Last Thursday on March 17, 2016 I went to an Adobe ColdFusion meetup in Minneapolis/St. Paul hosted by the aptly named Minneapolis ColdFusion Users Group ColderFusion. Adobe sent out a few members of their product engineering team to meet with CF users in the community face to face and go over some of the new features of ColdFusion 2016 release.
I'm excited this is the first major update release of ColdFusion since version 11. There were a lot of updates, these were some of the categories of the new features added to ColdFusion (2016 release), I have reordered some of the categories from the Adobe Help Documentation What's New article to help organize my thoughts here. (Italic sections map to Adobe's What's New articles.)
CFML and Programming Fundamentals
ColdFusion 2016 release adds a few new tools for ColdFusion developers. These tools provide new or expand previous functionality into additional dimensions. I'm excited about these new features because it will make ColdFusion even better.
With respect to changes to CFML the ColdFusion markup language and CFScript; one tool that I'm most excited about is the Safe Navigation Operator.
What is the Safe Navigation Operator? Why should I care?
So in general one thing that developers must constantly be aware of is referencing objects before they're declared. Back in the early days of C, C++, Java, Objective-C and at present for most of those languages, programmers had to generally instantiate/initialize a variable in memory before it was used. In most C-style languages you must declare what kind of variable you're creating before you use said variable this would tell the application when it was running/at runtime that it would need to reserve a portion of memory to hold this variable.
First as a preface for understanding what this is it's helpful to understand a bit of background on this new tool and how it is used in ColdFusion. One common programming practice that exists in ColdFusion and in many C-style programming languages like Java, C++ is an abbreviated form of an if statement called a ternary operator. It's essentially like an abbreviated expression that can shorten an if statement into a single line of code -- this is a pseudo code example of what ternary expressions look like in most c-style programming languages:
If (a is correct) ? (Then evaluate b) : (Else evaluate c);
Related Links:
Adobe News Press Release, The All New Adobe ColdFusion is Here [Posted February 16, 2016]
This article is a brief press release from Adobe Corporate Communications announcing the release of ColdFusion (2016 release).
Adobe ColdFusion Help, What's New in Adobe ColdFusion (2016 release)
What's New in Adobe ColdFusion (2016 release) is the landing page for Adobe's Help documentation that enumerates the main sections of new features documentation in ColdFusion's 2016 release.