Posted on June 5th, 2008 by Jim

More CFML Open-Source Goodness? Maybe?

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Category: Code, ColdFusion, Open-source
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So Railo is going open-source.  While I think this is a ‘good thing’ I am beginning to wonder how we as a CFML community are going to keep up?  While Open Blue Dragon has their steering committee I’m wondering if we don’t need something similar for CFML in general…

What is going to be considered the ‘core’ CFML tags? Where is the IDE that will handle all these different versions?  Is Adobe’s CFQuery going to be the same as OpenBD’s?

I see a lot of benefit in having several choices but it’s going to all be worthless if I can’t reliably port an application from one engine to another with no changes.

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7 Responses to “More CFML Open-Source Goodness? Maybe?”

Tony Garcia on June 5th, 2008 2:17 pm:

I have to say that this is also my main concern about the open source CFML engines. While I think it’s positive that there are more options, I really hope that there is a concerted effort to keep the core of CFML consistent across all of these engines. Of course, then there’s the debate about what should be considered “core”…

Matt Williams on June 5th, 2008 3:00 pm:

Good idea. Something like the W3C for cfml. But you’d have to get buy in from all vendors before it was worthwhile. Even if a vendor wanted to expand on a tag’s functionality, that would be okay, so long as it met the “core” first.

Mike Brunt on June 5th, 2008 3:21 pm:

Jim, I am one of the “lesser active” OpenBD Steering Committee members in terms of contribution; so far. I have always believed that compatibility in the core tag set of CFML is critical to the community overall and that is a common belief among all of us on the OpenBD committee. One of the things that attracted me to joining the OpenBD initiative is the embracing of all things J2EE. To be more precise, I see the OpenBD CFML engine as more akin to ColdFusion Enterprise functionalities as they pertain to J2EE, as OpenBD affords easy access to the many benefits of J2EE - JavaEE.

Adam Haskell on June 5th, 2008 4:46 pm:

I agree 100% Jim. From my understanding, Alan from OpenBD and Gert have already talked. We want to work together to have a standard. I also posted a question/challenge to Adam Lehman on his blog about the subject of Standard CFML. That standard could go beyond just tags though think about the Application.cfc lifecycle or the open plugin architecture of OpenBD. It would be beneficial for everyone if each engine was plugable via the same API so I could develop cfAIM and distribute it (commercially or openly) to folks using different engines.

Nitai Aventaggiato on June 5th, 2008 6:16 pm:

As a OpenBD Steering Committee member, I can promise you that it is in our interest to have a “CFML standard”. It is in the best interest for Railo and OpenBD to have the same CFML tags and functionality as the “mighty” Adobe Coldfusion.

I personally wish for a CFML board that consists of Adobe, OpenBD and Railo. After all it should be in the interest of every engine provider that customers don’t have to make any compromses.

SitePoint Blogs » The Week in ColdFusion: 4 - 10 June: More details on Railo open source and just a little bit of controversy on June 14th, 2008 4:20 am:

[...] Gert Franz has posted an official announcement on the Railo blog, as well as some followup comments about standardisation of the CFML language, which seems to be an emerging theme (see Jim Priest’s comments on the topic) [...]

Peter Bell on June 15th, 2008 5:47 am:

@Nital, What’s with the “Mighty” stuff? Without Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe there wouldn’t be a ColdFusion language at all. They continue to support the conferences and publications and to add great new features with every release.

I’m very excited about the Railo announcement as I think it will help to grow the community. I also personally think Gert chose an extremely smart way to co-operate with Adobe understanding the importance of getting along with the people who invented the language we all enjoy using.