Open CFML discussion
Andrew Penhorwood
Peter Boughton suggested this would be a better place for the
discussion.
I just found out about the death of the CFML Advisory Committee
(CAC). I have
been using ColdFusion since version 4.5 and I was one of the beta
testers for
version 5, 6 and 7. While I might be unknown to the CFML committee by
name I have been following what happens for a good 10 years.
I was very happy with the creation of the CAC. I thought it would
finally give a bigger voice to the community. I expected there
to be a open mailing list where anyone could watch the process and
jump in when they wanted to help / influence that process. From my
experience with beta testing CF, I was / am very frustrated with the
process.
My main comment is not about what happened to the CAC but where do we
go from here. The CFML community needs a place to share what they
want to see in the language. If that is not the CAC then who / where
do we look for this forum?
Peter J. Farrell
months before it's demise for personal reasons. I can say this list is
one of the places where I feel we can just talk freely about the
language and a great place to bend the ear of open source engines
members. In stark contrast to the committee list, the archives and
discussions are open and transparent to the community as a whole which I
personally feel is a better way to discussion the language.
There are a few members of the group that represent the open source
engines. By no means is this an exhaustive list, but here are the names
that we probably mostly recognize:
Railo:
* Sean Corfield (also former member of the CFML Advisory Committee)
* Mark Drew
* Todd Rafferty
OpenBD:
* Andy Wu
* Alan Williamson
* Matt Woodward (also former member of the CFML Advisory Committee)
I've looked through my personal list archives and I'm unaware of any
Adobe person replying to any thread. However, that does not mean there
aren't any members from Adobe or haven't kept tabs on the list traffic.
Just means I'm unaware of any activity on the list that is directly
observable on Adobe's part.
On a personal note, cross engine compatibility is one areas I try to
champion as much as possible. Yes, I lean towards open source in
general, but as the lead developer of Mach-II -- cross engine
compatibility is a major concern for us since we openly support ACF,
Railo and OpenBD as engines to run Mach-II on. So part of zealousness
is on part of Mach-II and the other part on the fact it it should "just
work".
HTH,
.Peter
Andrew Penhorwood said the following on 09/06/2010 11:51 AM:
Andrew Penhorwood
really read the Railo thread to catch all that was said.
It seems that people believe without Adobe on board the whole point of
a standards groups is doomed. That may well be the case. I also get
where Sean Corfield is coming from when it comes to standards bodies.
How does PHP and some of the other open source languages handle these
types of issues?
It seems that if OpenBD and Railo agree to a standard then Adobe would
be foolish to go a different route. I for one want to see all three
(four if you count OpenBD and BD as two) succeed. I have clients with
my consulting business on Railo and I work for a major university using CF8.
CFML is one of the coolest technologies I have used as a programmer,
which started over 30 years ago. But I became extremely frustrated with the
state of things while on the one of the betas with Macromedia. I
believe still have the emails. When pointing out bugs to the CF engineers
they told me we might fix it if there was time after all of the
features for this release were done. That was not the engineers fault
he was just being honest. Bug fixed are more important to me then
features. If people like me don't recommend the produce due to our
frustration with the process then no one wins and the applications we
work on move to a new technologies. It has already happened to me
twice. Sites I wrote in CF in 2002 now run on PHP and one of my former
employers is moving to .Net.
Once again the point is not what happened but where to do go from
here.
Andrew Penhorwood
> HTH,
> .Peter
--
Best regards,
Andrew Penhorwood
and...@coldbits.com
www.coldbits.com
336-501-0958 cell
Sean Corfield
> It seems that if OpenBD and Railo agree to a standard then Adobe would
> be foolish to go a different route.
I'd be curious to hear from Adam Lehman on that (he's on this list).
Given that Adobe has the vast majority of the CFML market compared to
OpenBD and Railo, I can imagine a for-profit business seeing value in
implementing something differently to ensure its customers find it
harder to migrate off to the other two engines.
Compatibility with Adobe is essentially a 'must' for Railo and OpenBD
to ensure portability of code with the largest player but the reverse
isn't true.
Realistically.
--
Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN
Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://getrailo.com/
An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/
"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive."
-- Margaret Atwood