Adam, while I'm of the opinion CF 7 _did_ bring things to the table, you're right about 6 being the monumental release. I fat-fingered the blog post and have updated it. Thanks for catching this.

Event gateways rock if you can a) use the ones that ship with CF or b) create your own with Java.

And yes, CF8 is chock full of goodness. Check out Cutter's blog post for a huge breakdown of Ben Forta's Scorpio presentation to the Nashville CF User Group.

http://blog.cutterscrossing.com/index.cfm/2007/5/1...

call me a jerk, but I think eventgateways were Macromedia half ass attempt at multi-threading CF. Once CF8 hit with cfthread, I see no reason to use them. By using cfthread you will be able to not only mimic all the functionality of eventgateways, you'll actually be able to get data back.

@tony, OK, you're a jerk! C'mon, you asked for that. The event gateways have nothing to do with multi-threading really. Yes, there happens to be an asynchronous CFML gateway included but that is more a side-effect of the event gateway architecture. The real power comes from the ability to hook into non-HTTP protocols.

You can have CF listen to a socket and respond to commands (so you could program an SMTP, POP, NNTP or FTP server in CF for example or talk to any socket-based application system - that's pretty darn powerful!).

You can connect CF up to IM services and SMS texting services. That's a huge, growing market for remote services - and CF is absolutely the easiest way to do that integration.

CF can integrate seamlessly with JMS servers via the event gateways. I've used that on several large integration projects and it's an incredible time saver.

You cannot use cfthread to mimic those integrations - that was just a comment made by the New Atlanta folks to dismiss the real power of the event gateways. I'm disappointed you believe them...

As for getting data back (from the asynchronous event gateway), check out my Concurrency for CFMX library which provides an idiomatic adaptation of Java 5's concurrency package for performing asynchronous method calls - with results - and the ability to manage a pool of asynchronous tasks or even basic vector processing (running the same code in parallel on an array of data).

Brian, I updated the URL. Thanks for letting me know. BTW, will you be at Adobe in San Jose in a few weeks? See you there if so.

Rey, thanks for the 833 reasons. =)

@Sean, Event Gateways were killed by being Enterprise only (a reasonable business decision, but bad for adoption of the technique). If they were ever provided as part of the standard edition, I think you'd see a LOT more interest in all of the amazing things they can do.

Of course, it could just be the budgets I'm used to - for a lot of projects $6k per box here or there doesn't make much of a difference - especially given the potential of the feature.

In the Computer World article a reader commented on the price of CF Enterprise edition being $6,000 and Peter you've listed the same price. Where does this price come from? I've never spent 6 grand for Enterprise edition. In fact, I just bought 9 licenses of CF7 Enterprise (with software updates, Scorpio is just around the corner you know) and paid around $4,400 for each. That's a 27% difference. I suppose the retail price could be listed as $6,000 - I don't honestly know - but who pays retail for server software?

@Peter, re: event gateways. I disagree. Adobe have said (on the Scorpio tour) that Enterprise outsells Standard which really doesn't surprise me: $3k / CPU for such an incredibly productive application server is a complete steal when you look at other "enterprise" technologies out there.

I think there's a lot more usage of event gateways than you get to hear about publicly because they're used so heavily for backend integration when ColdFusion is used for middleware projects.

I have spoken to countless people at companies all over the world who are using the JMS event gateway (with a variety of "enterprise"-priced JMS servers - as well as free JMS servers). I have also spoken to quite a few people who are building custom event gateways that integrate with specific "legacy" systems because, in comparison to building the entire machinery in Java (or whatever), it really is very, very simple to create a new event gateway.

The US$5,999 pricing for new Enterprise is on the Adobe website - just checked. See:

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/buy/

That could be some smartarse localisation (as am in Australia) but not made obvious.

But yeah I am loving CF8 so far and Release Candidate is due within weeks - if not days - with new stuff Damon et-al are still being very "mum" about. Bastards :)