Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

• Hidden Gems in ColdFusion 10
• What's New and Different About ColdFusion 10 on Tomcat

These were offered recently at cf.objective() and the SOTR/CF10 European Tour events, as I had announced a couple of weeks ago.

These are just PDFs of the slides for now, no recordings. But as those who have seen me talk before know, I tend to offer a lot of detail in my slides, so that they do stand well alone (against the modern fashion of slides that are mostly just pictures).

Sure, I could do more pictures and offer slide notes. It's not that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, just that it takes a lot more patience! :-) I may modify these presentations that way, in fact, for future presentations of them. In fact, I will be blogging shortly about the next planned presentation of them for the Adobe CF 10 Developer Week coming up in June.

BTW, apologies to any folks from the two events who had looked for the PDF for the Tomcat talk previously. Somehow I had failed to offer a link to the PDF on the presentations page, even though I was updating and uploading new variations of it both before and after the events. Darn.

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Such folks may be using the CFIMAGE action="resize" tag, or the imageResize() or ImageScaleToFit() functions to do resizing. (Or they may be also processing images using ImageRotate, ImageShear, or ImageTranslate, though the defaults for those are not problematic like the resize/scale tag/function processing).

The "problem" (if this is the cause of a slow page) is due to a default "interpolation" setting for CFIMAGE resizing, imageResize, and ImageScaletoFit. The default may not perform well at all. The good news is that the value is configurable, and you can test to compare quality/performance of difference values, as will explained below. There are still some other things to consider also. (If you're currently using CFIMAGE to do resizing, jump to the last section of this entry to see an example of code switching from the "slow" approach to the faster one. But really, you ought to read the rest of this entry to understand what's being proposed.)

While I offer all the info here for your consideration, if you need help implementing the solution, or better understanding how to find and resolve these or other problems affecting your CF server performance, see more on my CF server troubleshooting consulting services.

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Along with a few other speakers, we'll present sessions in Munich (May 21), Zurich (May 22), Paris (May 23), Brussels (May 24), and Amsterdam (May 25). See the tour dates page for details on the locations and agenda for each city.

Pretty sweet! :-) I always love going to Europe, and this will be my first time in Paris and Brussels. I'm certainly grateful to have been invited. I'll leave cf.objective on Saturday afternoon to fly right to Munich. Sadly, my wife couldn't join me (for reasons that I'll explain in a moment.)

Some may know the Scotch on the Rocks event has traditionally taken place in Edinburgh (where I had the pleasure to speak previously). And the "Scotch on the road" moniker has been used before when it's happened in another city or cities.

Hitting the road in a tour bus!

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

First, I'm giving two different sessions on Thursday and Friday:

• Hidden Gems in ColdFusion 10
• What's New and Different About ColdFusion 10 on Tomcat

See the links above for details on each talk. And as always, I'll post these talks (after presenting them) on my presentations page.

Then, on Thursday evening I'm giving a Lightning Round talk. Last year I did one on "Lies, Damned Lies, and Request Timeouts". This year, I will again do a CF-centric talk--someone has to talk about something other than beer, love, and other heartwarming or life-expanding talks. :-) This year, it will be "10 Things That Plague Most CF Servers, with Solutions". Yep, even in 6 minutes, I hope to share some surprises that many miss, but which I see daily in helping people in my CF server troubleshooting consulting services.

I'll be posting the presentation for that as well, but it will have additional detail (in terms of resources to learn more) on each topic.

Looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones. Please come say hello, and be gentle with me if I may not make an immediate connection of face to name. :-) With the blessing of attending and speaking at so many conferences comes the curse of meeting lots of people, only briefly, and often only once (or once in a great while!)

Finally, I'll note I am also presenting the first two talks above again next week, in a 5-city European tour. More on that here: Speaking May 21-25 in 5-day European #ColdFusion Road Tour, Scotch on the Road.

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I want to highlight a few of those things, to save folks having to dig around.

You can see for yourself the comparisons in at least a couple of places:

• Product Comparison (Standard vs Enterprise, in HTML format)
• ColdFusion 10 Feature improvement history (CF 8, 9, and 10, in PDF format)

What's new in CF10 but only in Enterprise?

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

And if you HAVE heard, you may well have heard from people who (as is often the case) are raising concerns about something they do or don't like, or do or don't see (that they may have expected). I'd like to address a couple of those points briefly, along with sharing the general announcement.

