Alan Williamson

I'd have to say the Scotch on the Rocks conference. The European community has been missing a steady CFML conference for sometime. We had CF_Europe in 2002 and 2003 but for one reason or another, it died off. With Scotch, we've taken control of the reigns, and put on not just a conference, but an event you truly won't forget.

This really depends on your locality. Here in the UK, I'd say the community are a little behind on maybe some of the advanced areas of CFML. Our feedback from the 2007 Scotch on the Rocks conference, in addition to the consultancy and training we have carried out point at this, with specifics being; frameworks, advanced CFC usage, OO concepts.

There are a lot of businesses deploying CF5-type Code to CF7/8 systems out there. The developers want to progress, they want to further their knowledge. They just don't know where to begin.

For a good 18 months I was the lead developer on an on-line portfolio system that helped companies; education, government, whoever, deliver educational qualifications to their own staff or their own client base.

This was a high traffic site using an Application Service Provider model, serving a good 80 clients, each of whom had a user base stretching from the 10s up the 1000s. We used CFMX6 and then 7 for the application making heavy use of the Event Gateway when we wrote our own custom reporting engine and interface.

Heh. Depends on who you ask. We do a lot of consultancy and training throughout the UK, and you'd be amazed at the companies that are utilising a CFML engine in house, but with no public facing sites or applications. We have worked with some huge companies.

Developer wise, there is a massive community in the UK, again they just aren't that visible and I'm sure there is a variety of reasons for that.

So to an outsider, at best they would say "staying the same", but our experience has shown us that it is growing.

I could take the cheap shot and say cost, but all the engines provides a free edition of some sort, and the fact CFEclipse is free... well, it means there is no cost to a developer wanting to try out CFML for the first time.

So, I will lay my cards on the table and say there are two main issues; IDE and Perception.

Sure, CFEclipse is free but it's far from finished. We have one guy - Mark Drew - working on the code, and that's in his free time. Sure, put it down to most of the CFML community not being Java Developers, but look at the other development communities; Java, .NET, PHP. They all have robust, fully featured, complete IDEs.

I know Adobe are gathering feedback on editors for CF9, but they (and Macromedia before them) have to hold up their hands and say "We screwed up on this one. Forcing Dreamweaver on you all was a bad idea!".

Perception. Amazingly, one of the big issues we still deal with in our day to day work is the perception that ColdFusion - and that's the engine most non-CFML-ers are familiar with - is still stuck in the CF5 days. Scalability issues, locking issues, code reuse was, "limited", for want of a better word.

The fact that the CFML world has changed completely since 2001 doesn't seem to have reached past our community boundary ... I don't think we can lay full blame to the companies behind the CFML engines for this one. As a community we should have stepped up and made our stand too. We typically hear of "preaching to the choir" in the CFML community so it's time to break out of that box.

It helps us break out of that box.

Up until now, all the CFML engines have been commercially licensed. For a long time now I've wanted to build a Virtual Machine, throw a CFML engine on there and fire it up on www.vmware.com. Restrictions on redistribution have prevented that. Taking things one step further, I can now build a Virtual Machine, deploy OpenBD and my own application and distribute it. All the end user needs to do is open the VM image on their computer.

How badly CFCs were implemented? Heh

Linux. We (Fuzzy Orange) are a pure Linux house and all our laptop/desktop machines run Ubuntu, with our servers running CentOS. We of course use Eclipse, and CFEclipse for all our CFML development.

I think there's more than one answer to this. All have different levels of achievability.

• Is the community still behind OpenBD?
• Are people actively using it in production; both new comers and those who have migrated from BlueDragon, ColdFusion, or Railo
• Has there been significant changes made to standardise certain features so they are cross-Engine compatible, as well as community driven enhancements
• And the most difficult challenge. Have we been able to sway developers from other communities to take a look - not necessarily adopt - at OpenBD.

Contact Andy @ andy.allan@openbluedragon.org — http://www.fuzzyorange.co.uk/