RSS Feeds
How BlueDragon solves "the most common objections to CF"
On Oct 1, CF guru and MM senior CF evangelist Ben Forta wrote a blog entry called The Changing Case Against ColdFusion, where he wrote:
... the two most commonly heard objections nowadays are: 1) ColdFusion is not free, and 2) uncertainty about the future and long-term viability of ColdFusion.
Fascinating that BlueDragon is uniquely positioned to address these two most common objections! First, we of course do offer a free version in our Server edition. See our previous blog entry for more details. It really is free, for deployment. Indeed, it's discussed even more in the context of "growing a business with BlueDragon Server" in an article of the same name in the Oct CFDJ at http://sys-con.com/coldfusion/article.cfm?id=658.
And as for uncertainty about CF's future, well, the very fact that another company (us) offers an alternative implementation of CFML does indeed bode well for both its viability and also eliminating its previous proprietary nature. New Atlanta's also a strong growing concern with a heritage in the Java server market that speaks to our 10,000 customers in 65 countries. That we continue to evolve it along with CFMX (just wait for our announcement of the next release and the features it will have) also speaks to its viability.
As Ben states in his article, the ability to deploy CFML on J2EE is indeed a very compelling feature (shared in our J2EE edition, in fact more effectively in the opinion of many).
Beyond that, though, our planned .NET edition will be even more compelling and will not only solve a niche that MM doesn't (and hasn't announced plans to), but it also will make CFML the only web scripting language that runs on both .NET and J2EE. That's portability, that's viability, and that's solving really important business problems. That's what we love doing with BlueDragon.
I spoke at the October MDCFUG meeting. The other speaker was Geoff Snowman
from Microsoft, whose presentation was about working with .NET and CF.
Primarily aimed at web service interaction, the presentation still noted
that BlueDragon will provide the only application-level integration of CFML
with .NET.
Jeff Peters [jeff@grokfusebox.com]
Cool, Jeff. Thanks for that. We had met Jeff at the CFUN event in the
summer and brought him up to speed on things. Glad to hear that he has
remembered it! :-)
charlie arehart [charlie@newatlanta.com]
Just to correct a statement that Jeff shared... Montara Software offers a
product called Black Knight that is available today allowing integration of
.NET with CFML using both ColdFusion and BlueDragon. We believe Black
Knight offers a much better integration option than is provided via COM or
web services.
Matt Liotta [mliotta@r337.com]
Are there any plans to fold in the MX enhancements to Blue Dragon -
especially the XML capabilities & CFC's?
Rich [rich@basement.org]
Let me offer a few comments at once. First, when I was replying to Jeff
about our having met Mr. Snowman, my reference to "Jeff" should of course
have been "Geoff".
To Matt's correction of Geoff's, it's a fair point. But let's not leave any confusion about Black Knight compared to BlueDragon. BlueDragon/.NET is a complete implementation of CFML on .NET, with your CFML running as native components and able to integrate with native components. Black Knight's a way to call .NET components from within CF (or BlueDragon). Valuable, sure. Check out montarasoftware.com for more info. There will be a place for each in different shops.
Finally, Rich, yes we do plan to fold in MX enhancements. Look for an announcement about our next release, due in beta in a couple of weeks. Or join our discussion list (http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/self_help/archive_searc h/index.cfm) to keep abreast of happenings.
charlie arehart [charlie@newatlanta.com]