I was initially unfazed by the announcement of the Free Open Source BlueDragon, I have never used, never wanted to. Mainly as it's not priced well against ColdFusion 8, if I wish to pay almost full price, I might as well get the real deal.
But I've been thinking about it for several days, and there have always been applications that I wanted to develop, but couldn't because of the ColdFusion pricing limitations. Those applications that I want to either develop and give away or develop and sell for $1000 or less, the cost of this is prohibited by the CF price tag.
No Adobe and it's supporters will argue, you can get cheap hosting, etc, etc but it's not the same. For example, I once developed a really cool intranet / document management system that was very well received by companies, but I had to price it too high to cover the CF cost. I have thought of developing a system similar to JIRA, but same issue. And when ever I have one of these ideas, I think I will need to do it in PHP, .NET or Java.
Adobe don't seem to understand this, but Im sure that many of you out there do. So now a free ColdFusion is coming that will have no limits on usage, and the only major feature to be dropped is most likely the CFDOCUMENT stuff. Well all my little project ideas, now have a new life.
I can write a simple time sheeting application, with an AIR client and a BD back end, cost to customer, my choice I have no on cost so I can give it away or sell it for $99.
I can write my intranet tool and not have to worry about any costs, utilise MySql and free PDF libraries and do whatever I like, once again I can give it away or sell it for $99, $999 or $9999.
The more I think about it the more I realise how many applications I can develop like this, and the more I feel that CF missed the boat and should have done this years ago, then developers with ideas like this that end up turning into something bigger needing, enterprise versions with support etc, would be in ColdFusion.
Adobe might now sit back and say, well you can do it in BD, then when you want more come to us, I say that ain't going to fly. I will support BD if these applications eventuate into something bigger, as it was them that made it possible.
9 comments:
Last time I checked, and correct me if I'm wrong, you needed a 500 quid 3rd party package to do CFC remoting (from Flex via RemoteObject, not using web services) with BD.
This means I wont be using it. Railo does have this feature in the very latest versions, but is not as free.
Dale, I'm looking at it from the same angle as you. The only reason I learnt PHP was to create those affordable web sites/apps that smaller clients want but wouldn't be able to afford if it was hosted with CF.
Falken, I've yet to see a Flex app where I think "wow, that's amazing". Or "there's no way I could do that using DHTML/AJAX". To create a good Flex app don't you need to learn a whole new language or pay up for an authoring tool? I'm not dissing Flex, I just don't see a benefit learning it or using it in a project. (Or perhaps Adobe Marketing have failed to reach me!)
@falken, you can connect through http or webservices, choose what ever you like. It doesn't have to cost you anything unless you want it to.
@gary, we use a lot of Flex and there are benefits over Ajax, but both have their place and it depends on your application.
I've been using BD7 for a long while now (and some years using BD6 as well), and it wasn't until CF8 that I made the switch back to Adobe. But it was more because it was faster and had the incredible CFAJAX-controls and CFIMAGE manipulation skills. But reading Vince Bonfanti's blog I now am sure to return to BD. Together with Apache and MySWL it's a kille app-server for CFML, and free! Nothing beats free. And now I can host my clients myself on a free CFML app-server, what more could a ColdFusion developer with his own business dream of? Full control and the best programming language and app-server in the world? ;-)
My concern has always been that there doesn't seem to be many shared hosting sites that offer Blue Dragon.
That is one thing I would see as a problem for BD going forward.
Dale,
Well said and its not like I haven't been trying to say that this market has existed for years.
People laughed at me and canned me for where our company was headed 2 years ago, now people might start to realise that I don't talk shit.
I wish Adobe had done this years ago, but at least now someone has stepped up and said to Adobe we realise there is a market. Now its time you do.
I am glad I got you thinking on the Open Source bandwagon with that intranet solution:-)
omg, this really sucks...
There are tons of other software out there you could use for DMS, though. Just saying.
I have experience with BD7 but I don't think I've been able to explore every feature of it. Would you say it is among the top DMS software?
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