An Overview of What’s New in ColdFusion MX _1

The MX release of ColdFusion is without doubt the most eagerly anticipated software release

in Macromedia's history. Everything—every single thing—has been completely rewritten

from the ground up, in Java. Not only that, but the ColdFusion software itself now runs on top

of JRun, Macromedia's J2EE server engine. You still write your ColdFusion applications in

CFML, but behind the scenes, ColdFusion Server translates your CFML into Java source code,

compiles it into Java bytecode, and then JRun kicks in and runs the compiled Java byte code.

This whole translation-and-compilation process is entirely transparent to you, but the performance

gains are very obvious in most cases.

Along with these changes in platform and architecture came big enhancements in the

ColdFusion language and some truly powerful new technologies, some of which change the

very way that you write ColdFusion applications from now on.