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ColdFusion 8:Customer Wish List

From Adobe Labs

A number of customers have posted comments about features that they would like to see implemented in Scorpio or another future release of ColdFusion. Feel free to add yours to this page.

  1. Ability to view what files are in the template cache. The CF8 monitor (and Admin API) does not offer this.
  2. Ability to read EXIF Data (Keywords etc) out of Images e.g. to write into a database or something
  3. A function to create a ssh connection to linux boxes. so developers can run shell commands within coldfusion applications. If own server as root otherwise as user. (like http://www.php.net/manual/de/ref.ssh2.php on php).
  4. Have you ever thought about Webstandards? So put CF generated Java Script (e.g. Form validation or FlashForm integration via ActiveContent) into CDATA Comments so it is XHTML conform or provide a option to put the Java Script into an external file to ensure a clean, valid code! And kill those empty lines of source code produced by Application.cfc
  5. Develop an engine that would automatically create CFC's based on a database relationships (i.e. Ruby on Rails for ColdFusion) but that would leave the CFC's editable so that we could easily implement other methods. ColdFusion already has an application framework that it follows, no new framework is needed just the ability to create CFC's based on database relationships that could be read via a instance connection to a MySQL or Oracle database. (This is now available with the new Eclipse ColdFusion Wizards.)
  6. Ability to kill certain Request threads using Administrator or command-line
    • Request termination added in CF8 Monitor (in Enterprise edition)
  7. Ability to make certain ColdFusion pages run only on a particular Server Instance while clustering
  8. Official support for Debian 3.1/Ubuntu 6.06 and later (x86 and AMD64)
  9. Linux installation via rpm/deb package, with yum and apt-get repositories to check for updates
  10. Faster Component instantiation. (addressed in CF8)
  11. Improvements in CF Report Builder (poor charting options in current version - horizontal bar chart, scatter graph. When opening main & subreport at the same time, if changes are made to the subreport and the save option is chosen, the subreport takes the same name as the main report. Need much more advanced options and powerful features in Report Builder.)
  12. CF Report Builder with "Custom Page Break" options not just page break after Report Header and before Report Footer. And creating of custom bands other than Group and other standard bands.
  13. Multiple levels of Reporting including mutiple subreports in the main report.
  14. Ability to install the standard version on an alternate servlet engine (e.g. Tomcat/JBoss/Glassfish) rather than forcing an integrated install. Don't like having to install another servlet engine when I already have one, and can't justify paying enterprise prices if I don't need enterprise features.
    • Clarification: you can do this with the Enterprise (and Developer) edition, but the person is asking about Standard.
  15. Ability to add multiple queries in the Report' s Query Builder.
  16. Ability to pass array and structures to the Report Builder as parameters.
  17. Ability to control what SOAP/Webservices Engine to use (CF ver 7.x is currently "locked" into using an outdated version of Axis).
  18. Official support for Sun Solaris 10 x86 and AMD64 edition
  19. a <cfjson> tag that mimicks *&t;cfwddx>. (added in CF8)
  20. The ability to merge and insert pdf documents from files, variables or the web (added in CF8)
  21. Better debugging of CFC's when working with ajax. Coldfire is a great start...
    • CF8 adds new cfdebug=true URL/query string option for this.
  22. If coldfusion forms could provide ajax functionality by default then it will be a great feature for Developers like:

    1. filling up one dropdown based on value in other dropdown.
    2. repeat fields into a form
    3. validate fields server side with ajax
    4. add help functionality
    5. convergence with other forms processes (XFA, Xform, ...)

