Adobe Nails ColdFusion Cofin

http://dalefraser.blogspot.com/2007/07/adobe-nails-coldfusion-cofin.html Regards Dale Fraser http://dalefraser.blogspot.com

Dale, I'd suggest posting the content of your blog here rather than just the url. As for your post on CF 8 being a dead product because of the price increase, note that the increase if for Enterprise. How many people here (other than me) actually use or need enterprise. ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

To add to the point, who has Enterprise without maintenance? CF8 is costing us precisely zip over what we've already paid (and considering what we get the maintenance was a bargain). ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

How many people use it? After this stunt, not many I hope. Almost 6 times the price is just stupid. I had budget allocated to upgrade from Standard to Enterprise, first time to purchase Enterprise, that just went out the door.

6 times? I think your talking apples and rocks. Both are roundish, but.... The 6 times your talking about is the cost of moving from standard to enterprise. For those who are not making that major leap (most everyone), the figure of 6 times is just a scare tactic. As for who's using it, many people including sites under the House of Fusion banner, like Fusion Authority. House of Fusion itself will be moved to 8 as soon as I have another free second (and after Jury Duty who's timing sucks). > How many people use it? > > After this stunt, not many I hope. Almost 6 times the price is just stupid. > > I had budget allocated to upgrade from Standard to Enterprise, first time to purchase Enterprise, that just went out the door.

Adobe today put some nails in the ColdFusion coffin with the Release of ColdFusion 8. To the suprise of the world, they decided to increase the price by 25%. What a joke when the biggest complaint is the price when compared to like products. I'm not sure who made this decission, or if any big shot in Adobe even fought for a price reduction but Adobe's one and only shot at doing something significant with ColdFusion 8 has been ruined. I will now seriously consider the future of our developments here and look at alternatives that won't cost be $7,499 US per server. Ben and the team, great product you should be proud, but I'm ashamed that you let this happen.

> As for your post on CF 8 being a dead product because of the price > increase, note that the increase if for Enterprise. How many people > here (other than me) actually use or need enterprise. Me! To be honest, the difference between $3,000/CPU and $3,750/CPU is pretty negligible in an enterprise world. For the - new-in-8 - (multi-)server monitoring and RDS/Admin user management features, unlimited CFTHREAD and unlimited MS Exchange integration, that extra $750/CPU is well worth it (as well as the general reasons Enterprise is worth paying more for: unlimited event gateways, PDF/document services, reporting etc). The key thing everyone should be rejoicing about is that Standard Edition includes: event gateways, pdf/document services, cfthread, MS Exchange integration, reporting, presentation generation. There would be a lot of complaints if these were Enterprise only features. There were plenty of complaints around CFMX 7 because event gateways were Enterprise-only! -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ "If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood

I want to echo what Sean said...I looked at CF8 and thought, "wow finally a product that I would really label Enterprise." Not to say CF7 wasn't Enterprise, it had some great features and was a great release, but I think the monitoring and some of the Administration changes helped make it really enterprise friendly. Thats not mentioning the performance enhancements, exchange integration (which currently means nothing to Lotus Shops bleh), and whole suite of ajax tools that really make CF shine as a UI web layer for large Java apps. You have to look at this product and realize enterprise is worthless to you unless you really need super scalability. Standard has it all, albeit limited/throttled. Sure cfthread and exchange integration and PDF (?) are throttled but they are available and until you have 100+ (dare I say probably more) concurrent users using the exact same functionality Enterprise means very little. Its like a computer, my Mom doesn't need a dual core 64bit AMD with 2gig of ram and 256mb dedicate graphics card running iSCSI to send me pictures and read email (unless she is running Vista then she might ;) ). Gone are the days where you have to have enterprise to play with those nifty event gateways. If enterprise looks to expensive to you then you probably don't need it, or you need to look at some other Enterprise software costs and revisit in 15 minutes. Hell I say that single move by Adobe to offer a more complete Standard Edition will open more doors for ColdFusion than any single feature. I say Bravo! Adam Haskell ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

