thecrumb.com

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.

I saw this post on Mike Henke’s blog… ColdFusion is dead (yet again) and of course I had to go read it. Mike’s take was it was just another “CF is dead” rant. But I clicked through and read the original post The State Of ColdFusion and have to agree with many of the author’s points.

Some of the arguments: price, job market, etc., have been hashed over many times and I don’t think it’s worth beating that horse anymore. However he does ask some really hard questions which I thought were really good:

Now on the flip side when did you last hear about:

• In fact anyone standing up talking about Coldfusion outside of a ColdFusion User Group. Doing this would at least make people aware of Coldfusion.
• Any promotion of Coldfusion outside of the Coldfusion User Groups.
• Coldfusion servers and educational package being rolled out free to universities so they can teach Coldfusion.
• A graduate who knows what Coldfusion is.
• A new book on Coldfusion in a bookstore online or otherwise.

These are some great questions! I don’t keep up with all the conferences but get the occasional mailer for things and I’ve never seen CF mentioned outside of Adobe/CF conferences (and maybe lately Flex stuff). It would be nice to compile a list of conferences we could possibly attend to spread the word.

We’ve hashed over the CF in education thing lately - this could be a big inroad possibly for Open Blue Dragon? In school? Walk in with OpenBD and CFEclipse on a CD…

And books. There is the WACK but I’d argue that’s not a ‘new’ book. Doing a quick search at Amazon I get 3 pages of results and the WACK series is the only new book I see listed.

I’m really hoping the Open Blue Dragon announcement can spark some excitement about CFML outside our community. Lots of potential here… Push OpenBD in the educational channels! Who’s going to write the first OpenBD book?? Can we get OpenBD into other web development conferences??