  23. Improve the SQL for Query of Query
  24. Improve cfscript capabilities -- in particular, add support for at least a few of the most common functions, such as throw(), rethrow(), and dump().
  25. add metadata management to different kind of documents (videos, images, text documents, sounds ...), with the most recent technologies as XMP or others.
  26. Ability to run under WAS6.1
  27. Improved PDF creation ability - print as displayed on screen ( using jrex )
  28. make the sql-parser ( used in query of querys ) available ( i have lots of sql to parse! )
  29. CFIMAP
  30. Blank space removal inside components whithout using output="no". Make output="False" the default for <cfcomponent> and <cffunction>
  31. cftop a top clone for coldfusion ( alas mytop )
  32. Graphics: support more graphics formats with cfimage, especially Adobe's own (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign)! CMYK <> RGB translation. EXIF, IPTC, XMP extraction and injection.
  33. Raise the limit of the query of query I ran into one scenario where if I was able to use three queries instead of two it would have been pretty quick & slick♫♪♫
  34. Add Combo Box to ColdFusion Tag, so that it can be used as input box and select box.
  35. Add the ability to CFINVOKE to connect to https servers that use SSLv3
  36. Support the right to left Language Arabic and Hebrew especially in flash tree (issue is w/flash client NOT cf, it works w/RTL plenty fine)
  37. Allow to use Report Builder to create letters. Right now page header, detail and page footer have to be fit on one page.
  38. Allow session variable replication between multiple Coldfusion/JRUN Servers on different subnets without using the JRUN webserver connector for load balancing or failover, i.e. allow clusters to be created using external load balancers for traffic distribution and failover
  39. Allow sorting of scheduled tasks in the CFADMIN. Its difficult when many jobs are scheduled and you want to sort by the time the job is scheduled to run.
  40. CFPOP supporting SSL for pop.
  41. Make Coldfusion open source :)... like you just did with Flex
  42. I second that. If Adobe isn't going to put the hype and energy into CF (like it does it's other products) it needs to go open source... the product is dwindling into obscurity-and that is a shame!. The suggestions above are great. We can expect to have those implemented ??? right—Never. So make it open source so we all can continue to use it, improve on it...we will all love you for it...I think it will only spell dollar signs for Adobe and allow for greater acceptance of cool products like flex, etc....
    • Well, it's clear with CF8 that Adobe is indeed putting the energy and hype into it. If you want open source, go check out the smith project.
  43. Add an attribute to the <cftry> tag to enable or disable it. This way you won't have to remove the <cftry> from the code to see the detailed error messaging. Yes, I know, you can code it, but on production servers I tend to have a whole application to treat errors where in a developing environment, I just want it spit out.
  44. Print ColdFusion report with "GRID" format, similar to Excel, as PDF or Word Document.
  45. Able to use <cfdocument> with format "RTF" option.
  46. Add SFTP to CFFTP
  47. Support for EDI-AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) and SAML
  48. Add a cffunction attribute to enable defaulting unscoped variables to a function local scope without having to use var keyword.
  49. Create a scope called "local" that can be used instead of "var"ing a variable in a function.
  50. The ability to dynamically call a method on a component such as. Component["stringPartOfMethod" & variableContainingOtherPartOfMethod](arg1, arg2 ....);
  51. The ability to set http headers for cfinvoke/cfobject webservice and cfhttp requests.
  52. Add sepiatone function to <cfimage> capabilities
  53. Enable cf flashform throttling and service control like Scorpio does with the PDF engine.
  54. I would like Adobe to support the Arabic Language implemented in Scorpio or another future release of ColdFusion and Dreamweaver
  55. Ability to restart one particular application. We have 15 applications on a server. If one application is causing problems we'd like to restart it. Right now we reboot the box and all 15 applications are affected. >-- Who wrote this? Naturally if you reboot all your applications (on that server, and possibly others) will be affected. Maybe you mean you'd like to restart each instance individually?
    • This would seem where you would want to use the multi-instance deployment option of CF, rather than the standalone (all apps in one instance).
  56. Better support for international currencies (especially that of the South Africa Rand)
  57. Improved handling and performance for cfmail and better error reporting. Including a dynamic check for valid e-mail addresses.
