OpenBD and CF Conferences

Below is our, OpenBD Steering Committee's, official stance on the matter that was brought up here

We feel it is more important for folks to know why they won't be seeing any OpenBD sessions at any CF conferences. While those involved with OpenBD are willing and happy to share some of the cool stuff we have done on OpenBD with the community at a conference, we'd hate to do that to the detriment of the conference by endangering a major sponsorship opportunity.

OpenBD has two distinctly different development branches. We have our standard JEE development branch which has had tremendous contributions from the community, and we have the GAE branch which has received great accolades from both inside and outside the CFML community. New Atlanta employees have been very active in the development on the GAE branch of OpenBD, and these contributions go beyond OpenBD. They've been the focus of many developers outside the CFML community and helps show CFML in a positive light to developers outside the CFML community.

As an example, Vince is creating a VFS for GAE that is a completely independent open source project (http://code.google.com/p/gaevfs/). This benefits not only OpenBD on GAE, but everyone deploying Java applications to GAE. It's a great contribution and by extension can only help reflect positively on CFML as a whole.

Remember too that it's not at all unusual for open source projects to have significant resource contributions from commercial companies. In fact, most well-known open source projects operate this way. A large contribution to Eclipse comes from IBM associates, but Eclipse is certainly not an IBM product even though it's used extensively by IBM. An important distinction is that Eclipse's license allows for commercial use, one reason why IBM is interested in Eclipse. OpenBD's license (GPLv3) does not allow for commercial redistribution and that helps ensure companies like New Atlanta or Adobe can not take and sell OpenBD or its derivatives. We do this for the protection of the community to guarantee they will always have a free fully open sourced engine for CFML development.

Edit: The title has changed since the original post, to be less confrontational and I've modified the introduction as well to try not to be confrontational. The last thing we've intended to do was be negative or against any group or individual. And inresponse to a couple private messages and one public the reason this is on my blog and not OpenBD's blog is 2 fold: I typically am the communication liason with the CF community, in tandom with Matt and sometimes Niati, and OpenBD servers more than just the CF community and we did not want to pollute that space with politics like this. We try to avoid this stuff and would have been happy to not talk about it but it was brought up so we responded.

OpenBD is Free as in Speech

So I'll admit to not keeping up with the blogosphere lately, I've been to busy checking out Fail Blog and related sites. But Adam Lehman Pinged me and asked for my thoughts on his recent post. What originally began as a comment turned into a little bit more than a comment length response so as the blogpshere goes sometimes I've created a blog entry instead. Since I think it is most important I will answer the second half of Adam's question first.

"Is the motivation of the OpenBD team ... [a] conscious effort to take CFML market share from Adobe?"

Nah. Hell there is a reality here right? If that was the motivation we are failing miserably since we don't present OpenBD at CF conferences (unless invited by the organizer) and we don't sponsor CF conferences. To date the only sponsoring OpenBD has done was $100 + raffle prizes at Spring BR 2008 which was largely to a PHP crowd (by design). So again just so there is no confusion we realize that by putting a "free" (as in cost) alternative out there, there will be some cannibalization. This happens but we have no interest in acquiring market share from inside the community.

"Is the motivation of the OpenBD team based in raising the quality of CFML"

"Raising the quality of CFML" is sort of awkward terminology to me. We are certainly interested in trying out concepts and putting out new/innovative features (especially as related to the cloud) but I think our bigger goal is providing an open source engine. We want to provide a fully open sourced CFML engine to those interested in Open Source software. We certainly want to bring new ideas, new ways of thinking, new avenues for CFML but raising the quality? I guess that depends on how you qualify what is meant by quality. The key here for us is concepts, and bringing new concepts to the community.

So there is my answer to your question Adam/community. I hope you accept is but I also feel like I need to add some additional commentary to the discussion of Free as in Speech v. Free as in Beer. From Adam's definition I agree I think OpenBD does straddle the lines a small bit. But I think there are a couple of things to mention to help clarify, as an example a lack of a road map. OpenBD does have a road map. Often times we do stray away from the road map and this the fault of a couple things. Sometimes contributors to OpenBD get a idea about something not on the road map and a new feature will popup over night. OpenBD contributors are passionate programmers and this is going to happen. I've come embrace this as to do anything else would be futile not to mention stifle creativity of the OpenBD team. To Andy and Alan's credit as they begin to implement features not on the road map they have done a superb job posting wiki entries and integrating feedback into the features. The second issue with OpenBD's road map is a result of poor project management rather than a conscious decision to hide what is going on. I talked with Alan about this many months ago and I stated my intent to step up and do more PM work. To date I have failed at this job, mostly due to a lack of effort and allow me to explain why (I think the explanation is telling).

