The Future of ColdFusion: Part 3 - Railo's Release

Railo have been providing an alternative to Adobe's ColdFusion for some time now. As with any two implementations of a language, both have strengths and weaknesses so the best implementation will depend on your use case. I haven't used Railo in any projects yet, so I'll leave the feature by feature analysis to others.

Instead I want to talk about some other elements of the announcement that I think will have a more important long term impact on Railo and CF (feature sets can change pretty quickly, after all).

Adobe's Initial Response
As a commercial entity, Adobe obviously has to think through the details of the Railo announcement and decide on a strategy that maximizes their shareholder value in the long term. For them to do anything else would be irresponsible.

That said, it was made immediately clear - first by Adam Lehman and then by Ben Forta that while Adobe must respond in a manner that is good for their business, there is going to be no bad blood or animus and that if there is a commercial justification for working together with Railo that they would be very open to doing so.

One thing that always surprised me about the whole New Atlanta issue was that some people seemed to get the impression that Adam was anti-open source. In my experience he has always been incredibly open to, interested in and supportive of open source developments and hopefully that will be a little bit clearer to people from his immediate response to Railo at his blog.

Ben has a wider range of responsibilities, but I also think he made it clear in his open letter to Railo that there was at the very least personal good will between the individuals involved.

The Personal Connection
I first got to meet Gert at Scotch on the Rocks last year and was able to spend more time chatting with him at SoTR this year (the moral of this story? Come to Scotch on the Rocks '09 :-) ).

It's clear that he is very widely liked and respected throughout the community. He took the time to give Adobe advance notice of his announcement, spoke with a number of the community influencers before his keynote and was at pains to point out that he wanted to grow the community and work with Adobe in a way that would help both of them to grow.

Of course, he is releasing an open source alternative to Adobe ColdFusion so there are going to be a bunch of sensitive issues to be worked out both between Railo and Adobe and in the community as a whole, but I believe that the personal respect between Gert and the Adobe team will certainly make the proces easier than it might otherwise be.

The JBoss Connection
If Gert had just announced the open sourcing of a CF engine, I wouldn't have seen that as a very interesting announcement, but the fact that they are going to be joining jboss.org and taking ColdFusion to Java conferences is interesting for a few reasons.

Firstly, we will finally get to see if the cost of the server or the limitations on deploying standard using JAR on something like JBoss or anything else Adobe specific has an impact on ColdFusion adoption.

More interestingly, JBoss is well respected within the Java world and if they include a ColdFusion engine, a good number of Java developers will at least take a moment to have a look and see if there is anything that could work better for them than jsp's or Velocity. Some Java devs have a negative perception of ColdFusion. Others miss the simplicity of the language for solving certain classes of problems. Yet others have probably just never thought about it much. It will be very interesting to see how the evangelism of ColdFusion within the Java world will play out.

I think it'll also be interesting to see if JBoss will be able to take advantage of the "making hard things easy" story by using CF as a way for developers who might not be ready to work with the stack directly by providing them a simple tag based interface using CF for getting started with elements of the JBoss stack.

Even within the ColdFusion community, the Railo announcement could stimulate some very interesting developments. Rather than just offering a "me too" implementation of the core language, Railo are already talking about tight Hibernate integration, easy clustering and fail over and taking other pieces of the JBoss stack and making them available to ColdFusion developers. Of course, the announcement raises more questions than answers. For example, will Adobe and Railo collaborate on extended language features? Will all of the Railo tags work on WebSphere or will they confine themselves to JBoss? It is certainly not clear what will come out of the announcement for CF developers, but I think it raises a lot of very exciting possibilities.

I also just want to mention how impressed I was by Luc Texier who is the lead JBoss Support for EMEA & APAC. I think his experience in open source and commitment to community involvement is also going to really help drive the growth of the ColdFusion community.

Of course, there are a number of very different ways this could play out for the language/community as a whole, but I'll leave that posting until tomorrow!

Oh, and if you want to find out more, I believe there are still a few tickets left for CF United where the saga will hopefully unfold a little further.

Thoughts?