I was just browsing around some of the feeds that I follow catching up after three days at Scotch, when I came across a post from Vince Bonfanti of New Atlanta – the people behind Bluedragon.
Nothing much you might think, being a post about BlueDragon 7.1 at Microsoft’s TechEd conference except for one thing. At the end of the post, Vince mentions New Atlanta’s new CFML migration services for those that want to migrate from CFML to Java or .NET (which are implied to be more modern web application platforms)
So, what does this say about New Atlanta? For me it suggests that they have no real interest in boosting CFML or making the world a better place for CFML developers, but are more interested in selling licenses and consulting to those who want to take their applications elsewhere.
For me, the CFML market now has two vendors I would do business with: Adobe and Railo. Anyone see this differently?
EDIT: To make things clear: I am completely behind the Open Bluedragon project ( as with any free and open project ), I just have some minor issues with New Atlanta themselves. I have no idea what happened with the OpenBD Steering Committee mailing list posts.
I agree he used a poor choice of words in ‘modern web application platforms’ but I don’t think you can hold that against him – he’s trying to sell software. And I’m sure there is a market out there for those sorts of migrations. I still give New Atlanta a lot of points for doing OpenBD. It will be interesting to see if that decision had any impact on Railo’s decision to go open-source.
Vince said “*legacy* ColdFusion applications”. By that I think he’s refering to older CF apps that may have been coded several years ago and are in need of updating, or if the original developers have moved on it may need bringing into line with whatever technology its owners are currently using.
Jim’s right in that it’s their business to sell software. NA don’t owe us a thing, in fact I think we owe them some gratitude for helping to keep CFML engine development moving forward by way of new ideas (cfthread, cfimage) and competition for Adobe. BD 7.1 looks good and shows they’re still committed to their BD.Net product which I really like (because of its flawless and practically transparent integration with .Net/IIS).
First – I must say that I don’t know Vince and I haven’t dealt with New Atlanta before. However, it does appear to me that OpenBD was their last ditch effort to attempt to get a bit of momentum on this project that has continually failed to meet their sales projections. I feel that they are shifting their focus elsewhere – and that your assumptions are correct.
Adobe / Railo are the future of enterprise CFML. OpenBD will provide an avenue for smaller projects to be deployed.
>It will be interesting to see if that decision had any impact on Railo’s decision to go open-source.
You think Railo managed to do a deal with JBoss in the time since NA announced it was open sourcing BD? The Railo/JBoss has been in the works for 18 months!!!!
Neil,
While I was listening to your talk at Scotch and respect you as a knowledgeable personality. At the same time, I think you were at the OpenBD BoF on Wednesday, right?
Do you think that the people on the Steering Committee let the OpenBD project just “go away”? From what I can tell, we are all “behind” the project and all we are trying to do is to create a successful open source CFML product. We are committed to the open source movement in the CFML community. You will soon see that we are not only talking about it, but will also follow with actions.
On the other hand, New Atlanta never made a secret that they are pushing the BlueDragon .NET engine forward. Actually thinking of it, New Atlanta is exactly doing what everybody is asking for; they are bringing CFML to other developers?
Isn’t that what everybody want and is talking about? Attracting developers from other languages to CFML. Well, to be honest, so far only New Atlanta has achieved that with going into the .NET environment.
Note: Thought I am on the OpenBD Steering Committee, these are my very personal opinions. Also, I have no bounds with New Atlanta nor do I receive any salary or alike being on the Open Source BlueDragon project.
In reality I see OpenBD to be absolutely Enterprise level. My work so far is largely under the covers but Clustering will definitely be in the mix as we move forward and it will be benchmarked and scalable and verified by heavy-duty load testing.
Sean’s words but I am not going to post more on it…. http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/New_Atlanta_cal ls_you_legacy
Neil, I perfectly agree with you.
And it seems the only legacy thing around is their website
@Nitai I am completely 100% behind OpenBD (although Railo has more appeal to me due to the different license), I am referring 100% to New Atlanta itself. It honestly looks like New Atlanta are trying to get people away from CFML with their newly announced consulting.
From what I know is that New Atlanta offers businesses that have abandoned CFML and converted to .NET a way to still have their CFML pages running but with BD.NET. So, those businesses have already gone away from CFML, but with the use of BD.NET they don’t go “all the way” and sometimes come back to the CFML language.
But, I do agree with you that the wording on Vince’s blog post is not good and could be misleading.
Regarding the licensing and OpenBD, would a classpath exception ease the licensing issue for you?
@Nitai – Exactly. Every shop in the world can’t run ColdFusion. That’s completely unrealistic. Some people ARE migrating away from CF. If you don’t believe that then you’ve had too much Adobe Kool Aid.
Why should we fault New Atlanta for helping businesses that want to go one way or the other??
Ah – seems like there is more going on here… from Sean’s blog:
http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/Farewell_Open_B lueDragaon
I’m guessing the steering committee mailing list is private so we’re only getting one side of the story but it’s unfortunate to see this project go downhill so quickly. Mark Drew, Matt Woodward and now Sean have all left in the last week or so…
Oops – I forgot – Matt left the Adobe Experts – NOT OpenBD.
[...] of a few days it seems the Open Blue Dragon project has imploded. First Neil Middleton’s post about a comment Vince Bonfanti made. Then Sean Corfield blogged a related post and a day later announces his resignation from the [...]
@ Jim
This is the last comment I will make publicly on this blog, but the project is not going downhill at all. Please read Sean’s blog post again. The project is going on. Sean just could not deal with the way Alan handled answered to some points of his. This is his personal opinion and they had differences.
That said, we will come forward with some announcements and will show that we are all behind this project and in it for the CFML community.
OK, once more for clarification I’ve made an edit to the original post.
@Jim Having spoken to Mark Drew quite a lot this week, I can 100% tell you that Marks resignation from the OpenBD committee was to do with a lack of time and nothing more sinister than that. Check out Marks blog for the details.
Hi Neil,
I made a poor choice of words on my blog posting. For what it’s worth, I’ve updated that blog entry to use more neutral language.
Regards,
Vince Bonfanti