> You have to look at this product and realize enterprise is worthless to > you > unless you really need super scalability. Standard has it all, albeit > limited/throttled. Sure cfthread and exchange integration and PDF (?) are > throttled Has anyone got a matrix of just *how* the PDF is throtted?  Because I'm quoting for a big form-based app at the moment, and I would like to know what the limitations are with PDF in standard as opposed to Enterprise. p.s. why don't people *trim* their quoting! -- mac jordan home: www.kestrel.org work: www.webhorus.net them: www.jordan-cats.org

So, I have to agree with Dale... Adobe has put a bullet in CF. For example, Standard Edition would be fine for me but I need Oracle access and now I need to pay twice that just to do supported Oracle connectivity.  We are an enterprise and when I discussed this with management they came back and said we should just invest our time in ASP.NET. We can retrain our developers, and not worry about buying upgrades and we'll get new features as they come out. You know, I don't disagree with them. I just recently started playing with Visual Studio .Net, and it's far easier to write web services and create great web content. Adobe thanks for the memories, a user/developer since version 4.5. - Charles On 7/30/07 5:27 AM, "Adam Haskell" <a.haskell@gmail.com> wrote: I want to echo what Sean said...I looked at CF8 and thought, "wow finally a product that I would really label Enterprise." Not to say CF7 wasn't Enterprise, it had some great features and was a great release, but I think the monitoring and some of the Administration changes helped make it really enterprise friendly. Thats not mentioning the performance enhancements, exchange integration (which currently means nothing to Lotus Shops bleh), and whole suite of ajax tools that really make CF shine as a UI web layer for large Java apps. You have to look at this product and realize enterprise is worthless to you unless you really need super scalability. Standard has it all, albeit limited/throttled. Sure cfthread and exchange integration and PDF (?) are throttled but they are available and until you have 100+ (dare I say probably more) concurrent users using the exact same functionality Enterprise means very little. Its like a computer, my Mom doesn't need a dual core 64bit AMD with 2gig of ram and 256mb dedicate graphics card running iSCSI to send me pictures and read email (unless she is running Vista then she might ;) ). Gone are the days where you have to have enterprise to play with those nifty event gateways. If enterprise looks to expensive to you then you probably don't need it, or you need to look at some other Enterprise software costs and revisit in 15 minutes. Hell I say that single move by Adobe to offer a more complete Standard Edition will open more doors for ColdFusion than any single feature. I say Bravo! Adam Haskell ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

and not worry about buying upgrades and we'll get new features as they come out..... Be careful on this one. For instance, when .NET 2.0 came out, and we wanted to upgrade our servers, we discovered that a lot of our 1.0 apps would not work. So in order for us to do this we had to re-write a lot of our apps. Not from the ground up mind you, just update some code that was not backwards compatable and would have caused a LOT of issues had we not looked into this. Not sure if this is still an issue with Microsoft since I have not touched .NET in over a year, but you might want to look into this part of it. Bruce >