I only have so much time to devote to OpenBD and lack of a road map guidance has typically been an issue brought up by the CFML community not folks outside of the community. Given my limited time to work on OpenBD I tend to spend most of my time focusing on what folks are saying outside of the CFML community as I think that is more important right now. As OpenBD matures and becomes slightly less erratic (think about the cloud development it is always innovating) we'll probably have more and more folks ask for a solid road map and that is the time when it will happen. Right now I think it is important but there are other pressing issues for me that I think will serve to grow the OpenBD community (and the greater CFML community) rather than appease the ColdFusion users looking for alternatives.

And the final topic licensing. This comes down to philosophy. As a commercial entity (Adobe, and a lesser extent Railo) and product manager (Adam specifically) I would expect these folks to have the stance that they do on licensing. That's not to say put in another position they would not have the same opinion but I think given their position wanting a sharable license makes sense. As a staunch (rabid maybe?) advocate of Open Source the opinion of the OpenBD steering committee is slightly different. What I mean by this is OpenBD is open source for the reason of wanting to be open source and we don't feel others should take that source, modify it, and NOT share it with the community. I recognize this is not a popular position with some folks but it is the position of OpenBD. At the end of the day let's be realistic OpenBD's architecture is so wildly different that it'd typically be detrimental to take anything but concepts from the engine and concepts are not covered under GPL. This brings me back to my original statements above. We certainly want to try out new things and take CFML to new places and new markets but we are interested in doing this entirely open source and keeping it and all versions of OpenBD open source. That is the intent of OpenBD.

Got the Beta Blues?

Rightly or not the cf-talk boards have had threads where it was made known ColdFusion 9 is in beta testing. Last year Adobe announced they would be more transparent in the development, even announcing the ColdFusion advisory board. It seems like that transparency is a slow build, which I understand as nothing happens over night. I did want to take a second to pimp OpenBlueDragon and say we are working hard to be as as transparent as we can be. If you have the Beta Blues and want to share some ideas on how you thinkCFML can be made stronger, more competitive, or otherwise improve your life check out Open BlueDragon's google group and feel free to submit a ticket to our ticket system! CFML is a great language and I am confident ColdFusion 9 will deliver a great new set of functionality, I also have to say I am very impressed with how OpenBD has progressed through the months. Did you know we are considering adding cfvideoplayer and well as cfvideo? We'll talk more about this as soon as we figure out how we think it should work, until then you tell us how you think it should work. Also add it as a favorite so we can gauge the interest in this feature!

Speaking @ Mid-Michigan CFUG

It's my pleasure to announce the first of what I hope to be many Open BlueDragon presentations I will be doing for local CF user groups. Rick contacted me a short while backing asking about a presentation and I happily accepted. I was originally (shortly after OpenBD's launch) a little hesitant to do this due to the negative stigma around OpenBD. I think much of that has past plus Railo seemed to be welcomed at UG and I'd like to expect the same courtesy for OpenBD. If your user group has an interest in OpenBD please feel free to contact me, a.haskell on Google's email service. For my limited Fusebox readership that are PHP users if you have a user group I'd love to get an opportunity to show you an open source alternative to PHP. OpenBD might serve you well with some customers that have CFML in house already (not to mention you can still use FB on it!). CFML is an incredibly powerful language and OpenBD gives you a great free alternative. I'll be presenting OpenBD to the Mid-Michigan CFUG on Nov. 11 @ 7pm.

Speaking at bFusion

Bob Flynn and is once again hosting bFlex and this year has added bFusion! bFusion is an awesome 1 day FREE(!!) event at Indiana University (Bloomington Indiana) followed by a 1 day FREE event for Flex. I won't get into the sales pitch just check out the site. I do want to pimp my 2 sessions though both of which are very near and dear to me. First is Open Source CFML Engines and second being Headfirst TDD.

In my Open Source CFML session we'll explore the open source business model and take a deep dive into how open source CFML engines will help shape the future of CFML development. There is a lot more to Open Source than just the free cost aspect we'll explore this for a brief while. We'll also discuss the differences between Platform and language. I think its just as important to recognize the value of ColdFusion as it is to see the value in CFML. At the end of the session you'll walk away armed with the knowledge you need to make a conscious well informed decision if open source CFML is the right option for you!

