for the results to pop-back, though we are using a lot of flushing to the screen to let them know the search hasn’t died. Although the DB product is slow, it’s very scaleable, and could easily handle more queries at a time. If we were able to thread the queries to run several at a time rather than serially run them one at a time, the reports we are compiling would return much faster. Our competition is able to do this much faster than us, and it’s really getting to be a bad thing.

One option we are somewhat exploring is rewriting the DAO in pure Java to take advantage of threading, but we really don’t want to do this as we’ve already spent the past year rewriting all of our core CF software which has been a big, painful, ongoing task.

5.) I wish I had a box around here to test this with, but in general, my observation has been that it’s a lot slower if you are opening-up multiple cfhttp calls in a row. You will probably not notice it at all unless your application is doing more than a few cfhttp calls in one page.

The speed difference is really quite shocking if you compare them. You might be able to replicate what I’ve seen by looping a cfhttp to a server not located locally and comparing the two times of the execution scripts?

A good example of the use of cfhttp in this manner would be an application doing a whole slew of cfhttp calls to check and see if various RDF’s/Atom feeds had been updated.

7.) I could of used better, specific examples of this, but perhaps there is something different/better I could be doing when I come across the escape character problem.

9.) Yep, I totally understand the dependency on AXIS. Admittedly I probably have a bit of a textbook slant to my view of webservices after rolling my own SOAP Server in CF 5 a while back, but hopefully it will get there someday.

As far as the threading hack goes, it only works for me because I’m able to write to the database with the spawned threads, and then read back those results later from the database (but not with the parent thread). In otherwords, don’t expect what you want to thread to show-up or be used on the same page that you thread it from.

If something like that still sounds useful, I’ll try to write-up something soon.

At work we mostly develop things which do not fall into your typical website/e-commerce/portal realm, so it may not be helpful to most people and productive for me to spend the time to write out some code samples and so forth. But if it is, let me know!

I recently rediscovered the tmt_java_img CFC by Massimo Foti.

http://www.cfmentor.com/code/i.....#038;id=50

Within 10 minutes of downloading I was resizing images to my will on a $2/month shared server. The catch is you need to be running CFMX 6.1.

I would still like to see better tools available but this is a great solution for those on shared servers.