  58. Support for installation on True-64bit Operating System Apple Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
  59. Whatever "new" features make it in there, please make them a) rock solid and b) browser and language independent. Example: A cfgraph or cfform flash element is only useful if it can handle German and Swedish representation of dates & currencies for example, and work in Safari (OS X is coming strong), Firefox, IE7 etc.
  60. A CFIFLOOP tag with a "condition" parameter. Something to save coding lines
  61. Modify the CFINCLUDE tag to utilize site root relevant paths like .asp's #include virtual so that there is no need to create server mappings that needlessly convolute the site structure and create publishing complications when building a site using site root relevant paths.
  62. Add a getCallerTemplatePath() function that gets the path to the cfm of that called a custom tag. Right now getCurrentTemplatePath() cannot be used for this because even if you add a function to the caller scope that returns getCurrentTemplatePath() it will still return the path to the template that called the function, not the template where the function exists. This makes creating Website Template systems easier because custom tags can be aware of where the calling page is and include configuration etc. The only solution I've found for this is to cause an exception in a function and having that function return the path from the stack trace (ex. cfcatch.tagContext[3].template ) which is very hacky.
  63. Client certificate support in cfhttp.
  64. Support MS SQL2005's Failover partner attribute vai the Admin interface
  65. A Scope("var") function that, given the name of a variable, returns the scope that variable would be fetched from if it were evaluated right now. Thus, Scope("CFID") would return "SESSION", or maybe even the Session structure itself. This would aid immensely in debugging spaghetti apps where explicitly-scoped variables are few and far between.
  66. cfimage tag support for TIFF files, including 1-bit compressed (i.e., faxing.)
  67. Support for multipage tiff - at least for thumbnail creation
  68. switch to icu4j for i18n support
  69. Currently, host services disabled CFobject tag and createObject on share hosting. Is there a way CF can be improved to lift these restriction?
    • Note CF8 DID add a new admin option, "Disable access to internal ColdFusion Java components", so hosts can use that while permitting use of CFOBJECT/createobject otherwise.
  70. Ability to bypass the parser and write direct java code, like a cfscript with full java capabilities. I know, its sad, but you have no idea how many times I've wanted to use "new" instead of CreateObject. Or, at the least, improve CFSCRIPT capabilities. Given that this is bad programming practice, there would be an option in the Admin to turn off this feature, of course :)
  71. Please add the ability to password-protect the PDF file generated from cfpdf. It vould be great to be able to actually generate a PDF from cfpdf
  72. Add ARRAY attribute to CFLOOP or ability to pass an array as a collection. (Added in CF8)
  73. Add ability to convert CSV formatted data to a query as can be done with CFHTTP directly on a variable holding a csv formatted data. Currently have to save the data to a file just to turn around and use CFHTTP and then must delete file.
  74. This might be odd, but allow CFINCLUDE of PHP, or other languages and have them actually run naturally (with existing variables), instead of using an iframe, cfhttp or other means.
  75. Allow controlling CPU utilization per instance...Actually if one of the coldfusion instances decides he wants to take over 100% of the CPU... all applications running on different instances will stop responding
  76. Update POI jar file (poi-3.0.1-FINAL-20070705). That will give us the opportunity to update Summary Information of OLE2 dcouments for example
  77. A keep together or print with 1 detail option for the CFReport files group headings so that the headings are not orphaned by page breaks.
  78. Add the capability of viewing the JVM MaxPermSize in the Server Monitor- the memory used by JRun..
  79. Duplicating an existing datasource entry in the administrator.
  80. Addition of <cflock> functionality from within cfscript
  81. Allow the option of having <cfqueryparam> not use prepared statements (so CF would have to do the type checking and the sql sent to the server would be "plain" sql text). Why? Because in MS SQL, the sql behind a prepared statement is completely opaque, so SQL Profiler is useless for identiying slow queries or debugging. This isn't your fault but it makes our shop avoid cfqueryparam and that is bad for security. This option should be settable for the entire server, and perhaps overridable at a more granular level.

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