Well, I’m sure you have seen this elsewhere but CF MX 7 is out. Now that all the waiting is over the new question is will we buy it? As fellow CF blogger Barney b. notes how will it fit into the plans of smaller shops.
The company I work for is pretty small though we do alot of development for larger organizations such as the US government. However, even for them the target audience of the application is typically pretty small. So, are the new features worth it for us to upgrade or to suggest upgrading to any of our current clients.
Currently, I don’t think so. I don’t think we can justify the upgrade to our existing clients. For one client I had thought the flash forms might be a handy improvment to what is currently a very large grid (sometimes up to 2100 text fields!) for logging large attendance sets. Browers tend to render that many form fields slowly - so I thought the RIA aspect of the flash form might lead to a smoother user experience. From what I have seen of it though I’m not so sure - and nor am I sure it is worth the cost of a new license considering what the customer has already works; even if the initial load time is, at times, slow.
I think our only “product” might benefit from the upgrade. The application and session events alone might make it worth it. Plus the highly improved Verity search; not to mention the pdf and flash paper generation. However, upgrading it to use CF MX 7 may make it a harder sell for us initially since many of our current customers already have CF MX 6. Overall, it should be interesting to see how our company incorporates this new release into it’s business plans. The delicate balancing act of keeping our current customers happy while also helping some move toward the new and advanced features found in MX7.
I imagine we will probably adopt MX 7 slowly for our customers; but depending on our partnership agreement with Macromedia we may have the opportunity to start some real development against it internally very soon.
Of course, then, I’ll just have to maintain apps in CF5, MX6, and MX7. Fun!