You can use the Oracle j2ee drivers (that comes with Oracle) to work with CF standard. Just a little more work on your end, but it works fine. This is for Oracle 10g, it may be slightly different for other versions.. -Find the ojdbc14.jar driver on your oracle installation -Put that jar into your WEB-INF\lib -In coldfusion, create a new datasource and choose "other" as the driver   -JDBC URL would be jdbc:oracle:thin:@ip:port:database   -Driver Class oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver Now why does CF standard not just go ahead and do this for you. Well franky I don't know, but it really doesn't matter if you have the drivers anyway. It does confuse the hack out of people, which is bad. Wanted to make sure you knew this before you decided to jump ship :) John mason@fusionlink.com 770.337.8363 www.FusionLink.com - Specializing in ColdFusion and Flex hosting Now offering ColdFusion 8 Enterprise hosting FREE Subversion hosting So, I have to agree with Dale... Adobe has put a bullet in CF. For example, Standard Edition would be fine for me but I need Oracle access and now I need to pay twice that just to do supported Oracle connectivity.  We are an enterprise and when I discussed this with management they came back and said we should just invest our time in ASP.NET. We can retrain our developers, and not worry about buying upgrades and we'll get new features as they come out. You know, I don't disagree with them. I just recently started playing with Visual Studio .Net, and it's far easier to write web services and create great web content. Adobe thanks for the memories, a user/developer since version 4.5. - Charles On 7/30/07 5:27 AM, "Adam Haskell" <a.haskell@gmail.com> wrote: I want to echo what Sean said...I looked at CF8 and thought, "wow finally a product that I would really label Enterprise." Not to say CF7 wasn't Enterprise, it had some great features and was a great release, but I think the monitoring and some of the Administration changes helped make it really enterprise friendly. Thats not mentioning the performance enhancements, exchange integration (which currently means nothing to Lotus Shops bleh), and whole suite of ajax tools that really make CF shine as a UI web layer for large Java apps. You have to look at this product and realize enterprise is worthless to you unless you really need super scalability. Standard has it all, albeit limited/throttled. Sure cfthread and exchange integration and PDF (?) are throttled but they are available and until you have 100+ (dare I say probably more) concurrent users using the exact same functionality Enterprise means very little. Its like a computer, my Mom doesn't need a dual core 64bit AMD with 2gig of ram and 256mb dedicate graphics card running iSCSI to send me pictures and read email (unless she is running Vista then she might ;) ). Gone are the days where you have to have enterprise to play with those nifty event gateways. If enterprise looks to expensive to you then you probably don't need it, or you need to look at some other Enterprise software costs and revisit in 15 minutes. Hell I say that single move by Adobe to offer a more complete Standard Edition will open more doors for ColdFusion than any single feature. I say Bravo! Adam Haskell ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

John, From what I know (or remember) of the legalities of it all - it is actually rather expensive for CF to ship with a driver, as there are a slew of licensing costs.  This was one of the reasons it took so long to get postGres and mySQL5 drivers with CF. But there has never, ever been any issue with you adding them in yourself, as then the licence isn't bound to the CF product. Annoying, I know, but that's just how the cookie crumbles. Mark ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

> So, I have to agree with Dale... Adobe has put a bullet in CF. For > example, Standard Edition would be fine for me but I need Oracle access > and now I need to pay twice that just to do supported Oracle > connectivity.  We are an enterprise and when I discussed this with You might also just buy Standard and use a third party oracle driver. I connect quite happily to DB2 with standard using a different driver for example. Enterprise comes with high quality drivers for enterprise DBs - but Standard is not limited to those drivers that ship with it. Jim Davis

Charles, Why not just use Standard, and use the free JDBC drivers you can download from Oracle themselves, and just make an 'other' connection? What's the problem with that? I hate to say this, I have to wonder - if your business is complaining about paying ~10K for their server software, (or less), then you probably struggle to qualify for the 'enterprise' target that ColdFusion really is targeted for. (and most of us aren't, we're just paying for upgrades). Maybe I'm too far removed from the bean counters (and that is quite possible), but I actually am quite confused by all of this noise. I'm actually sitting back and looking at all the new features that were put in Standard, which is meant for people who aren't enterprise, and going 'cool! loads of new stuff, without a price hike... nice work for targeting those that aren't enterprise, and essentially giving them more for less cost in a product'. Mark ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

Mark Mandel wrote: > Charles, > > Why not just use Standard, and use the free JDBC drivers you can > download from Oracle themselves, and just make an 'other' connection? > > What's the problem with that? No ref_cursor support.  That's only provided with the enterprise drivers built in to CF.  Just to name one ;). Matthew Williams Geodesic GraFX www.geodesicgrafx.com/blog

Unless the Oracle supplied driver has changed recently, some things don't work the same as the DataDirect CF Oracle driver, like stored procs returning results from ref cursors and BLOBS. If it has changed, great. ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

