New Atlanta will be exhibiting at the DevConnections Spring 2009 event in Orlando, FL from March 22 through 25. Stop by our booth to learn how you can use BlueDragon.NET to:

• migrate existing ColdFusion applications to ASP.NET without rewriting any code
• improve the performance and reliability of your ColdFusion applications
• integrate ColdFusion (CFML) and ASP.NET technologies

We'll see you in Orlando!

We were recently asked by a customer whether BlueDragon.NET could support memcached, a "high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load." Though BlueDragon.NET already supports query caching, our customer's goal is to implement a cache that can be shared across multiple servers in a cluster and that can store data types other than just query results.

In response to their request we created the Memcached client CFC for BlueDragon.NET, which is based on the .NET memcached client library.

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This the third in a series of blog entries that compare BlueDragon.NET with the ColdFusion 8 (CF8) .NET Integration feature. In the first, I discussed the architectural differences between the two products; in the second, I showed how these architectural differences translate into an enormous performance advantage for BlueDragon.NET. In this blog entry, I'd like to show the advantages of BlueDragon.NET regarding .NET compatibility.

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Michael Sprague has written a very nice set of CFML custom tags that use the jQuery JavaScript libraries to implement alternatives to the CFGRID, CFWINDOW, and CFTOOLTIP tags introduced in ColdFusion 8 (CF8). In Michael's words:

"This (CFjqAjax) is a library of custom tags that replicate the CFGRID, CFWINDOW, and CFTOOLTIP tags from ColdFusion 8. The CF8 tags work, but I find YUI and Ext much harder to work with than jQuery, and the file size of the JavaScript libraries that CF8 includes is excessive. So, I created CFjqAjax."

My first thought on reading this was, "I wonder if CFjqAjax will run on BlueDragon.NET?"

Click here for the answer

No changes were required to any of Michael's code to run on BlueDragon.NET (the data displayed in the CF_WINDOW example is different than the demo on Michael's web site, but is displaying correctly based on the contents of the downloaded package).

Nice work, Michael!

CFML-to-.NET integration is the ability to create and invoke methods on .NET objects from CFML using the CFOBJECT tag and CreateObject function. In a previous blog entry I discussed the architectural differences between BlueDragon.NET and the implementation of the ColdFusion 8 (CF8) .NET Integration feature. To summarize:

• CF8 implements .NET integration via remote procedure calls (RPC) to an external process and a Java-to-.NET bridge.
• BlueDragon.NET is implemented as an in-process extension to ASP.NET; creating and invoking methods on .NET objects is done using the .NET reflection APIs.

The implications of these architectural differences for CFML-to-.NET integration are:

• BlueDragon.NET performance is much better than CF8;
• BlueDragon.NET provides much better compatibility with .NET than CF8 (CF8 imposes limitations that BlueDragon.NET does not); and,
• BlueDragon.NET provides a wealth of opportunities for integration with IIS and ASP.NET that CF8 does not support at all.

In this blog entry I'd like to delve into more detail on the first point: performance.

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A prospective customer recently asked if BlueDragon.NET has any advantages over ColdFusion 8 for running multiple instances. For those not familiar with the topic, Adobe has published a short white paper entitled, Multiple Server instances using Adobe ColdFusion 8 Enterprise Edition; in this white paper, the benefits of multiple instances are listed as, "high availability, enhanced security, fine-grained application optimization, individualized application administration, and clustering." All of these benefits are also available in multiple instance configurations of BlueDragon.NET.

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I was approached by a prospective customer at Microsoft's TechEd conference who asked if BlueDragon.NET could solve the performance issues he's having with ColdFusion. I told him that based on our experiences with companies such as MySpace, eBags, HealthGrades, DevX, and dozens of others I was very confident it could, but that "the proof was in the pudding" and the only way to know with any certainty was to test his application.

A few weeks ago I was able to pay him a visit and help set up his application for testing on BlueDragon.NET. We ran into two minor CFML compatibility issues that we were able to fix with patches very quickly, and a few days later I received this email:

"Here are the results of preliminary testing over 1 minute:

CF7: 381 pages served Blue Dragon: 1007 pages served

So Blue Dragon served up 164% more pages or 2.6 times the number of pages as CF 7 running on the same server. This is very encouraging."

These performance gains are typical when doing performance benchmarking of real-world applications on BlueDragon.NET; in fact, a performance gain of 2.6 times is actually on the low end--we regularly see performance improvements of 5 to 10 times just by migrating an existing ColdFusion application to BlueDragon.NET.

If you're having performance problems with an existing ColdFusion application, download a 30-day evaluation copy of BlueDragon.NET to see for yourself the immediate performance improvements it can provide.

New Atlanta is sponsoring and exhibiting at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando next week, where we will showcase the upcoming BlueDragon.NET 7.1 release. As I've discussed in previous blog entries, the key new features of BD.NET 7.1 include:

• IIS 7.0 Integrated Pipeline (onRequestStart and onRequestEnd for all content types)
• IIS 7.0 Integrated Configuration
• IIS 7.0 Integrated Administration

In addition to demonstrating BD.NET 7.1 at TechEd, we are also announcing our new ColdFusion-to-.NET and ColdFusion-to-Java migration services. As experts in ColdFusion, ASP.NET, and Java technologies, New Atlanta is uniquely positioned to assist organizations that want to migrate their ColdFusion applications to either the ASP.NET or Java EE web application platforms. Look for additional information on these new services to be posted on our web site before the start of TechEd next week.

Here's an interview I did with Fusion Authority at CFUNITED-Europe a few days after our announcement of open source BlueDragon. So this is actually the first interview I gave on this subject, even though the DZone.com and CF Weekly podcast interviews were published before it. Also--unlike the other interviews--this one was completely ad-libbed, without prepared questions ahead of time (which shows at the end).

ColdFusion 8.0.1 has been released with support for 64-bit operating systems (among other enhancements and bug fixes); BlueDragon 7.0.1 was released with 64-bit support earlier this year.

I noticed that 64-bit support is available only in the CF 8.0.1 Enterprise and Developer editions; CF 8.0.1 Standard is still 32-bit only. See the CF 8.0.1 Release Notes and CF 8.0.1 System Support Matrix. Since BlueDragon Server JX 7.0.1 is available with 64-bit support (BD Server JX is the edition closest to CF8 Standard), this creates quite a wide disparity in pricing for 64-bit Windows and Linux.

Support for 64-bit Windows and Linux is available in BD Server JX 7.0.1 for $899/server for any number of CPUs; to get support for 64-bit operating systems in CF 8.0.1 you must buy the Enterprise edition starting at $7499/2-CPU server, more than eight times more expensive than BD JX. (To get support for 64-bit Solaris and Mac OS X with BlueDragon you must buy the BD/J2EE edition starting at $5999/2-CPU server. And, yes, Open BlueDragon will run on all 64-bit operating systems).

BD.NET 7.0.1 pricing is closer to CF 8.0.1. To get 64-bit support in BD.NET 7.0.1 you must buy the Enterprise edition starting at $5999/2-CPU server. The BD.NET 7.0.1 Standard edition, which is only available for 32-bit Windows, starts at $1999/2-CPU server.