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Are New Atlanta genuine about CFML? |
| by Neil Middleton 1:47 pm Saturday, 7 June 2008. |
I was just browsing around some of the feeds that I follow catching up after three days at Scotch, when I came across a post from Vince Bonfanti of New Atlanta - the people behind Bluedragon.
Nothing much you might think, being a post about BlueDragon 7.1 at Microsoft’s TechEd conference except for one thing. At the end of the post, Vince mentions New Atlanta’s new CFML migration services for those that want to migrate from CFML to Java or .NET (which are implied to be more modern web application platforms)
So, what does this say about New Atlanta? For me it suggests that they have no real interest in boosting CFML or making the world a better place for CFML developers, but are more interested in selling licenses and consulting to those who want to take their applications elsewhere.
For me, the CFML market now has two vendors I would do business with: Adobe and Railo. Anyone see this differently?
EDIT: To make things clear: I am completely behind the Open Bluedragon project ( as with any free and open project ), I just have some minor issues with New Atlanta themselves. I have no idea what happened with the OpenBD Steering Committee mailing list posts.
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So, what does Open Bluedragon support anyway? |
| by Neil Middleton 9:44 am Thursday, 8 May 2008. |
Yesterday, Richard posted a comment on this blog asking about CFDOCUMENT support in Open Bluedragon.
I therefore thought I would post up links to two documents on the New Atlanta website describing the compatability of Bluedragon with Adobe ColdFusion. In these documents, Open Bluedragon matches the functionality of the J2EE version (as far as I am aware).
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Running the free Open Bluedragon CFML Server on Tomcat |
| by Neil Middleton 12:04 am . |
Yesterday, I posted an entry on the options that are now opening up to us as users of Open Bluedragon. Although I was talking largely about the possibilities from a development point of view, I largely skipped the deployment story.
Well, I’m not going to go into that now, as I’m sure that’s a whole series of posts in itself, but what I will say is that Per Kleven has posted a HOWTO on how to deploy openBD to Tomcat whilst maintaining an easy upgrade path for the inevitable regular updates.
It can only be a matter of time before this sort of thing is available for deploying openBD to practically every Java server under the sun (no pun intended).
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Open Bluedragon makes CFML development easy again… |
| by Neil Middleton 1:50 pm Wednesday, 7 May 2008. |
If you’ve not been hiding under a rock for the last few months you should be aware that New Atlanta have now released a GPL version of Bluedragon known as OpenBD. This project is aimed primarily in giving the community a CFML server that they can use, pretty much without restriction, and without cost. Driven by a well staffed steering committee, and discussed by a busy group of developers, it is set to be an interesting option for CFML developers out there.
So, how does it make life easy? Well for starters, you are pretty much free on the cost aspect. Want 100 instances running on a server hosting all sorts of stuff?, that’s fine, it’s free. Want to change something to work better for you? You can, provided that you don’t breach the GPL v3.
For me, the easiness is gained from the development story. It is now possible to have your CFML projects include the actual openBD runtime itself. So what? Well, this let’s you do a couple of things:
1. Set up Eclipse so that you can run your apps from within the IDE - no need for a CF Server installation. All you need is the appropriate Eclipse features, and a J2EE server installation folder (Tomcat or JBoss AS spring to mind).
2. Keep EVERYTHING in source control. Due to the fact that your projects contain the server itself, you are also keeping your server config within your project.
3. Set up continuous integration for CFML. With OpenBD, you are now in a position where you can have a continuous integration process getting your code out of source control, compiling it, testing it, and packaging it up into a WAR file for deployment wherever you might want it. After all, it’s a lot easier to deploy a WAR to your server than 1000 files of CFML code.
So, all in all, it’s looking rosy, and we’re only just coming up with ideas on what this allows us to do. So therefore, if you haven’t already - check it out, it’s well worth it.
As a side note, I will post details on how to get openBD running from within Eclipse another time. For those of you who are impatient, there is a screencast HOWTO here.
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Google launches App Engine |
| by Neil Middleton 10:12 am Tuesday, 8 April 2008. |
Last night, Google launched their Amazon EC2 competitor, App Engine.
For those of you that don’t know - Amazon EC2 is a system whereby you can upload a machine image that you can then create literally hundreds of virtual images from for very little cost. Accompanying this is the Amazon S3 service which is essentially a huge virtual storage device in the cloud - priced in a very reasonable pay-as-you-go style.
The cool thing with EC2 is that it is all controllable with an API - so, for instance, you could potentially have a web application that monitors it’s own load, and scales out new servers as required fully automatically - you only pay for what you use. This is great for new start-ups who aren’t really sure if their new super-duper social site is actually going to get no visitors, or become the next Facebook.
Google App Engine is a little different. With this, you are given a pre-prepared machine image which is basically a web server rigged up to use Python (with other platforms potentially coming soon) and a Google driven data-store, which is bound to be a bit speedy. Initially this might seem a little annoying as a CFML developer until you check out the free account.
As a non-paying App Engine subscriber you are somewhat limited on what you can do - but as Google describe it, you have enough for half a gig of storage and around 5 million page views a month. Now, thats a pretty busy website in my eyes. So, if you have a busy static website, a load of files requiring storage, or are handy with Python it’s worth a look - you could end up with a free web server.
On the other hand though, as a CFML developer, you’ll need to look at EC2. With the advent of the open-sourcing of Bluedragon, we are now in a position where we can build a no-cost server image (comprising of Linux, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat and Bluedragon) which we can then deploy to EC2 and scale for very low cost and end up with a supremely scalable, and performant cluster of servers. Best of all, if you don’t use it much - it doesn’t cost you as much, unlike having a rack of under used servers somewhere in a data-center.
So, come the revolution, we can all be building our infrastructure from nothing but the cloud, and scaling as far as we want, and best of all, for no cost but still using CFML. Obviously Amazon EC2 is the only choice at the moment for cloud CFML computing, but I’m sure Google will make their system a little more customisable over time.
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