Saw this interesting article on Slashdot – Open Source Killing Commercial Developer Tools. Will Adobe ever release an updated IDE for ColdFusion?  And if they do – would anyone buy it?

The tools market is dead. Open source killed it. The only commercial tools that can survive today are the ones that leapfrog open source tools.

According to my IDE survey the majority of the 400 respondents indicated they would pay up to $500.

• 111 – Free
• 144 – $100
• 126 – $100-500

But one wonders how much better it would have to be before people switched from the free CFEclipse.  And as I’ve said before – now with 4 CFML engines available – a ‘universal’ CFML IDE become even more important.

The Slashdot article leads to a post at DZone where the author discusses his new IDE which looks interesting as well.

UNA Collaborative Edition is a real-time collaborative development environment for software engineers. It lets two or more developers edit the same code, at the same time. It’s similar to pair programming, but better because both developers can contribute productively, whether they’re located across the hall from each other or on different continents.

The ‘Open’ CFML Survey has been up for about a week. As promised here is the first round of results:

Results are available in both PDF and Excel:

• PDF: cfml-ide-report-041708
• Excel: cfml-ide-report-041708

Both these are just a dump of the data – no pretty graphs. I’m going to try and go through some of this data and summarize it a bit in a more readable format (hopefully I can get to this over the weekend)

I did dump the HTML output (with pretty graphs) into a PDF as well.

• PDF (with graphs): cfml-ide-report-041708a

This is a bit nicer to look at but you can’t drill down into the ‘other’ replies, etc.

I thought this was an interesting read: We Don’t Use Software That Costs Money Here from Coding Horror.

It won’t be easy for commercial software or subscription websites. If past history is any indication, beating the free alternatives is going to get progressively more difficult every year.

Thought it was very relevant with all the discussion going on regarding Open Blue Dragon. It will be interesting to see if OpenBD “rocks the boat” any in the CFML community. Or will it go largely ignored like the Smith and Railo projects? Or will those projects see a renewed interest? How will Adobe respond?

Interesting times indeed!

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??

If you haven’t listened to the Vince Bonfanti interview on ColdFusion Weekly yet – go do it.

To be honest I was expecting a bit more of a ‘cut-n-paste’ interview where Vince responded with canned responses. It was anything but. Vince gave a great overview of his history (he’s a developer GASP!), the history of BlueDragon, and why they decided it was time to go open-source. He answered a ton of questions and cleared up quite a few things I was wondering about.

It was funny because he mentioned using File Maker Pro and having it connect to the web. That was EXACTLY the reason I discovered ColdFusion. A Mac user at my company had a huge File Maker database that he wanted to ‘webify’. At the time there was no ODBC connection to File Maker and I went exploring options and found ColdFusion.

Listening to Vince, it’s clear that he gets open-source. I’m even more excited about the release of OpenBD now than I was before.

On a side note there is a new OpenBD mailing list.

This weekend I downloaded the Flex Builder Linux alpha, but ran into some issues and after digging around in the forums it was hinted that a new release would be out ’soon’. Soon turns out to be this morning. Alpha 3 was released today! I’m looking forward to getting home and trying that out!

I also saw on Sean Corfield’s blog that an alpha release of Air for Linux is out too! Sean’s post also pointed to this nice article on Read Write Web discussing Flex and Air on Linux. The article had this nice tidbit:

In addition to AIR and Flex releases for Linux, Adobe announced that it had joined the Linux Foundation in an effort to help “accelerate the growth of RIA technologies on the Linux platform.”

Dan Wilson interviews Vince Bonfanti about the recent BlueDragon open-source announcement.

This caught my eye:

We’re also investigating the possibility of creating a free VMWare appliance containing the full software stack including the Linux operating system, MySQL, JBoss or Tomcat, and BlueDragon.

I blogged about doing this almost a year ago… but unfortunately it wasn’t easily doable with Adobe ColdFusion.

He also goes into why they picked the GPL license (following the MySQL business model) and support (there will be none). Hopefully they WILL provide some type of community driven support area – mailing lists and/or forums so that the community can support itself.

Looks like Vince will be at cf.Objective doing a demo and releasing some code and that is just around the corner!

I kind of lost track of CFWeekly but it appears they are back in a ‘CF_Roundtable’ format which seems pretty cool. This week they discuss the BlueDragon open-source announcement. The roundtable includes:

• Sam Farmer
• Brian Meloche
• Terrence Ryan
• Brian Swartzfager
• Kurt Wiersma
• Dan Wilson

Really good stuff and for the most part everyone seemed fairly positive about things. Matt and Peter do a great job of going over the various open-source licenses (which can be confusing to say the least). Go listen!

The only thing I completely disagree with was Peter’s comment on the support / bug fix cycle. If anything the open-source products I use have bugs fixed or features added FAR quicker than any closed source products I use.

Overall a great discussion and it’s nice to have CFWeekly back!!!