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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??