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Will BlueDragon always be playing catchup?
A question was posted as a comment to an entry on Sean Corfield's blog (where he kindly announced the release of BlueDragon 6.2, http://www.corfield.org/blog/index.cfm?do=blog.entry&entry=D2402A82-DE24-0972-25E59055EEA8C17E) asking "won't BlueDragon always be playing catchup?"
It's an understandable, if not fully informed, question. The questioner should know that there are features in CFMX 7 where MM is finally catching up with BlueDragon. We've had optional sourceless deployment for a couple of years, and we've had standard WAR file deployment in our J2EE edition just as long. Even some little things are new in CFMX 7 that were even in our 6.1 release last year, such as the ability to pass XSLT parameters on XMLTransform. And there are still more innovations which still aren't in CFMX. More on those in a moment.
Of course, it's the notable new features of CFMX 7 that he's probably thinking of, such as Flash form components, PDF generation, reporting, the event gateways, and so on. None of those are things we can't add. Indeed, we've got working prototypes already. Whether and when we do add them will be driven by our customers' needs. Not all the features in a new CF release are fully baked when first released (remember CFCs as of 6.0?), and not everyone is going to be equally happy with a given new implementation (witness various complaints about the Flash components, reporting, and more).
Further, our customers may not really care enough about a new feature (we still don't bother to support CFGRID, CFAPPLET, CFCHART, and the old form of CFREPORT, and no one's held that as a litmus test for deciding to not use BD.)
But back to the question of who's catching up with who, we have added things that the community has long requested, which STILL are not in CFMX 7: CFIMAGE, CFIMAP, CFZIP, CFCONTINUE (to skip to the next iteration in a CFLOOP), a Render function (to process CFML from passed in via a variable, such as from a query, etc.), assertions (CFASSERT and an assert function), enhanced whitespace compression, enhanced error reporting, the ability to serialize CFCs, the ability to replicate sessions on clustered servers such as WebSphere and WebLogic (which CFMX 7 still can't do), and more.
And our .NET edition is truly unique. While both CFMX and BlueDragon allow CFML apps to run natively on J2EE servers, only BlueDragon runs CFML natively on .NET. See previous blog entries here for more on that great feature.
So we'll certainly be watching CFMX 7 and the community's response (more important, our customers'), but it's just not fair to say we're "always playing catchup". As most people seem to conclude, competition is a good thing and keeps both companies on their toes. CFML developers win in so many ways. We're here to help. As we note on our web site, "you've invested heavily in CFML, and so have we".
Charlie - a question. You mention not needing to support cfgrid, cfchart,
cfapplet, etc. I can understand the old java based things. But no one is
asking for cfchart? I find that hard to believe as it seems so useful,
especially for simple reporting.
Raymond Camden [ray@camdenfamily.com]
Well, I said no one considered it a litmus test. Some have asked for it,
and we've pointed them at various solutions that exist. Some have even more
desirable than either CF's or our (prospective) Java server-based charting.
One tool in particular is FusionCharts from infosoftglobal.com. But, just
as CF did (and we did before deprecating CFGRAPH in 6.2), we could leverage
a Java charting package (or the .NET framework in our .NET edition) to give
people CFCHART. It may well be added, because people are interested. Again,
though, it's not been a show-stopper yet (and given other things we were
adding, that left us not bothering to add it to 6.2).
Charlie,
Where is this working prototype of Bluedragon generated flash forms and PDF files? I wanna see! Oh, and event gateways!
(Personally, while I think the flash forms have potential, the PDf generating and event gateways are *FAR* more interesting features of CFMX7)
Rick, to be honest they're really things you can do yourself (at least the
PDF and Flash forms). For PDF, there are many Java-based (and .NET ased)
solutions, as you know.
For Flash forms, Laszlo can do what CFMX's Flash forms (based on a bundled version of Flex) and it's open source. You can even bundle Flex within BlueDragon.
What I've done for these is create CFML custom tags to simulate the CFML tags. Again, anyone can do these. None of the versions I've worked up are in a form ready for release, but again conceptually there's nothing stopping you or anyone else to do. As I said above, we will consider putting them in as real CFML tags in the future.
As for the event gateway prototype, that of course isn't enabled via custom tags. We had started building our own notion of the same thing that ended up in MM's event gateway feature. When we learned that they were doing it, we decided to hold off putting in ours and would just wait for MM's so as to not introduce conflicting syntax.
But really, while some in the community are ultra enthusiastic about the gateway feature, we've really had no customer press us for it. So, again, we'll be watching.
One place that BD could really beat MM to the punch is CFC interfaces and a
implements="" attribute for cfcomponent. That alone would have me look
seriously at switching.
Are there any plans to include them in future releases?
Dave Ross [dave.ross@gmail.com]
Dave, that is not something we've considered, but as I said above we do
listen to our customers (and the community). The best place to file that
request is in our feature request page, available from the self-help page:
http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/self_help/index.cfm
That way, it will be registered for consideration as we begin planning for our next release later this year.