Railo: What Shouldn't We Do?
For Railo, the competition is other dynamic scripting languages on the JVM including Groovy and JRuby. None of those languages avoid BlazeDS integration or PDF or image processing because Adobe does them. For us to do so would simply give people another reason to choose something other than a CFML based engine, making it much less likely for them to come back to CFML for their next project.
I think it is important that Railo and Adobe find a way to co-exist. Both parties have selfish interests independent of the interests of the community as a whole, but I think they have more to agree on than to argue over. In the past it might have made sense to look to carve up the market by "leaving" certain things to one provider or the other, but as an open source project, Railo needs to be driven by community interests and to provide a compelling and comprehensive solution for CFML developers. I think the market will make its own decisions over times as to which engine to use for any given class of project and we should follow the communities lead.
But I've been posting a lot about CFML. I want to step back in my next posting (in an hour or so) and take a look at the broader JVM world and how I'd love to see Railo evolve in the best of all worlds.
Railo reneged on a number of promises to Adobe, and while you argue they are in the best interest of the community, it's really about business and profit. This has severely damaged the relationship between the two companies. Adobe aside, if Railo thinks they can offer a superior solution for Flex and PDF then by all means, go for it. However, aren't those the 'manager' feature you so like to rip into Adobe about?
I'm more upset with the false promises made to the community. Looking back at the original announcement in June 2008, it's disturbing to see how many promises made to the community have been broken.
http://www.adrocknaphobia.com/post.cfm/breaking-ra...
It seems the _only_ thing that remained true was the choice of OSS license. Today, the JBoss 'partnership' consists of a single link from JBoss.org to the Railo website. At this point it doesn't seem like JBoss is planning to do anything more than that. Maybe this all has to do with the fact that the JBoss CTO who announced the relationship with Railo, resigned last week.
Honestly, Peter, you are a good friend, so my advice is simple and without an Adobe influence: Deliver on your promises. Otherwise it's just hype and marketing fluff. I think most of the community has given Railo a free pass while they got their stuff together to go OSS. But at a certain point I have to think the same level of criticism thats aimed towards CF, which is a mark of a passionate community, will be aimed at Railo as well.
- Adam Lehman
Adobe Product Manager - ColdFusion / Bolt
The community is more than ColdFusion and Railo in this case. The community is CFML developers. Expanding our market should be the goal and IMO Adobe is not Railo hostile or controlling. They have very much impressed me being open to other CFML platforms that are not in themselves hostile to Adobe or it's products. A working relationship has been formed where Blue Dragon Open source is also on the board now.
There are enough struggles in life. Let's not run around accusing (and Peter is not doing this... but I have seen this in many threads online lately) each other. Peter is right. We need to find a way to both co-exist and deal with the stink clouds that seek to divide us. :)
I have no idea whether Railo will do a better job than Adobe of things like Flex and PDF integration, but as an open source project it makes no sense to rule out specific technical areas - if people want BlazeDS integration, it'll be in the core. Personally I'm more concerned when I see that a Flex usergroup is doing a presentation on Zend (NYFlex UG the other week) - how hard are we trying to get people not to use CFML???!!!
Sacha was supportive of the partnership, but he didn't lead it. There are a number of plans being worked on for the jboss project and we'll release them when they're ready to be released!
I value your friendship and appreciate the input.
At Scotch On The Rocks 2008, Gert has announced that Railo would be open-sourced under LGPL2 (1). During the same session I was excited to announce also a technical collaboration with JBoss. Since then the Railo team has worked hard to get the codebase ready for public consumption. One should realize how much work is involved in such endeavor. We have done the same ourselves a few times and I can say that Railo has performed in the usual timeframe. AFAICS they make progress one step at a time and I like this approach. This is the only way to deliver eventually on the "promises" aforementioned. Plus once again Railo was *NOT* acquired by Redhat therefore Gert and his crew are most likely busy making sure payroll checks are honored every month.
Regarding Sacha's departure, all is explained in his blog (2). And his comment on your past blog entry still applies today (3).
Cheers,
Luc Texier
Senior Technical Development Manager
Common Frameworks - Portal Platform
JBoss, a division of Redhat
(1) http://classic.railo.ch/en/index.cfm?treeID=360
(2)http://sacha.labourey.com/2009/03/29/i-am-leaving-...
(3)http://www.adrocknaphobia.com/post.cfm/breaking-ra...
@Ziggy - Sorry you see my comment as a complaint. Peter was a friend way before he was a competitor so thats where my advice comes from. The only reason I work at Adobe and dedicate so much of my life to ColdFusion is because I love this community. If I think someone is misleading the community then I'm going to call it out regardless if it's MS, Railo, JBoss, whoever. Myself and Adobe should be held accountable in the same way.
Then you must not understand PR and how shabby that makes Adobe look.
I've never heard anyone say Railo mislead "the community", only you. And it seems you're clearly upset that they might provide more to the community than they even promised. Not a bad thing for the community at all! -Though maybe for Adobe's profits, but "the community" will decide that.