Rakshith has today released the latest iteration of the ColdFusion road map: "New Product Roadmap for ColdFusion".
Here's a scrape of the PDF (linked to in that article):
So that's a bit bleak. I'm not sure I needed something to manage web services. But then again I can't think what that might entail, so I'll keep an open mind. It does sound like something aimed at IT managers rather than something which'll end up being well-realised for ColdFusion administrators.
I know PDF stuff is important to a lot of people, but not me. Don't care. This could be quite good for people who do care though, I s'pose.
I don't see how "CLI" comes under language enhancements. But still: this'll be something worth having a look at, I reckon. I'm looking forward to that.
Ordered / sorted structs? Yeah... I guess. I know people seem to want to control the ordering of keys in a struct, but I have always thought that this is a misuse of a struct. Also this seems a bit stuck in a procedural coding mindset. If we want to be able to iterate over a some sort of keyed data structure, wouldn't providing something like IEnumerable so that an object's keys can be iterated over. Still: it's a bit of an edge case to want to do that too. But what an approach like this would give the CFML developer is more control over what they can do with the functionality, rather than being limited to Adobe's implementation.
Storing sessions externally? Cool. But not a language feature. This is an admin feature.
So it's pretty bloody light on areas which I am interested in: the CFML language. Still: it's early days in the pre-release cycle, so maybe more stuff will come in. Also this doc seems like a marketing doc not a technical doc, so perhaps distinct language features are not "marquee" enough for this sort of doc?
It'd be great if for once Rakshith could produce something aimed at ColdFusion's developer community.
I don't care about CF Builder or ColdFusion on Cloud, so someone else can editorialise about those.
I'm actually pretty disappointed in this. I'm certain (-ish) that Rakshith claimed ColdFusion 2016 was gonna be developer-centric, rather than PHB-centric, and it seems they've backed away from that. Pity. There are so many excellent language features CFML could add to make it a more appealing prospect for the rest of the IT industry (obviously it'd also need a marketing push in that direction too). Oh well. I guess it's not surprising really.
There's also mention of ColdFusion 13, but it's pretty nebulous:
Bleah. Don't care at all about that lot. Good to see Language improvements being a "focus". Even if otherwise completely glossed over.
As for the release/support cycle:
Not that Adobe have a habit of sticking to plan, but this suggests that given ColdFusion 10 goes into "extended support" (the yellow bit) in mid 2017 (EOL in mid 2019), then we won't be expecting to see ColdFusion 2016 until mid 2017?! That doesn't seem right. I would more expect it to show up early Q2 next year. I'd guess ColdFusion 2016+1 would be out early 2018. Hopefully I will not care by then ;-)
It's public knowledge I'm on the ColdFusion 2016 pre-release programme, but I can't bloody say anything about it yet. The next milestone I'm looking forward to is being able to write up some of the stuff I've been looking at.
Anyway... I've got work to get back to. And a sandwich to eat.
--
Adam
