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??

Alan has a list of the OpenBD (Open BlueDragon) Steering Committee on his blog:

Andy Allan, Peter Amiri, Mike Brunt, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew, Adam Haskell, Jordan Michaels, Alan Williamson, Matt Woodward and Andy Wu

LOTS of good names on there and some really nice quotes but obviously I’m going to have to step up and volunteer for the committee myself.

“formalised language”… “masterful clustering-replication mechanism”…

Huh?

Not one of them mentioned the dreaded ‘f-word‘…. Can’t anyone say it??! Me of shallow pockets (have you priced kid sneakers lately?) will…

OpenBD is Free!! (it even rhymes – marketing will love that)

OK. Now I feel better.

On a serious note – I am happy to see such prominent names on the committee and I’m really looking forward to seeing where all this goes. Exciting times!

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.