What if instead of rebranding, there was just a concentrated effort to
'rebrand' CFML as something beyond Adobe Coldfusion?
Another issue I see is that CFML isn't really standardized.. At least
from my perspective. There's CFML on Adobe.. CFML on OpenBD.. CFML on
RAILO. And they each have their differences.
It's almost as if CFML is a 'style' of markup language without a
defined backbone. The backbone is provided by the vendor..
Adobe/OpenBD/Railo.
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Jason Blum <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hey I'm just glad my email wasn't just flatly ignored!
@David: Well good point - and I think I overstated the
user-defined prefix as sufficient, in and of itself, for a
concerted effort to re-brand the platform. It'd just be a
feature, like OpenBD's new Catch-all Email. That said, I think
I've heard of CFML being branded as the "fast way to do Java" for
years and am not sure it's working. I just figured the
user-defined prefix would be so easy to accommodate, makes for
pretty dramatic but low-hanging fruit.
@Matt fantastically thoughtful response as usual and ends on a
great note! I tried to emphasize that the CF prefix would be
supported by default, so nothing's getting thrown out. And I'm
not so sure that everybody cares about the platform, to the point
of grilling you on Your Markup Language's origins. Consider the
"app store for government" at
http://marketplace.civiccommons.org/apps, where the technical
requirements are listed almost as an afterthought, completely
overshadowed by the main points IT decision makers care most
about: "What does it do?" and "Who's used it successfully?"
And isn't the platform less relevant than ever in the cloud? What
IT managers want more than anything is the new beautiful
single-click war deployments to Jelastic stuff. They don't care
what it's built on when they see other cities deploying it
successfully. Government agencies all over are deploying Drupal,
for instance, despite not having PHP developers on staff.
Totally agree we'd never fool the more technically-minded. I
really had in mind just the bozos who ignorantly propagate all the
ColdFusion is dead memes.
All that said, I'm very inspired by your rally to reclaim the
proud history of the language. I agree we have to do that
regardless. But wondering if we can do both. It's just a
prefix. It's nothing more than empowering you to configure your
server to parse .someOtherFileExtension for CFML, or to i18n your
views to speak Mandarin. It's just a little feature that gives
you a little more control over your brand.
BTW Im not at all convinced it's a good idea - just curious to
hear folks thoughts. I do think re-branding in general works
though, which is why companies and political parties do it all the
time. :)
-J
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Matthew Woodward
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 3:28 AM, Jason Blum
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Because "CF" carries so much baggage in so many peoples' minds
For some reason what comes to mind when I start thinking about
this is that live recording of U2 doing "Helter Skelter" where
Bono says, "This is a song Charles Manson stole from The
Beatles. We're stealing it back."
Here's my two cents on it. While the notion of starting with a
clean slate might be appealing, it's totally a case of
throwing out the baby with the bathwater and does nothing but
give you a whole new set of problems to overcome. Breaking
with CFML's past simply trades old problems for different
ones, specifically trying to get people to try a "new"
language and get the existing users to change what they're
doing for the sake of marketing goals that (from my
perspective anyway) are of dubious value.
In other words, just changing the name isn't going to make all
the challenges we have magically go away.
The Jeremy Allaire video that you had the absolute genius to
secure for OpenCF Summit (thanks again for having that
brilliant thought!) really struck a chord with me as I'm sure
it did many others. It was so great to hear the original
inspiration behind CFML directly from one of its creators, and
all of what he said still holds true today. Even with all the
new languages that have come along in the interim CFML is
still light years beyond so many of them in terms of
simplicity, accessibility, flexibility ... it's fantastic
technology and if we all didn't believe that, we'd go off and
use something else.
But I'm sure we're all in agreement that we don't have a
technical problem, if we have any problem at all (as we
discussed at length at OpenCF Summit) it's a perception/image
problem. And you don't fix that by slapping a new name on it.
Let's say we do rename things or allow user-defined prefixes.
What you get into then is conversations like this:
"So what's this ?ML stuff?"
"Oh it's a great new scripting language for the web."
"Never heard of it."
"Have you heard of CFML or ColdFusion?"
"Yep, I remember that from back in the day."
"Well this is that, with a new name."
"Oh."
*** crickets chirping ***
My point is that for people to understand what the hell it is,
you'd *never* get away from referring to its history.
And frankly, though I realize perception is everything, screw
the haters. I'm proud of CFML's history and even prouder about
where it's going these days. To me we'd lose WAY too much if
we detached ourselves from our past. It's far more good than
bad, and I think it's far more easy to fix the perception
issues we may have than it would be to try and start over
(which honestly isn't feasible in my opinion).
It's like rebranding high fructose corn syrup as "corn sugar."
You're not really fooling anyone, and attempts like that can
easily backfire. Not to mention if you turn the language into
a free-for-all of user-defined prefixes, I don't see what that
really gains and from my perspective it introduces a host of
issues.
Instead of trying to start over, I'd much rather spend that
energy focusing on education, grassroots marketing, and an
image makeover for the fantastic history we do have going for
us than lose all that for the sake of what ultimately is just
semantics. A rose by any other name and all that.
Specifically, I'd like to see:
* more friendly, introductory tutorials and screencasts (I
have some ideas on these)
* an online book building an app from start to finish (one of
the goals of openbdcookbook.org <http://openbdcookbook.org>)
* a trycfml.org <http://trycfml.org> site, which Mike Henke
suggested at OCFS (I bought the domain name, and the code
already exists in the Mach-II dashboard. would love design help!)
* an online manual like PHP has (the OpenBD manual goes a long
way towards this and comes straight from the engine code so
it's always up to date)
* Case studies. These are huge. As Alan can attest there is
some seriously high-traffic stuff running on CFML, so we need
to highlight that stuff wherever possible.
* Related to case studies, a "who's using" list. Even if we
can't get case studies from everyone there are some seriously
big name organizations using CFML.
* Reaching outside our bubble. We had .NET developers show up
at OCFS! That's huge because now they see we're doing some
very cool stuff. We need more of that.
In summary, I think a name change or syntax change is dumping
the great CFML history (not to mention running the risk of
alienating the CFML faithful) in favor of the hope of bringing
new people in simply because the technology has a new name.
That to me is not a good value proposition, and I feel our
time could be much better spent polishing what we have instead
of trying to start over, which from where I stand would
introduce far more difficult problems to overcome.
Let's steal CFML back, take it back to its roots, work very
hard on building the things we know people want and need to
get into CFML, and take this great technology to the next level.
--
Matthew Woodward
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
http://blog.mattwoodward.com
identi.ca <http://identi.ca> / Twitter: @mpwoodward
Please do not send me proprietary file formats such as Word,
PowerPoint, etc. as attachments.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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Jason Blum
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http://phenotypical.com
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