This is all over the ColdFusion blogosphere! Today Vince Bonfanti of New Atlanta dropped the bombshell frugal CFML developers like myself have been waiting to hear for a long time!
New Atlanta announces free open source BlueDragon edition
It’s under the GPLv2, but otherwise details are a bit thin. They do mention removing some third party technology that will not work under the license:
The free open source edition of BlueDragon/J2EE will be fully featured, with only minor differences to remove dependencies on commercial libraries. The open source edition of BlueDragon/J2EE will be integrated, packaged, and distributed with other open source software such as Tomcat, JBoss, Apache, MySQL, Java (OpenJDK), and Linux.
It will be VERY interesting to see how Adobe reacts? This could fail horribly at which point Adobe can say “I told you so” or it could take off (hopefully!) at which point Adobe will be way behind.
Of particular interest to me is if any hosting companies will drop ColdFusion in order to adopt BlueDragon in order to offer less expensive ColdFusion hosting.
Vince also mentions making this a “community” project with a steering committee which I think will be important for development of all the things that go into a good open-source project.
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I dunno about ‘waiting to hear for a long time’.
I’ve been making serious efforts to get the Railo CFML engine (server ?) working at home, for instance (summary: I need a more recent version of it).
Railo is not open-source. “Free” yes, open no. And there are also some limitations (similar to the Developer edition of ColdFusion) on their “Community” edition (one db, no search, no CFX, etc.)
The Smith Project is the only open-source CFML engine I know of. And it has been awhile since I’ve looked at their site but last time I checked they were still missing a lot of functionality.
If you are ‘frugal’ cost is probably more important than source.