WDDX part 2: CF DevNet neq CF Developer Edition

July 13, 2007

As noted earlier on Crumpisms, there is one very noticeable difference in the DevNet Edition of ColdFusion, and the other flavors out there: the watermark. When using ColdFusion DevNet, a watermark is added to the output of all CFM pages as they get processed through the CF engine. Earlier this week I had a problem w/ one of my contractors: a new piece of Ajax/WDDX based code wasn't working on his laptop. After various debugging attempts, we realized that he's on the DevNet edition of ColdFusion, not the Developer Edition! So instead of getting a valid WDDX packet serialized and sent over to the Ajax function (which the Developer Edition does nicely), he was getting a WDDX packet tagged with this "ColdFusion DevNet -- Not for resale use" watermark, which made the otherwise well formed WDDX invalid, and broke the application! Just a reminder: though the names "Developer" and "DevNet" are similar, they have some very different internal behaviors that may break your applications. (Given that the Developer Edition is free, why do people use the DevNet version? *shrug*) hth.