Railo – new life for ColdFusion?

June 23, 2008

I have to admit, I’ve never been in to ColdFusion.  I used it on a couple small projects back in the early 2000s (was just brought in to finish/fix existing code), but never really dug it.  Not that it was *bad*, but the early versions really smacked of watered-down development.  Everything’s a “tag”, so it’s “simple”.  Yet most problems that were facing developers (and still do) aren’t ’simple’ problems.  The problems stem from project communication, client interactions, etc.

A noted CF expert – Hal Helms – had drilled in to my head that most projects fail not because of technical incompetence but communication issues.  Yes, he wasn’t the first to come up with that insight, but he was the first person I’d heard put it succintly.  I use the same examples today when talking with clients/coworkers/whomever.  I’ve rarely been on a project that ‘failed’ (missed deadlines, overbudget, whatever) because I or someone on the project didn’t know how to open a file, or read from a db, or other ’simple’ things.  Many have ‘failed’ because of misunderstanding on the part of one of more parties.

So, CF’s focus on the ‘tag’ approach early on turned me off from exploring it further.  On top of that, it was rather expensive, and closed source to boot.  By 2003, I’d more or less written off CF as one of those techs that would continue to get marginalized in the webdev world, like Perl.  Whatever the technical or cost/benefit merits, when judged against the bigger communities and toolsets of PHP, .Net and Java, CF was destined to be a footnote.

However, a few things changed.  Macromedia bought Allaire, then Adobe bought Macromedia.  CF started compiling down to Java.  IDEs with CF integration continued to get updated.  What was happening?  Perhaps people’d put so much money in to CF already they were willing to help support it through its dark days?  I don’t know for sure, but CF has seemed to hold its own during the last few years, and seems to be going through something of a renaissance.  Which brings me to Railo.

I just heard about Railo today (which inspired this hasty post).  Railo is a third party CFML engine – it’s not created by Adobe, but from a company in Sweden.  They have a free Community Edition, and a reasonably priced ‘Enterprise’ version.  They are coming out with a GPL (2?  3?) version later this year, which will be hosted at jboss.org, if I’m reading that correctly.  I expect JBoss will probably integrate it, which will open up the world of CFML to a new audience of Java developers.

All in all, still very interesting to see.  I have talked to 3 companies this year using ColdFusion, and I don’t think I talked to any for 2 years before that.  While I’m hardly a bellweather of tech adoption, it was still a bit eye-opening to me to have run in to that many in a short time (2-3 months).

On a related note, if you’ve got a ColdFusion opening, why not post it over at http://webdevjobs.com?

By the way, will this have any effect on Groovy adoption at Java shops?  Seems like it might have a splintering effect on Java devs looking for ‘alternative’ Java tech.  Any thoughts on this?

Posted in Development, Java, Software, Web