The long awaited ColdFusion MX 6.1 (formerly Red Sky) is now available for download. I though t it wasn't going to be out for a while longer, but it looks like it's been added to the Macromedia web site (although no mention on the homepage yet).

CF MX 6.1 is so much more than just a maintenance update for ColdFusion. In addition to the over 400 bug fixes in this release, you should (in most cases) notice a huge boost in the speed and stability of the application server thanks to major improvements and tuning undertaken by Macromedia's engineering staff.

Here are the highlights of the new release:

• App code is now compiled in memory as opposed to disk, resulting in a significant decrease in initial page compilation time as well as an increase in overall runtime performance.
• The installer was completely overhauled, making it easier than ever to install ColdFusion MX. Additionally, a single installer now covers all versions of ColdFusion.
• Speaking of versions, Macromedia decided to change the way ColdFusion MX is licensed. I won't go into all of the details here, but I will say that the coolest part is that the Enterprise version now lets you install a FULL copy of JRun and then deploy CF MX 6.1 on top of it. Yep, that's right, a FULL, LICENSED copy of JRun. This means that Enterprise customers can start taking advantage of ome of the more compelling features that J2EE has to offer such as multiple server instances, JRun's buddy list clustering, etc.
• ColdFusion MX is now deployable on additional operating systems including Red Hat 8 and 9, SuSE 8, Solaris 9, and Windows 2003 Advanced Server. Additionally, deployment is possible on Mac OS X and AIX.
• COM support was vastly improved with a new version of the JIntegra COM/Java bridge (1.5.3).
• A new version of Apache Axis (1.1) is including, fixing several web services issues, adding support for SSL, proxies, and timeouts, and improving overall performance.
• DataDirect JDBC driver were updated to 3.2 SP 1.
• DataDirect SequeLink 5.3 ODBC Agent and Server.
• Unicode is now supported in MS Access.
• Updated Sun JVM (1.4.2).
• Flash remoting updated to Updater 1 level.
• Underlying JRun 4 updated to Updater 2 level.
• cfchart engine updated.
• Email engine has been totally overhauled. In addition to huge performance improvements (ability to send 1 million + emails an hour in Enterprise), several new features were added including connection pooling, multi-threaded message sending, backup mail servers, support for multi-part messages, SMTP authentication, and fail-to support.
• CFC's get several major bug fixes and new features. The biggest improvements are the fix to the unnamed/variables scope (more on this later), the addition of a new super "scope" for referencing overriden methods and properties in a parent CFC, a fix for the dreaded page context bug, and the ability to set "global" methods for all CFCs on your server.
• ColdFusion's built-in security mechanism has been updated to give you the option to tie cflogin's timeout to the session scope.
• New releaseComObject() function for forcibly terminating a COM object connection.
• New wrap() function for automatically wrapping text.
• timeFormat(), lsTimeFormat(), dateAdd(), and datePart() now support milliseconds with a new mask (l).
• getTickCount() now returns a counter representing the elapsed time in milliseconds from Unix Epoch (January 1, 1970, 00:00 GMT).
• cfapplication tag now supports new loginstorage attribute, allowing logins to be tied to session scope or a cookie.
• new xaxistype and yaxistype attributes added to cfchart tag.
• cfdump tag has been updated to allow you to dump COM objects.
• cfexecute has a new attribute called variable that you can use to specify a variable name to hold any output generated by the call. Previously, output could only be written to a file.
• cfhttp was completely rewritten and now supports all HTTP 1.1 operations (get, post, head, delete, put, options, and trace). Additionally, cfhttp gets several new attributes: getAsBinary, multipart, proxyuser and proxypassword. Additionally, there are several new return variables available.
• Two new attributes for the cfhttpparam tag: encoded and mimetype. Also, two new values for the type attribute in the cfhttpparam tag: body and header.
• cfinvoke tag gets a few new attributes: proxyserver, proxyport, proxyuser, proxypassword, and timeout.
• cflogin tag now supports HTTP Digest and NTLM authentication.
• cfmail tag bonanza! New attributes include charset, failto, replyto, username, password, and wraptext. Additionally, you can now specify multiple servers (to act as backup servers) in the server attribute in the Enterprise edition. Also, type attribute was expanded to allow additional mime types to be specified.
• cfmailparam tag upated to allow additional mime types in the new type attribute.
• cfmailpart tag added to allow for multi-part mail messages.
• cfpop can now retrieve multi-part mail messages.
• MUCH, MUCH more!

Here's the best part about this release. If you have an existing ColdFusion MX license, the upgrade is completely free! I've been running it in a test environment for quite some time now, and I can say without any hesitation that this is the best, most stable release of ColdFusion ever!

In the self-promotions department, my new book, Programming ColdFusion MX (2nd Ed.) is set to ship on August 13th. O'Reilly specifically decided to hold publication to allow me to update it for MX 6.1. As far as I know, it's the only book on the market that covers all of the changes (and there are a ton) introduced in ColdFusion MX 6.1. I'll be posting more about the book in a few days.