Yesterday, Richard posted a comment on this blog asking about CFDOCUMENT support in Open Bluedragon.
I therefore thought I would post up links to two documents on the New Atlanta website describing the compatability of Bluedragon with Adobe ColdFusion. In these documents, Open Bluedragon matches the functionality of the J2EE version (as far as I am aware).
Thanks a lot Neil. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support CFDOCUMENT - see the following for the reasons.
http://www.chapter31.com/2008/03/16/vince-bonfanti-and-the-differences -between-bluedragon-versions/
There are other options of course, but means rewrites (and RE-TESTS, and tweaking CFDOCUMENT was a bit of a PITA first time round)
Richard,
Have you considered using the commercial edition of BD/J2EE? It has all of the advantages of OpenBD that Neil describes in his previous post, plus CFDOCUMENT support. And, BD/J2EE is less expensive than CF Enterprise; if you want to redistribute BD/J2EE in a VAR/OEM arrangement, we can probably negotiate pricing to further reduce your costs. Contact sales@newatlanta.com for more info.
BD uses a 3rd party product to assist with PDF creation which costs about $5000 per server license if bought separately. I emailed ICEsoft about 2 months ago asking if they’d consider a deal for Open BD users but they didn’t even bother to reply.
That’s a shame because if NA left the hooks in (which Vince said they could do) ICE could sell a version that only works with Open BD (to protect their mainstream sales) for a reduced cost, like, er, $100. I have no idea how much Open BD users would be prepared to pay. Maybe $500 tops for commercial use?
… or you could just use ColdFusion 8. In addition to , it has a full suite of PDF tools. Plus you’ll get the full backing of the 5th largest software company in the world. Adobe has and continues to be open to OEM agreements.
Also to add to your links, I find the most unbiased list of incompatibilities is listed on the BlueDragon Wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueDragon#Compatibility
@adrock - been down that route already with Adobe
@vince - At the moment we are considering whether we will restructure our offerings to provide “lite” versions which will not offer PDF output, in which case OpenBD will make a lot of sense. I’ve already done some testing and so far no gotchas. However in future, and if the general OpenBD experience is good, we will certainly look at BD/J2EE. The Adobe licensing has been a pain for a while when in effect all we want is a runtime and not the full server capabilities
ive been looking a blue dragon awhile myself. now that it has gone open source ive been getting more exited about it (along with everyone else and their mother).
this cfdocument problem is distrubing. removing the limitations of cost to cfml through open source could do so much for bring it to everyone, but without compatibility of something like the cfdocument tag seems a serious restraint on its exceptence in the open source community. (at least in my opinion)
also i found limited support for flex/flash remoting. with the birth of open source flex 3 framework, will there be support for flex integration?
I just ran across this post while surfing, not sure if this will help and if it’s possible to use with the OpenBD, but here it is:
http://www.pdfbox.org/#Features
It’s free and open source and possibly something someone can build on or use right away.
Hope it helps!