The heart of ColdFusion technology has always been to provide developers features which will improve their productivity. This new 2016 ColdFusion version continues to push this idea by including new features to help developers quickly create and build applications.
Command Line Interface for CFML
The 2016 ColdFusion release comes with a new command line interface which lets you locally run CFML scripts without running the ColdFusion server. This makes scripting in CFML all the better. You can work with databases, email, files, and web services via the simple command line interface. Your arguments and named arguments can equally be easily passed to the command line interface.
Coldfusion Technology for Webservices Support
There is additional metadata for the REST services which means that ColdFusion can create swagger documents for the REST service defined within a document. The ColdFusion 2016 release will automatically create a REST description file of this type.
Coldfusion Technology to Improve Performance
ColdFusion 2016 has introduced two new settings, namely passArrayByReference and searchImplicitScopes. The first passArrayByReference passes on the array by reference for an application once this feature is activated. The second searchImplicitScopes bypasses searching for variables in implicit scopes, letting it find defined variables in the application more quickly. There are a number of other enhancements to CFML which are listed in the documentation for the 2016 release of ColdFusion.
SOAP to REST Translation
It is now possible for ColdFusion developers to perform one-time configurations at the API Manager portal in order to publish a SOAP service as a REST service without changing any code. API Manager can accept REST requests, construct SOAP envelopes for the backend and thusly convert the SOAP response back from the service into a usable REST response. What more could you ask for?
CFML Enhancements
CFML is enhanced as a language with every new release of ColdFusion, including of course this 2016 version. Some of the 2016 ColdFusion release’s big improvements include:
Safe Navigation Operator
The safe navigation operator is a short-hand operator which can easily get rid of isDefined or NULL checks within code. It only executes the right-hand side of the safe navigation operator is the object in question is defined but isn’t null.
Insertion Order Struct
You can create structs using ColdFusion 2016. These structs maintain the order of insertion of elements while iterating over the structs too.