My second session, Head First TDD, is pretty much what the title describes it to be. We'll be diving head first into how to start developing with Tests in mind. The cool part is the Head First TDD will be hands on. I won't tell you how you should do TDD you will follow me and work with others and PRACTICE TDD. In the 1.5 hour session there might MIGHT be 20 minutes worth of presentation the remainder of the time will be used to explore TDD together with, hopefully, non-trivial examples. Since this is hands-on and interactive you'll need ColdFusion (or Railo should work), Eclipse, cfEclipse and mxUnit installed. If you'd rather you can just use pulse and get my profile, which I have talked about before. You'll still need to install a CFML engine and have mxUnit's CFML code downloaded and preferably running in ColdFusion. You'll also need an open mind and bring a little extrovert along b/c you will be working with others! You'll also need to download some CF files for the hands on but the examples I have are very boring and I am trying to come up with new ones, ones I have not finished yet. Most likely that will be done the week of the bFusion as I procrastinate and have a lot on my plate. I'll post them as son as I am happy with them.

Welp that's all I have to say for bFusion, I can't wait to see you all there!

ColdFusion Costs too Much

That's a pretty common phrase I hear from folks looking at ColdFusion for the first time. Even scarier I hear it from folks inside the community! Don't get me wrong I love open source and I think there is plenty of room for open source CFML engines/platforms but when it comes down to it ColdFusion's platform for what it offers is a great deal. I get tired of hearing CFML developers tout the RAD of ColdFusion this used to be an okay mostly valid sell but the market has changed yet CFML developers montra hasn't. With a good framework and IDE Java can be pretty RAD these days, besides no one has ever quantfiably proved how much faster ColdFusion, or CFML, really is for development. What follows is an exceprt of a response I sent to a certain "journalist" when confronted about Open Bluedragon, he opened stating ColdFusion's (Standard) price at a mere 1300 was "unbeleivable":

... I'll be the first one to pimp the open source offerings but I also think there are some misconceptions of costs for ColdFusion. If you consider what the Adobe ColdFusion platform offers this [$1300 price tag] is pretty reasonable. What you or anyone needs to ask themselves, especially now with other CFML engines is, "Does the ColdFusion Platform offer me the features I need for the cost?" It seems more and more folks answer no to this but let's think about this for a second. Can Java produce a PDF? Certainly. You can use Java libraries and generate a PDF just fine. Without a bit of work though and a couple layers of abstraction generating an HTML equivelent and a PDF is tedious and can be costly when supporting an app long term. ColdFusion offers you a very simple and elegant way of generating a PDF based off purely the HTML you are already generating. Any pure Java shop can do this too but they need to either modify some open source HTML parses, write thier own, or purchase icesoft's parser (cost: nearly on par w/Adobe's ColdFusion). So with this feature alone all costs, never mind productivity gains of CFML, are nearly negated. Also consider JMS integration. Once again I could develop a nice abstraction layer in Java no problem but then my team is responsible for integration testing, regression testing, and support for this abstraction layer. Not nearly the same if I just use ColdFusion and it's JMS & ActiveMQ integration points. Testing is a real cost and relying on a commercial product is a huge cost saver. A final example to consider is ajax. Have you ever looked at how much a pain it is to refactor from ExtJS 1.0 -> X.X, or jQuery with the UI widgets? The api for ExtJs (and other js libraries) constantly changes and backwards compatibility is becoming a cost barrier to upgrading on large applications. By using ColdFusion's ajax tags you never have to pay a developer to upgrade your codebase to work with the latest version of ExtJS. Adobe is taking care of that for you behind the scenes. Now lets bring this full circle, these are only 3 examples I thought of off the top of my head, there are numerous other cost saving and value adds in the ColdFusion platform so the question really is are these worth it to you? Maybe they are (we certainly take advantage of some of these at my company) maybe they are not. If all you are generally interested in CFML and not the ColdFusion platform, great there are some awesome alternatives now through some open source offerings like OpenBD, Railo and, to a lesser extent, Smith Project. Each OS offering offers their own platform stuff, Open BD for example has a plugin for JMS. Railo, for example, has some very cool integration with Amazon's S3. ... ColdFusion's price point is very valid in many instances for many folks. I am an advocate for open source CFML, no doubt, but I am also an advocate for ColdFusion as it has solved many problems for the company I work for and done it at a huge cost savings.

Hopefully this spurs some good discussion and ideas on how ColdFusion is a money saver and not just from a RAD standpoint.