You have to use the Thin client and then it works fine. Eric Unless the Oracle supplied driver has changed recently, some things don't work the same as the DataDirect CF Oracle driver, like stored procs returning results from ref cursors and BLOBS. If it has changed, great. ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more ----- example, Standard Edition would be fine for me but I need Oracle access and now I need to pay twice that just to do supported Oracle connectivity.  We are an enterprise and when I discussed this with management they came back and said we should just invest our time in ASP.NET. We can retrain our developers, and not worry about buying upgrades and we'll get new features as they come out. You know, I don't disagree with them. I just recently started playing with Visual Studio .Net, and it's far easier to write web services and create great web content. ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more ----- finally a > > product that I would really label Enterprise." Not to say CF7 wasn't > > Enterprise, it had some great features and was a great release, but I think > > the monitoring and some of the Administration changes helped make it really > > enterprise friendly. Thats not mentioning the performance enhancements, > > exchange integration (which currently means nothing to Lotus Shops bleh), > > and whole suite of ajax tools that really make CF shine as a UI web layer > > for large Java apps. > > > > You have to look at this product and realize enterprise is worthless to you > > unless you really need super scalability. Standard has it all, albeit > > limited/throttled. Sure cfthread and exchange integration and PDF (?) are ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more ----- to > > expensive to you then you probably don't need it, or you need to look at > > some other Enterprise software costs and revisit in 15 minutes. Hell I say ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

A quick check of the latest Oracle thin client download page shows that Java up to 1.5 is supported. Since CF8 ships with Java 6, there may be a further issue. ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more ----- -- mxAjax / CFAjax docs and other useful articles: http://www.bifrost.com.au/blog/

I will keep that in mind...I just know that was the solution for 6 and 7.  I would assume they would be releasing something that is compatable with 1.6 in the near future.  Mark this down as one of the many reasons why I dislike Oracle *grin*. Eric A quick check of the latest Oracle thin client download page shows that Java up to 1.5 is supported. Since CF8 ships with Java 6, there may be a further issue. ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more ----- -- mxAjax / CFAjax docs and other useful articles: http://www.bifrost.com.au/blog/

> Charles, > > Why not just use Standard, and use the free JDBC drivers you can > download from Oracle themselves, and just make an 'other' connection? Or, you can buy the DataDirect Oracle driver yourself: http://www.programmers.com/ppi_us/Product.aspx?sku=DB1%20017X Of course, once you see what it costs retail, you may rethink CF Enterprise being "expensive"....

----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more ----- No doubt about that!  DB2 drivers are REALLY REALLY expensive.  IBM wanted to charge us like $30k for "DB2/Connect" to give us the JDBC drivers direct from IBM. If you use free drivers, you get no support from Adobe.  Or anyone. At least with CF Enterprise using the included drivers, you get support from Adobe if you need it. Rick

>I just recently started playing with Visual Studio .Net, and it's far easier to write web services and create great web content. How is the .NET code for a webservice easier than writing access="remote"? -- mxAjax / CFAjax docs and other useful articles: http://www.bifrost.com.au/blog/

The .Net development not only creates the web service but it also creates WSDL and a Test page to test the web service. Which is really slick compared to what CF produces. I've also found the web service code generated by CF does not include the proper header info, which has caused some application developers a headache consuming some of the web services. On 7/30/07 6:06 PM, "James Holmes" <james.holmes@gmail.com> wrote: >I just recently started playing with Visual Studio .Net, and it's far easier to write web services and create great web content. How is the .NET code for a webservice easier than writing access="remote"? -- mxAjax / CFAjax docs and other useful articles: http://www.bifrost.com.au/blog/

So it makes the WSDL and a test page. CF makes the WSDL as well. Now a test page - I grant you - would be nice. That could be a good edition to CFEclipse. I haven't heard of any issues with the WSDL CF produces. Have you logged bug reports for these? ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

And if we are going to compare Web Service features - CF makes automatic documentation for web services. That's probably just as useful as a test page. :) ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

Charles E. Heizer1 wrote: > to pay twice that just to do supported Oracle connectivity.  We are an > enterprise and when I discussed this with management they came back and said > we should just invest our time in ASP.NET. We can retrain our developers, and > not worry about buying upgrades and we'll get new features as they come out. your "enterprise" shop will pay to re-train developers but not an extra $2000 for their app server? geez, that's the stupidest thing i've heard in a long while and working w/the government here, i hear a lot of really dumb ideas.