Over 2 years ago, I posted why ColdFusion 9 Needs ActionScript Support
More recently Ben Forta has mentioned the idea again, and I'm still for it. We currently have two technologies that work well independently and talk together well, but there is no code sharing and a host of syntax / formatting issues.
We have a current requirement for some code that will run both on the server, and standalone, offline. So how can we do this exactly?
Well its currently ColdFusion code, this cant run standalone offline, not without a ColdFusion licence for every customer, thats not going to happen.
So we could rewrite the code in ActionScript, and run it offline in an AIR app, but that doesn't run on the server, not easily at least.
Thus what are we supposed to do, maintain two versions in different languages, thats just a bad idea, there needs to be a solution to this from Adobe, the lack of a solution will lead us to look at the other offerings.
I could use Microsoft C#, runs on the server under ASP.NET, runs standalone.
I could us Sun Java, runs on the server under tomcat etc, runs standalone.
In our case, Microsoft is off the list because it doesn't allow cross platform use. And Java has its own issues but at the moment the only solution.
But the solution I prefer is for Adobe to commit to having a server side version of ActionScript. And I care not if its called ColdFusion or part of ColdFusion, but having access to all the ColdFusion goodness would be great. But firstly I would like to see Adobe commit to it, it was demonstrated at Max several years ago. And I honestly don't think that many will wait another 2 years before they decide the future of the product.
Im sure some will disagree, but from my companies point of view, its needed.
3 comments:
Trying to pre-empt the Scotch on the Rocks keynote? :)
I'd like to see a commitment to increasing performance, and making the current language more useful.
The one thing I never want to see is cfscript deprecated in favour of ActionScript. ActionScript as an optional server-side language would no doubt be useful to some people though, so I'm not against it!
Yeah, i thought about the same for some time already. Truth is, AS3 also has issues, all the things they took from ECMA are super, but things they avoided make AS3 uncomplete language for modern enterprise development. Adobe did super job with Flash virtual machine and AS is far more consistent and extendable then cfscript and cfml. We'll see what will they do.
I'd rather have straight ECMAScript support, rather than ActionScript. Why not just give me a language I can use on both the server and the client side?
Imagine how much easier it would be if you could write a single code base to validate data both on the server and client side.
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