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.

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).

CFML Compatibility Guide

CFML Enhancements Guide

Yesterday, I posted an entry on the options that are now opening up to us as users of Open Bluedragon.  Although I was talking largely about the possibilities from a development point of view, I largely skipped the deployment story.

Well, I’m not going to go into that now, as I’m sure that’s a whole series of posts in itself, but what I will say is that Per Kleven has posted a HOWTO on how to deploy openBD to Tomcat whilst maintaining an easy upgrade path for the inevitable regular updates.

It can only be a matter of time before this sort of thing is available for deploying openBD to practically every Java server under the sun (no pun intended).

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.

Last night, Google launched their Amazon EC2 competitor, App Engine.

For those of you that don’t know - Amazon EC2 is a system whereby you can upload a machine image that you can then create literally hundreds of virtual images from for very little cost.  Accompanying this is the Amazon S3 service which is essentially a huge virtual storage device in the cloud - priced in a very reasonable pay-as-you-go style.

The cool thing with EC2 is that it is all controllable with an API - so, for instance, you could potentially have a web application that monitors it’s own load, and scales out new servers as required fully automatically - you only pay for what you use.  This is great for new start-ups who aren’t really sure if their new super-duper social site is actually going to get no visitors, or become the next Facebook.

Google App Engine is a little different.  With this, you are given a pre-prepared machine image which is basically a web server rigged up to use Python (with other platforms potentially coming soon) and a Google driven data-store, which is bound to be a bit speedy.  Initially this might seem a little annoying as a CFML developer until you check out the free account.

As a non-paying App Engine subscriber you are somewhat limited on what you can do - but as Google describe it, you have enough for half a gig of storage and around 5 million page views a month.  Now, thats a pretty busy website in my eyes.  So, if you have a busy static website, a load of files requiring storage, or are handy with Python it’s worth a look - you could end up with a free web server.

On the other hand though, as a CFML developer, you’ll need to look at EC2.  With the advent of the open-sourcing of Bluedragon, we are now in a position where we can build a no-cost server image (comprising of Linux, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat and Bluedragon) which we can then deploy to EC2 and scale for very low cost and end up with a supremely scalable, and performant cluster of servers.  Best of all, if you don’t use it much - it doesn’t cost you as much, unlike having a rack of under used servers somewhere in a data-center.

So, come the revolution, we can all be building our infrastructure from nothing but the cloud, and scaling as far as we want, and best of all, for no cost but still using CFML.  Obviously Amazon EC2 is the only choice at the moment for cloud CFML computing, but I’m sure Google will make their system a little more customisable over time.

I’ve been a little late to this party but I thought I would post my thoughts on the recent announcement by New Atlanta that they were making their Bluedragon J2EE product open source.

There’s been plenty of people commenting on this already covering pretty much every opinion there can be ranging from wholehearted enthusiasm to nothing but negativity.  There’s also been a couple of posts whereby people have completely misunderstood and thought New Atlanta were pulling out from the CFML market altogether.

So, what are my thoughts?  Well, in a nutshell it’s got to be a good thing for both us as CFML developers, and New Atlanta.  For them it’s undoubtedly a marketing exercise to produce a viable appealing alternative to CF8 that can act as a loss leader into the other NA CFML products.  Overall, awareness of Bluedragon has already increased, and will again once the infrastructure is in place to deal with the product being moved into the community.  More people will check it out to see if they can reduce their software costs, whilst others will take a look purely out of interest.

An interesting option that is raised is that of bundling.  It is now possible, assuming that all the licenses align properly, of bundling CFML products in with a web server, J2EE container and CFML engine - for no cost.  This could give rise to loads of virtualisation options with regard to things like Amazon EC2, as well as pre-baked CFML appliances.  Basically imagine where you are currently using CFML and think how you could change your distribution / pricing models by giving BlueDragon a shot.

But, so far, I’ve only talked about the fact the software is free (as in beer), rather than the fact that people will be able to browse and contribute to the codebase.  How will that effect the community?

In short, I don’t think anything will change in the slightest.  CFML developers are normally not Java developers and therefore pretty much unable to contribute - and all the Java developers out there don’t really have a vested interest in developing a CFML server, they’re gonna go for something that helps them directly such as Eclipse as Tomcat.

This has already been very much proved via the Smith project, a purely open source CFML engine.  At the time of writing this has roughly 60% language coverage coming from only a very small handful of developers.  This signifies that as interest from the CFML community goes - there is none.  Nobody seems interested in developing the platform in it’s open source nature, only the no cost.

So, why is this?  Well I can only think there’s two arguments here.  Firstly, the one of pricing.  Although CFML is very productive and pays for itself in the long term, there must be a number of low cost apps out there that sit behind firewalls that simply aren’t pratical to write in CFML.  For instance, take an app worth a couple of grand.  Why would anyone want to pay out another grand for the software - why would they not use something else?

The second argument is that of people adopting CFML.  There appears to be a line of thought that suggests that if CFML were free to all, then people will come flocking from other communities to use CFML.  Now, I hate to be blunt here, but they won’t.  A free CFML engine (as good as CF8) will make virtually no difference.

Why?  Well, think about it.

Put yourselves in the shoes of a PHP or ASP.NET developer.  What reasons would you have for moving for CFML? Why would you dump a platform that does everything you need for another?  There’s just not really any reason to do so.  These people are happy with what they have, they are happy with the size of the community and the help it gives, and they are happy with the number of jobs available to them.  For them, I don’t think CFML solves any problems.  Look at it the other way - why would you move to PHP?

Something I’ve noticed over the years as a CFML developer is that every six months or so, there’s a conversation across the whole community as to where CF is going.  Is it dead or not?   Is Adobe going to kill CF off or not?  How can we get more people using CFML?

To be honest, does any of it matter?

At the moment, CFML is a stable environment, and serves it’s developers well.  It isn’t a one size fits all solution, and there are things that other developers can do, which we can’t - but at the end of the day we all end up the same.  After all, there is nothing binding us to CF, we don’t have to use it for everything.  There is not some sort of sworn allegiance to CF that prevents us from using PHP/ASP.NET once in a while.

You simply must use the best tool for the job at hand.

There is no silver bullet.