I won't be at OpenCF Summit, but I will be at SOTR... When you're discussing the future of CFML will you pass a thought for plug-in, extension and open source application "markets".
I've no idea how PHP or any of the other languages handle community contribution, other than the fact that the last time I was looking for a PHP element for a PHP cms there were a million different bits of code all of which were a completely rubbish. (I obviously exaggerate) I notice from the Railo list that a person on that list is looking for somewhere to put their packaged GPL3 licensed application. I suggested RIAForge. I realise that RIAForge is ACF centric in its "branding", but it doesn't actually matter which version of CFML the code runs on and often you will see folks posting the server versions that its compatible with. It also doesn't have any functionality for selling applications, as you would expect from a "marketplace" these days. The Railo team are putting together a Railo marketplace. While I think this is a great idea, what is going through my mind is the complaint that comes up time and time again of "there are no open source coldfusion applications" and personally I'm wondering "how the hell is anyone ever going to find CFML applications?". We know that the former is absolutely not true and the number of applications on RIAForge as well as the various other framework and related projects out there attest to that, but looking from the outside, that's where the latter comes to mind. There isn't one place to find a CFML server like you would for Ruby or PHP and others I'm sure. Then there are a number of different places that are host various CFML applications. It isn't always clear that there is a distinction between what CFML is and what Adobe ColdFusion, Railo, OpenDB, BD.Net are, that a lot of the time a ColdFusion application will happily run on OpenBD or Railo, because the underlying CFML is either well written or relatively simple and so on. My worry is how do we as a community make CFML more prominent and the Servers less so? That's not to say that the servers aren't important (he says ducking before someone takes a swing at me ;) ) but it is the language that needs to be marketed, given a new lick of paint and a much more positive spin. The servers provide the delivery mechanism for CFML solutions. Their footprint in the web application arena is individually quite small, CFML as a whole is much larger, but needs to bigger, better thought of and therefore a more likely solution provider. We have 2 commercial CFML server providers, 2 Open Source server solutions, 4 Java server applications and 1 C# based server. You can write apps using HTML-like tags, script or both, integrate with a myriad of third party application with no need to buy or plug in non-native extensions and you can deploy easily to cloud servers. What the hell isn't to like about CFML as a solution? I think I may have gone off at a tangent... So my question for your consideration is; how does the CFML development community make CFML solutions more attractive to build, easier to find and more people learning about it as a web application solution? Incidentally, I was pleased to see Andy Allan going and addressing a bunch of students regarding ColdFusion and offering a bunch of free places to SOTR for students and generally making a nuisance of himself at other technology conferences up in Scotland. ;) We definitely need to somehow persuade technology educators across the globe to include CFML when the talk about web application solutions. Stephen -- tag/function ref: http://www.openbluedragon.org/manual/ mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en Get to Texas in Feb for OpenCFSummit http://www.opencfsummit.org/
