It was published aparently here: - BUT - I can't reach this page (in fact it crashes my browser)
http://hardwarecentral.dealtime.com/xPR-Macromedia_ColdFusion_MX_Server_Professional_Edition_Full_Version_PC_Unix_CPD060D400~RD-94567763588 Regards, -- John Scott ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fuzion - CFAussie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "CFAussie Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 1:40 PM Subject: [cfaussie] RE: Review MX Robin, Was this article published somewhere originally? Darryl _____ From: Robin Hilliard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Posted At: Thursday, 28 August 2003 11:51 AM Posted To: CFAussie Conversation: [cfaussie] RE: Review MX Subject: [cfaussie] RE: Review MX John, I've cced cfaussie on this rebuttal so that others can use it/add on to it. The author seems to have it in for us in a big way. He doesn't have the vaugest idea what he's talking about in terms of the history of CFMX's development. The bugs they refer to were fixed soon after the inital release. MX compared to 5.0 Cold Fusion 5.0 was probably the peak of the evolutionary mountain in Cold Fusion. Though it had some reliability issues that 4.5 did not, it boasted a number of extremely powerful features no available before. However, MX is definitely a step back downhill. If you're not familiar with the politics, Cold Fusion was created by a company called Allaire. Part way through the development cycle for 5.0, Allaire sold out to Macromedia. It was a freindly acquisition, had been working together for years - e.g. Generator was a JRun application. This appeared to be a good thing at the time considering Macromedia's market share and the possible integration with Flash. Macromedia created a graphing function for Cold Fusion that was able to create interactive flash based graphs and ran quite quickly and stable. Then they released 5.0. Cold Fusion MX is the first version of Cold Fusion Macromedia did all the development on...and man did they screw it up. Development of a Java version of MX started at Allaire and LiveSoftware (creators of JRun) several years before the merger, both 5.0 and MX were built and product managed the same team, built in Boston. What Macromedia bought to 5.0 and MX were vastly improved QA processes - this was the reason the 5.0 release was so solid. >From what I understand they basically rewrote the Cold Fusion Application Server. CF is no longer based in the highly efficient language of C , but in the portable sluggishness of Java. Most pages will run as much as 50% slower, and queries to your datasource will run 75-150% slower. In addition, CF now compiles each page the first time it is called. So when you get your site up on your server, expect the first few visitors to get sick of waiting 5 seconds for each page to compile and leave...or expect to hit them all yourself. This is complete bs, and he seems to have very little idea about Java. All MX versions are faster than CF 5.0. http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/whitepapers/pdf/cfmx_perfo rmance_brief.pdf Here's a recent interview with Jeremy Allaire about CF in which he covers the move to Java: http://www.meet-the-makers.com/conversations/allaire/2/ And as it's turned out moving to Java has been fantastic for CF developers and the Java community. This presentation explains CF and J2EE: http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/productinfo/features/tech_ info/ It just gets worse though. When you first set MX up it seems to be unusable. First, you cannot have more than 2 sites running on the same server without tweaking an undocumented information file. Addressed at the time by a technote and a service pack If you do, requests for any page that has the same file name as a page on the other site(s) on the server may result in the code from one of those pages. This 'caching' of the pages is to speed up processing, and I can see it's merit, but it should not be preset and should definitely be either documented or accessible from within CF Server. You'd better also not forget to work your way into the advanced options in the datasource setup. Otherwise you'll notice every query taking 2 seconds. This is caused by CF not maintaining a connection to the datasource between requests. Lets move on to reliability now. CFFORM no longer works as it is supposed to. CFGRID has reliability problems. Server crashes happen on occasion (never with CF 5). Now my server has a tendency to lock my processor usage at 100% until the Cold Fusion application server is restarted. These were bugs addressed by the service packs. It's true the initial release of MX wasn't as stable as 5.0 - considering that the entire codebase had been rewritten in Java (the largest development effor for a release in Macromedia's history) this was not suprising. CFMX 6.1 is the best release of CF ever. http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/productinfo/features/whats _new/ I actually encountered many of these problems during the eval, and would have bought a license for 5, but could not find one for sale. I think it important to note that no one from Macromedia was willing to help me with any of these problems. I had to get help from fellow developers on the forums. MX does not compare to 5. Forums are not a channel for support. This is stated at the top of the page in the forums. I doubt he approached Macromedia support. Managing the Server Management is decent. MX has a much better interface than 4.5 for this, though I prefer the 5 interface to either. Setup is a simple install routine and you're set to go. Nothing else. You can easily log all error messages as well as any mail messages sent through CF. You can change all kinds of caching settings through an easy intuitive interface. There's a limit to what you can cache, which can become a pain as it's generally lower than I'd like my settings, but that's not a huge thing. Actually, there's not much more to say about management...it's a breeze so long as you have some basic web server knowledge (until you start hitting the aforementioned bugs). Compared to... So you're wandering how this all compares against other languages. Well, my opinion is that CF is the way to go, even in the light of MX's major drawbacks. I'll compare to asp since it's representative of most other languages like it. Cold Fusion requires you to put out a lot of money for a server package while ASP does not. This doesn't take into acount the amount of 3rd party add ons you'd have to purchase to make asp equivalent to CF feature to feature (tens of thousands of dollars) or CF's ability to run on free OSes like linux. However, CF is much easier to learn. More importantly, you can write pages much quicker in CF due to it's higher level nature. ASP pages will run more efficiently on the server since it's a native language, but CF is fine for most smaller and even enterprise applications. Unless you're expecting over a million page views a month I think you'll be fine. My 1.2 GHz server is doing about a quarter of a million a month and processor usage averages about 10%. Much worse than my CF5 server, but still acceptable. Conclusion CF is powerful and easy to learn. You'll find it better than most languages unless you're involved in some very in depth stuff. Version 5 is much better than MX, but near impossible to find a license for (at least cheaply). In addition, Macromedia doesn't want to hear about the problems and is not working to fix it. My advice is to get yourself a demo of MX. Try it. If you like it but have some minor qualms, search Ebay for a version of CF5. You'll be happy with it. BS again. CF5 is still available under our volume licensing program. We've released three service packs and CFMX 6.1 in the last year. We have a large support organisation with increased coverage in our timezone. CF licenses (like most commercial software) are non-transferable so he finishes the article encouraging people to buy pirated software - what more can I say? HTH, -- Robin Hilliard Technical Sales Engineer - Australia/New Zealand Certified Advanced Cold Fusion MX Developer Certified Flash MX Developer Macromedia, Inc. Mobile: +61 (0)418 414 341 -----Original Message----- From: John Scott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, 27 August 2003 10:58 AM To: Robin Hilliard Subject: FW: Review MX Robin, can you read this and give me some ammunition to rebutt it please ? Regards, John Scott (we met at CFUG last week) --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/ --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/
