Railo: Expanding the Community

Attracting New Developers
Railo is a JBoss project. We are pitching presentations to OSCON, JBoss World, and are looking how to get presentations lined up at Java and JBoss user groups. CFML is already a superior view technology to JSPs and soon I hope to be able to see it as a real competitor to Groovy in terms of scripting on the JVM.

I don't know how many new developers Railo will bring to the CFML world, but compared to Adobes efforts to date to reach out to non-CFML developers (I still remember an Adobe presentation on Flex the other year showing PHP as an example back end) and given the relative size of the organizations, I think we're doing our part. Even in small ways like the technology amnesty which we sponsored at Scotch on the Rocks, we're committed to bringing CFML to more developers even though we're currently a very small team.

However, I think the real benefit that Railo brings to the CFML world is in stemming some of the attrition which is natural in any language.

Keeping Existing Developers
Whether they are into open source, whether they like the innovative features, whether they had a problem with object performance, whether they found Groovy more productive, whether they felt silly talking about CFML to Java devs or whether they just need to do some projects that don't justify an app server license fee, Railo is working on giving people reasons to stay with CFML.

Our focus is on making CFML a compelling language choice for RAD scripting on the JVM and providing the benefits of the Railo solution to all developers - through presentations and resources for developers - whether they currently use CFML or not.

Tomorrow I'm going to take some time to look at what Railo *shouldn't* do . . .