My understanding from our CFUG meeting last week is that there will be no service packs for CF 5. However, hotfixes will be released as necessary. Macromedia's logic behind this is that they feel CF 5 is a stable enough product that they'd rather have all of their developers focusing on Neo, rather than service packs for a code base that they are effectively abandoning. I should note that I wasn't at DevCon and I'm not in cahoots with anybody at Macromedia, so my info is strictly from my CFUG meeting.
Performance-wise, I tend to be skeptical about white papers that claim "my product is the fastest," especially when it's the product manufacturer's. However, I have seen several independent white papers around the net on CF 5 performance, and the conclusion has always been that there is a significant performance improvement. Apparently, when Win2K was released, the good folks at Microsoft didn't bother to tell their vendors that certain "under the hood" features were changed. This caused problems with CF on a Win2K platform. (If you've been using CF long enough, you might remember the endless threads about the nightmares of upgrading to CF on Win2K when Win2K was first released.) This has been resolved in CF 5. There were also some tweaks made to code that's been around since the first release of CF. Put those two fixes together, and you have most of your explanation as to why Macromedia is claiming to be upwards of 40% faster with CF 5 as opposed to 4. (The rest of the explanation, I'm sure, is to help market a product that most people aren't really sure they want with Neo on the horizon) One last thing to note while considering the upgrade. Another note that came out of the conference was that Macromedia will "guarantee" that any app running in CF 5 will work when Neo is released. While I don't understand why they wouldn't guarantee 4.5 as well (seeing as there hasn't been any significant changes in syntax, just added functionality), at least you'll be "assured" that your apps in 5 will smoothly upgrade when the time comes. Again, as a disclaimer, I was not at the conference and did not hear this directly from the horse's mouth. However, our last CFUG meeting here in New York was effectively a "brain dump" of DevCon, and these were the facts that I gathered. If anybody knows that anything I've written above might be misleading or just plain wrong, by all means please let me know. Hope this helps in your decision! Dave. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Get the mailserver that powers this list at http://www.coolfusion.com FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