For more, see all the goodness at the coldfusion.com web site. (And yes, if you didn't know it, that's a nice easy-to-use domain name that redirects to the main Adobe CF page.) There you'll find lots of content about what's new, including videos on various pages (some of which include yours truly).

What's new? Lots more than you may think

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

The good news is that you just need to update the one hotfix jar. While it is discussed in the technote for the hotfix, the note about this update is sadly (currently) at the BOTTOM of the technote. I'll repeat what it says here, to give it some more visibility:

Note - Updated on March 29, 2012

Following bug is reported for ColdFusion 801 against this security bulletin hotfix.

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError Exception is thrown while using cffile upload.

We have updated the hotfix files of ColdFusion 801 to include the fix for the above issue. Users who have already applied the hotfix for ColdFusion 801 can just update the hotfix jar.

I'm pretty sure this is fixing what some found to be a reliance in the hotfix on your having applied one of the specific Cumulative hotfixes, but if someone had not, or if they inadvertently removed the CHF during the process of adding this single one, things would break. I'll note that the HF technote above does say very specifically what jars to remove, when applying the hotfix. Some people in haste instead delete all the hf and chf jars, or delete chf hars when it says to remove only hf jars. They so look similar in name.

I cover this issue of being careful about applying hotfixes (there are other mistakes you can easily make) in another blog entry I did, CF911: Are you finding CF (or CF Admin) busted after applying a hotfix? Three possible reasons.

And before someone chimes in to lament, "this is what's so wrong with the CF hotfix process, that mistakes can be easily made", I cover that too. The short answer is that Adobe is addressing this in CF10, and may even offer something to help us later for CF 8 and 9. We shall see.

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

For years, experienced developers have recommended client-side proxy tools like Firebug, Fiddler, Charles, and such. I list these and many others as a category in my CF411 site listing over 1800 tools and resources for CFers, in the category, HTTP Debugging Proxies/Sniffers/Web Client Test Tool.

I recently updated the list, though, to point out these "built-in" forms of these tools, now available in most browsers. If you may be in a place where you are "not allowed" to install new software (or are simply disinclined), knowing that the browser may have such a valuable tool built-in can be a real discovery, thus this entry.

Here's the content that I've added to that section:

• In Chrome, see the Dev Tools, available under the "Customize and control Google Chrome" icon at the top right (the monkey wrench), then Tools>Developer Tools.
• In Firefox 6 and above, see the "Web Console" feature in the "Web Developer" tools, available under the Tools menu.
• In Internet Explorer, see the Developer Toolbar which is an ad-on for IE 6 and 7, and the f12 Developer Tools that are built into IE 8 and 9 (in the Tools menu).
• In Opera, see the Developer Tools in Opera DragonFly, available in the Edit>Developer Tools menu in Windows, and Tools>Advanced on Mac.
• In Safari, see the "Web Inspector" feature of the Develop menu.
• I welcome additions/corrections/feedback.

The links I've given for each of these often have friendly introductions to using such tools. I can also commend an old but classic discussion of such tools, here.

Have you used these sort of tools? How have they helped you. Are you surprised to learn that the browsers now have such tools built-in? Chime in and share your thoughts. I may do a later blog entry or talk introducing using these tools for some common problems working with CF.

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I've not yet seen anyone try to create an ultimate list of *all* the new features in CF10, so here's my shot at it. (This is based on the public beta. I will update it soon with info from the final release.) Of course many (including Adobe) have created lists that show perhaps a couple dozen of what they think may be the most prominent features, or the most interesting for them, etc. I've just not yet seen anyone list even simply all the features mentioned in the beta new features guide. That's what I'm doing here.

But to be clear, I am not listing every new tag and function (that would be tedious.) Instead, I'm listing them as concepts, and where warranted, any relevant subtopics that expand on the new feature.

I've got more to say about the list (how I created it basically from the 244-page CF10 new feature docs, and what you can do to help expand it). But some will want me to cut to the chase, so here's the list. Please check out the additional discussion after it.

Charlie's Ultimate List of new CF10 Features, revision 1.9 (Sep 12 2012), listing 217 items¹

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

With a title like Beginner's Guide, one may wonder what to expect. As a contributor myself to several CF books (carehart.org/contact.cfm#books), I appreciate the challenge in deciding the intended audience for a book, and keeping it in mind as we are writing. And having been a co-contributor on now 10 multi-author books (not all on CF), I appreciate the challenge in keeping a consistent voice among all those authors throughout a book, as well as each keeping that intended audience front and center. It's not easy, although it can be aided greatly by careful editorial control and editing.

What to expect from the book?

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