The month of June has been significant with the news of the Railo CFML server joining the JBoss ecosystem and New Atlanta ready to formerly announce the open source BlueDragon CFML server at the CFUnited Conference. It's interesting to consider what this will mean for the future of CFML and obviously Adobe's official implementation of CF.
We now have two reasonable implementations of ColdFusion that are now free and open source. It's very likely that this might help spur adoption of CF which has been fairly stagnant for a number of years. Despite the supposedly strong sales numbers that Adobe routinely trumpets (although rarely articulates with hard numbers), job postings for CF are flat in an industry that continues to grow. Hopefully the accessibility that an open source CF will offer will make more folks pick it up and see what it's all about.
There's also a good chance that this will drive Adobe to make CF's pricing more competitive. Given that CF Standard sells for $1299 now it's hard to believe they would start to give that away for free. Perhaps the price will be pushed down significantly or Adobe will make a free version available while stripping out additional features from pro. At the end of the day, having access to a cheap version of the "real" CF can't be a bad thing.
The biggest concern has to be one of forking. BlueDragon has for some time decided to implement their own tags or functions in the language, some of which were followed by Adobe while others were not. Railo has also started to add their own features which I haven't seen in BD or CF. If Adobe introduces a third version of the product that will mean at least five different deployment environments. Is this going to be a problem? Or will the choices just mean that the reach of CFML will expand?
In some ways this reminds me of the Java universe with its numerous implementations of the Servlet specification and/or the full Java Enterprise Edition stack. The difference here is that these technologies are based on well-defined standards and specs that anyone is free to implement. Most of the commercial vendors will add their own extensions to "add value" and justify their hefty license fees but the spec is implemented rather reliably across the board, giving you freedom to switch between vendors if you so desire.
Does this mean that a CF specification might be in the future? Will Adobe cozy up to Railo to tag-team BlueDragon? It'll be interesting to see what's in store for the second half of 2008.
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