Coldfusion 8.01 Released

Yesterday, April 3rd 2008, Adobe released a Coldfusion Updater bringing the Coldfusion 8 to version 8.01.

This release fixed a host of issues as well as added some new features oft requested by the community.

Some of the new features are listed below:

• 64bit support
• Updated to Java SE JDK 6 Update 3, version 1.6.0_03.
• Updated Verity Engine
• Some EXTJS Ajax controls updated to version 1.1.1
• Support for non-standard attributes in the AttributeCollection
• Support for nested implicit structure and array creation
• A host of changes to the cftextarea rich text editor
• CFImage enhancements to support additional attributes
• PDF enhancements

For a full and complete listing of the changes, additions and bug fixes for this release see the release notes.

My Take on the Release

I am particularly pleased with the addition of the ability to nest implicit structure and array creation. When the ability to create arrays and structures implicitly was introduced I thought that nesting was automatically included and figured it must have been a bug that you couldn't nest them.

The enhancements to the cfimage tag (HTML attributes, retaining EXIF data), in my opinion, is more a completing of the tag than the addtion of enhancements.

The Ajax tags are always going to be behind at least 1 version behind what is currently available, while this may or may not be a big deal for some, others may want to use the freely available custom tag libraries such as ColdEXT, which uses the most current libraries.

I have to be honest I am not sure what additional functionality is provided by the changes to the AttributeCollection, I know we can add attributes that are not standard. Would someone care to give me a real world use-case for this?

All in all a great first updater for Coldfusion 8, the additional features really shows that Adobe listens to the community.

Happy Coding...