Re: [plum] Breaking the silence

Mon, 22 May 2006 08:49:54 -0700

Aloha, all!
 
Just got back from a cruise around the Hawaiian islands, and I'm jet lagged and sunburned.  Didn't touch the Internet the entire time!  Yay!
 
I just wanted to respond about Plum.  We didn't put that much work into Plum to just abandon it.  It's still the same tool we use for all our sites.  Why hasn't it been updated or upgraded since its release?  Probably because it was so thoroughly tested and documented for more than two years beforehand, and the few IDE-related errors and minor fixes to a couple of the custom tags and generated code have either been tolerable or have easy workarounds.  Still, we do want to change a couple of things and make another release.
 
The issues right now are time, participation, and focus.  As you can imagine, it takes a *lot* of time to rev a commercial-grade product like Plum, and that time costs us real money, so we opened up for participation from the outside, which for the most part hasn't been flooding in, except for a few dedicated souls.  Until the next release we are just handling new projects using the original version of Plum plus the workarounds (like the Verity and stylesheet fixes), or our internal BlueDragon version of the framework plus the same fixes.  It's working great for us.
 
The remaining issue is focus.  More and more I'm seeing that Plum makes ColdFusion feel a little like the .NET Framework in some ways, which is a good thing.  A while ago as I started building ASP.NET 2.0 apps that had the same capabilities as Plum, I got really pissed: almost everything we spend months on perfecting in Plum to make something happen was either a simple setting in a web.config file or a property setting somewhere.  Everything was either easier or better in .NET 2.0, and we could do much more as well.
 
So our focus has been along the lines of BlueDragon.NET, pure ASP.NET 2.0, and desktop apps and services written in C#.  If we build a CFML app, unless otherwise required by the client, it's using the BD version of Plum, and we integrate with the .NET Framework as needed.  Typically the app uses SQL Server 2005, so we have CLR integration from that side as well, and it's pretty sweet.  If there's no need for CFML, it's pure ASP.NET 2.0 all the way, and we're happy.
 
So that's where things stand.  We're always going to use Plum for CFML apps, and it's a good and stable product with a few minor issues that can be worked around.  When the next release will be will have to be a function of necessity for the time being, and the only thing really bugging me right now is the need to make Plum forms easier to build without any table or column aliasing, but even that will require a very large amount of work.  It is, however, something we can involve others in, so why don't we tackle this first, eh?  It will take a good bit of effort... anyone want to volunteer?

Respectfully,

Adam Phillip Churvis
Certified Advanced ColdFusion MX 7 Developer
BlueDragon Alliance Founding Committee

Get advanced intensive Master-level training in
C# & ASP.NET 2.0 for ColdFusion Developers at
ProductivityEnhancement.com

----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, May 12, 2006 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: [plum] Breaking the silence

Yeah, I know they like BlueDragon. I installed it and looked at it for a while. I just can't afford the upgrade. While I see the advantages of BD in some areas, it is not going to be a player for me at this time.

I also want to play with Flex. We have a flash developer on staff now, so we will leverage what we have and stay in the Adobe camp for now.

As far as the meeting, I can't do it at this time, just too many irons in the fire right now.  Also, if Adam and David decide to let this lapse, I will probably start investigating other frameworks for longterm use.  Lots of stuff going on right now, so it looks promising.

The issue is that Plum is just killer. I like their approach to doing things, it just 'fits' well with the way I do things.

Oh well, life ain't perfect :)

On 5/12/06, mark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hey Jeff,
 
I think Plum will go forward, but for Blue Dragon.  It bums me out 'cause I really am looking forward to Flex and Adobe is making sure ColdFusion and Flex are really easy to work with together.  It is really one or the other.  Blue Dragon/.Net/Ajax or ColdFusion/Java/Flex.  Not even Coding Gods like David and Adam can do both.
 
My understanding is Adam and David will do one more point release for PLUM for ColdFusion along with the first release of PLUM for BlueDragon and from there forward, all work on PLUM will be with Blue Dragon. 
 
You know, we are pretty close from a geographic perspective.  Would you be interested in getting together and comparing notes on changes made to core files?  And what you would like to see changed?  Maybe we could get some others to join in?
 
Mark

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