If you’ve not been hiding under a rock for the last few months you should be aware that New Atlanta have now released a GPL version of Bluedragon known as OpenBD. This project is aimed primarily in giving the community a CFML server that they can use, pretty much without restriction, and without cost. Driven by a well staffed steering committee, and discussed by a busy group of developers, it is set to be an interesting option for CFML developers out there.
So, how does it make life easy? Well for starters, you are pretty much free on the cost aspect. Want 100 instances running on a server hosting all sorts of stuff?, that’s fine, it’s free. Want to change something to work better for you? You can, provided that you don’t breach the GPL v3.
For me, the easiness is gained from the development story. It is now possible to have your CFML projects include the actual openBD runtime itself. So what? Well, this let’s you do a couple of things:
1. Set up Eclipse so that you can run your apps from within the IDE - no need for a CF Server installation. All you need is the appropriate Eclipse features, and a J2EE server installation folder (Tomcat or JBoss AS spring to mind).
2. Keep EVERYTHING in source control. Due to the fact that your projects contain the server itself, you are also keeping your server config within your project.
3. Set up continuous integration for CFML. With OpenBD, you are now in a position where you can have a continuous integration process getting your code out of source control, compiling it, testing it, and packaging it up into a WAR file for deployment wherever you might want it. After all, it’s a lot easier to deploy a WAR to your server than 1000 files of CFML code.
So, all in all, it’s looking rosy, and we’re only just coming up with ideas on what this allows us to do. So therefore, if you haven’t already - check it out, it’s well worth it.
As a side note, I will post details on how to get openBD running from within Eclipse another time. For those of you who are impatient, there is a screencast HOWTO here.
There should be some interesting discussions at Scotch on the Rocks (http://www.scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/) given that 60% of the Steering Committee will be there.
I find myself more and more interested with this project. I would love to see a tutorial where you could walk us through setting up a development environment as well as setting up an example application. FYI - The link above is not working.
@Dan it appears that the screencast has exploded. Adam Haskell was the originator so I would assume that he will sort it out soon ;).
All you people blogging about video my bandwidth limit was reached :). That’s a GOOD thing though the more people watching the more people learning!! I sorted out the bandwidth I now have 25x more space with the host and it should be back online now for all to enjoy. I’ll be more proactive to get more bandwidth on my next video…coming shortly
Thanks for this post Neil. We are going to be looking at this possibility. Currently we deliver CF apps to clients packaged as WAR files, but unfortunately each one requires a CF (Adobe) enterprise license limiting the pricing options. And that even if the client has no idea that they are running CF. (One possible issue is CFDOCUMENT compatibility. We use this a lot, and I need to find out exactly what the support for the tag is in OpenBD)
@Richard For you things should be quite easy assuming that language compatibility isn’t an issue for you. You can still deploy WAR files, but your development workflow may change slightly depending on how you want to use openBD (source vs WAR vs Jetty etc).
@Neil - thanks. NB A bit OT, but while I’m here I noticed another blog you mentioning a bluedragon-commented.xml file in the WAR distro. It ain’t in the one I downloaded this morning. Am I looking in the right place?
[...] is still a hot topic. Neil Middleton thinks that Open BlueDragon makes CFML development easy again. Do you agree? While we’re talking about it, the official blog has been launched, and a [...]