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Introducing the Making Blackstone Series

It's hard to believe it's approaching 10 years since Macromedia ColdFusion first began making web application developers productive and helped them create dynamic websites easily. It would probably be an understatement to say that a lot has happened in that time. A lot has happened in the world and to application development, end-user expectations, the pervasiveness of technology in people's lives, and to the evolution ColdFusion. However, with everything that has changed in the past decade, there are some fundamental truths in the ColdFusion mission that we have tried to ensure over that time and with each release. A few of those principles include our beliefs that ColdFusion should:

• Make customers insanely productive in building applications of all sizes
• Make cutting edge application development easy
• Make new types of solutions possible
• Make the lives of administrators and IT groups easy

The ColdFusion product went through a bit of a metamorphosis with the 6.0 release (the ColdFusion MX release) several years ago. With that release, ColdFusion moved onto the Java platform and added support for CFCs (ColdFusion components) and web services, among other features. Last year, the ColdFusion MX 6.1 release nailed bugs and stability issues, introduced dramatic new performance and scalability gains over 6.0., 5 and 4.5, and is a proven, rock-solid foundation for us to evolve and innovate future versions of ColdFusion.

Earlier this year, we released an updater for the 6.1 release, which included hot fix rollups and cleaned up some final issues. We feel very good about the current codebase, and we're hearing the same from customers as well.

By the way, if you're still on version 4 or version 5, you're missing out on some dramatic performance and scalability gains (ColdFusion MX 6.1 is up to 23 times faster than older versions). You can realize these benefits by simply upgrading your server. Additionally, upgrading to ColdFusion MX 6.1 is the easiest way to upgrade to the ColdFusion Blackstone release. We're working hard to ensure that the upgrade from ColdFusion MX 6.1 to ColdFusion Blackstone is absolutely painless, and as smooth and seamless as we can make it.

The Blackstone release will support upgrading from ColdFusion MX 6.0 and ColdFusion 5—upgrading should be easy and absolutely seamless—but ColdFusion MX 6.1 customers will have the smoothest transition. The reason we're so confident of this is that ColdFusion Blackstone really is the ColdFusion MX 6.1 Updater under the hood, plus many additional fixed issues and all of the new and incredible Blackstone features.

On that note, we thought you would like to hear from the lead Blackstone engineers for each of the major new feature areas. They'll tell you about the features their teams built and about the innovation process that produced these incredible features in this release. We thought that in the spirit of openness and transparency we've tried to maintain around this landmark release, you might like to get inside the minds of the people who have lived, breathed, and labored for well over a year and a half in making Blackstone.

Over the next few months, and at regular intervals, ColdFusion engineering team members will give you the inside scoop so you can hear first-hand accounts of the process of researching, innovating, creating, refining, testing, and polishing the new features. In some cases you'll hear about some of the internal debates, the disappointments and setbacks, the challenges and triumphs, and the major breakthroughs that all played key roles in "Making Blackstone." Most importantly, you'll hear all about the new Blackstone features, have a chance to try out some of the new features with code samples, and learn what the features mean for you.

Blackstone delivers something for everyone: application developers, application users, system administrators, and emerging developers who have a limited amount of time to become productive in building web applications.

We are very excited about the new features in this release and think that you will be too. I don't think I've ever witnessed a more passionate and energized group of people working together towards the common goal of delivering for our customers than the people on the ColdFusion team during this release. In fact, the only other group of people I can think of who might be more passionate about what they're doing are ColdFusion customers themselves—your success is what drives us.

So let me take this opportunity to say thank you. Thank you for your support over this incredible past decade. Thank you for your feedback and efforts to make the product better. And thank you for doing what you do.

We know many of you are the unsung heroes in your organizations, and we aim to arm you and keep you armed with innovative, productive, useful, scalable, and efficient options in ColdFusion as you solve problems, innovate new solutions, streamline processes, build new businesses, train more kids, sell more products, become more efficient, communicate more effectively, and make the world a better place in thousands of other ways.

Upcoming "Making Blackstone" Article Series

In the upcoming "Making Blackstone" article series that we will publish over the next weeks and months in the ColdFusion Developer Center, you will have the opportunity to learn about new or updated features in Blackstone including:

• "Blackstone Reporting" by Dean Harmon, Sherman Gong, Collin Tobin and Bill Sahlas
• "Blackstone Printable Output" by Xu Chen and Hiroshi Okugawa
• "Blackstone Event Gateways" by Tom Jordahl and Jim Schley
• "Rich Forms" by Mike Nimer and Kumaran Nallore
• "Blackstone Searching and Web Services" by Tom Jordahl and Jim Schley
• "Blackstone Clustering, Deployment, and Multi-Instance Support" by Geoff Greene, Erik Tierney, Brent Baker, and Jim Murphy

At the MAX 2004 conference in New Orleans last November, we brought virtually every Macromedia ColdFusion engineer. They hosted plenty of informal sessions to give you the real deal on Blackstone and ColdFusion in general. We were careful to build time into the Blackstone release schedule to account for changes in the product as a result of your feedback at MAX.

If you haven't purchased upgrades to or copies of ColdFusion MX 6.1 Enterprise with subscription, which includes entitlement to two years of software upgrades, check it out now—it's a great and cost-effective step. Read more about the Blackstone release.

Again, on behalf of the entire Macromedia ColdFusion Team, including development and QA engineers, product and program managers, engineering and QA managers, IMD writers, editors, and managers, and executive sponsors, let me say, "thank you." This one's for you.

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