After coming off of the successful launch of Creative Suite 6, Adobe has not been resting on its laurels. They’re back again with another product release that should go hand-in-hand with CS6’s HTML5 features.
Adobe announced today that ColdFusion 10 is available to Web developers. If you’re familiar with ColdFusion, then you should know that it’s Adobe’s server side technology for developers to create Web applications using the Java EE platform. The big addition this time is increased HTML5 support.
Adobe boasts that the newest version of ColdFusion 10 accelerates the Web development process by reducing “complex business logic into a few lines of code.” It does through the power afforded by HTML5 including Web-sockets, video players, geo-tagging and interactive charting.
“In the world of rich internet applications, the latest HTML5 standards are pushing the limits of what developers can achieve on the Web,” said Tridib Roy Chowdhury, senior director of Products & GM-Web and eLearning, Adobe. “With the increase of content consumption on mobile devices and tablets, it has become critical for companies to provide a rich and consistent brand experience on mobile. Adobe is at the forefront of the HTML5 revolution, and ColdFusion 10 delivers the first server side solutions to help develop interactive HTML5 applications to deliver richer user experiences across multiple screens from desktops to tablets and smartphones. In ColdFusion 10, we’ve focused on helping enterprise Web developers improve their productivity in development, deployment and maintenance and helped them easily leverage the latest technologies of the day.”
As mentioned, the biggest new feature is HTML5 integration. While providing all of the above technologies powered by HTML5, it also gives developers a choice in terms of publishing. They can either push out data to multiple clients or go for a point-to-point data push.
ColdFusion 10 also promises to be the fastest version of the software yet. It has replaced Adobe’s JRun software with the open-source Tomcat to increase the performance of ColdFusion. The move to Tomcat brings with it a large development community that will keep it up to speed with the latest Web standards.
The newest version of ColdFusion also comes with access to a large repository of client-side HTML5 charts. Developers can easily implement them into their apps using the built-in chart functionality. These charts can also run in Flash so more reason to integrate CS6 with ColdFusion 10.
Following the example of Flash’s latest update method, the ColdFusion Administrator will now notify developers when updates are available. Developers can also opt-in for the one-click Hotfix installer to save time.
As always, new versions of Adobe products come with a wide range of security enhancements. ColdFusion 10 is no different as it utilizes the latest security standards to protect applications from cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery.
ColdFusion 10 is available in three editions with one of them being free. The Enterprise edition of the software will set you back $8,499 while the standard edition is a bit more manageable at $1,499. The developer edition which can only be used for development purposes is free to download and use. As with other Adobe products, customers who have previous editions of ColdFusion will be able to upgrade at a much lower cost.
If you want a more visual guide to the new features in ColdFusion 10, check out Adobe’s video guide.
