Free BlueDragon Opens Doors

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.

IE8 Breaks ColdFusion

IE8 is a nice browser, it renders the Acid 2 test perfectly and Microsoft has finally taken a leap of faith that not even Firefox has.

But with a leap of faith comes a host of issues, IE8 will not render a whole lot of sites very well. Including Blogger. I couldn't post this from IE8.

And all the CF8 Ajax / DHTML features are broken. Even in IE7 emulation mode the grids will not render correctly.

So who's fault is this? Is it Microsoft for being so brave, Adobe for including DHTML stuff, EXT for not working.

Well it's a combo, but most notably Adobe will have to fix it, and hopefully fix it by moving to EXT 2 rather than anything else. Others have blogged that ColdFusion including large libraries of javascript and DHTML was risky, Adobe are aware of this and now have no choice but to fix it.

Now Adobe need to release a CF8 update before Microsoft release IE8.