I <3 Open BlueDragon

A couple times now I have see Vince, Alan, or others from the BlueDragon teams quoted as saying, "Don't you love being in control." I thought sure yeah its open source but I still have to either branch or wait for you to accept my contributes to make it in the distro. Well I am happy to make an exclusive announcement! Introducing.... Open BlueDragon Sandboxe Projects! Take from the Steering Committee's, draft, charter:

As part of the Open BlueDragon initiative, there will be a secondary code repository for projects that are not part of the core code base. This repository will be known as the project sandbox. Contributions to this area will extend the BlueDragon engine via the official plugin interface. This plugin interface facilitates deep integration into the core engine without necessitating any changes to the core code base.

This is THE most exciting news I have seen, and it gets better:

The plugin API makes it VERY EASY to hook Java code up to CFC's... [the] plugin makes it easy for you to create a tag that would then bridge Java Technology-with-CFML-through-CFC.

Say your enterprise wants to use Open BlueDragon but you heavily use cfgrid's AJAX functionality, nothing is stopping you from writing a jar and dropping it in your distro, its that simple! No branching or figuring out the engine, use the published API and presto, AWESOME! As an added bonus you can contribute it back and if it is popular and well written it may become part of the distro in the future. Alan has already talked about some fantastic Sandbox Projects that blog-city uses which I will let him brag about, and others have spoke of additional ideas as well.

I was excited about the open source initiative from the beginning but seeing this and learning more about it I am even more excited. Thanks to Alan and Andy and everyone over at New Atlanta for this contribution to the community. And a special thanks to Alan for giving me the go ahead to blog about this, I was so excited I just couldn't contain myself.