Scotch on the Rocks review
… or a look at ColdFusion from a Flash/Flex developers perspective.
I just got back from four days in beautiful Edinburgh for an event I would likely not have attended were it not that I was invited to speak there.
Scotch on the Rocks is one of barely a handful of what I’d call real “community driven events” out there, while not as polished as other more commercial counterparts I had a sense that this is the place to be if you want to get a real feel of what is happening in the ColdFusion community and want to network with fellow European developers.
As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I’ve only had very limited exposure to ColdFusion and even that was year ago which made it all the more interesting to see what its current state of affairs is.
A couple of observations:
ColdFusion is growing up - while it always seemed to me that it would be difficult to architect CFML in a more OO structure, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of frameworks out there that promote best practices and allow for an MVC type approach. Indeed its not too similar from what we’re seeing in the ActionScript community.
ColdFusion and open source - alternative ColdFusion engines are flourishing, notably Open BlueDragon, and Railo who announced going open source and joining JBoss.org during the second day keynote.I honestly think Adobe needs to take ColdFusion in the direction its going with Flex — open source it and focus on creating commercial tooling and broadening the ecosystem. I’m sure that would do wonders for adoption for people coming from a Java background and create a more obvious path for companies to start moving towards enterprise LiveCycle solutions.
ColdFusion adoption - pricing and availability of hosting have always been the main obstacles I’ve had when considering building something on a ColdFusion backend.The integration between ColdFusion and Flash/Flex front end’s is really well done and would be a fantastic time saver considering the built-in Flash remoting gateway, LCDS etc. unfortunately that is something I’ve rarely been able to take advantage of.
Now with Open BlueDragon, Railo becoming viable alternatives in terms of licensing, pricing and them offering Amazon EC2 images this is looking increasingly tempting to get back into ColdFusion development and consider it for upcoming projects.
Congrats to Andy, Kev, Jatin and the rest of the team for a fantastic event. I’m looking forward to polish up my ColdFusion skills and attending again next year!
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Interesting write-up there Pete. I’ve also floated / thought about ideas around “What if” regarding CF going open source.
Let me take off my Microsoft badge for a second *unpins the badge, watches as the wires and blood begins to drip freely..* (OUCH! that hurts)…
(hopefully I’m afforded the right to speak freely & of my own personal opinion that of not my employer, on this one?)
[obsecure, know it all analyst speaking voice begins here]
On the surface it makes sense? in fact I’ve often wondered why Macromedia/Adobe didn’t run with the CFEclipse crowd the moment Zorn was given birth (Spike & Co could of done with the financial warchest).
Yet that in turn would most likley impact the Dreamweaver Sales (If it aint broke, don’t fix it applies here). Then there is the sales revenue from CF Server itself, and whilst the population isn’t as big as it’s competitors, i’d guestimate that it’s still got a nice revenue model attached to it (enough to either self-fund itself or partially cover the costs whilst Creative tools fill the rest of the gaps in).
Adobe’s a $3bn company at the moment, if Live Cycle, Acrobat 9+ and Flex 3-4+ integrate well within Enterprise, *maybe* they can sacrafice the CF revenue stream, provided it can influence the previous top 3 in Enterprise & beyond. If that doesn’t happen, it’s unlikely that they’ll give up the profits of CF on the hope/pray that it attracts new hearts & minds. Flex has been a big leap and i’m wagering that Adobe will spend a lot of money and time nailing down the Open Screen initiative vs being distracted by Opening up Coldfusion (could be wrong).
Coldfusion would also probably hurt the LiveCycle initiatves as well, as in many respects its kind of a basic edition (ie you were right that the LCDS is free as in beer). Given most Flex solutions use basic AMF it’s actually a fairly cheap alternative in the long run?
[obsecure, know it all analyst speaking voice ends here]
-Scott.
Thanks for coming & speaking Peter;
It’s good to get someone on the outside of the CF Community looking to make comments that make sense.
If more people stop thinking of CF as the old C engine and started to take a look at it again now as a fully grown up Java Applications the world would be a happier and easier life for everyone and now with Railo 3.1 going open source in October there really should be no stopping the momentum