Answer to the open letter to Railo and me

June 9, 2008 · By Gert Franz · 7 Comments

Ben - thanks. I guess this gets you climbing up my charts even higher :-)
I slept very badly the past few weeks given the fact that what we were going to announce might have a huge impact on the evolution of CFML for the community.Ben pointed out that this was of course a business decision as well and he is absolutely right. We all have to put bread on the table somehow. Nevertheless this step mainly serves the community. We are of course expecting some revenue from raising a new market, but it would be foolish to do so without a strong partner (JBoss) and maybe somehow together with a competitor (Adobe). Let me state this clearly here:
There is not way to create an expert group or similar without the participation of Adobe. Anyone who does not see this is fooling themselves. Let's face it: Without Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe none of us would be in our current position. This was one of the reasons we decided to contact Adobe prior to announcing the move.
And I must also point out that Ben always treated us (especially me) with respect and he always helped whenever he could or whenever it was possible. So I really appreciate his words and am really thankful. Nevertheless I suppose there won't be a book called "Railo 3.1" by Ben Forta :-).
But once again, any Open Source expert group or CFML expert group needs to have at least someone from Adobe in it. And I must also say that I would like to see it as an independant expert group, not only having the JBoss or Adobe signs all over it. Then it might even be possible to gain acceptance from the majority of the CFML community.
There's a new wind blowing in the CFML market at the moment and we all should benefit from it. A lot of frustrated JSP users might just be waiting for CFML to show up...

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Tags: CFML · Open Source · Railo 3.0

7 responses so far ↓

1 Raul Riera // Jun 9, 2008 at 2:47 PM

This is great news, I read Ben's article and I pretty much agree with everything. I was excited to see some Open Source options (that actually were useful) for ColdFusion but I was starting to loose hope since OpenBlueDragon is SOOOO "green" right now. I would like to see Railo grow along with Adobe ColdFusion. The more competition, the better the engine/language/ will become.
2 Jim Priest // Jun 9, 2008 at 6:09 PM

Yes - I think someone really needs to consider some kind of "CFML Steering Committee" or "expert group" and ideally we'd all brush aside our differences and invite EVERYONE to the table. Good stuff in CFML land! :)
3 Jeff Gladnick // Jun 9, 2008 at 7:00 PM

Amen. It's nice to hear open calls again for a CFML core standard, and I hope Adobe takes you up on your offer to create a CFML steering committee.
4 Mike Brunt // Jun 10, 2008 at 3:35 PM

I was on the OpenBD Steering committee up until last weekend and Sean Corfield and I resigned from that pretty much at the same time but independent of each other. The reason was a badly worded blog piece by the President of New Atlanta where he seemed to suggest that ColdFusion was a legacy language and New Atlanta offered services to transition from CF to more modern languages such as .NET or Java. From what I have read and heard about Railo and the thrust of its creators I am not surprised that Adobe has a different attitude to this project. Good luck.
5 Brian FitzGerald // Jun 10, 2008 at 5:15 PM

I just want to offer another word of support and say that I am very excited about the Railo and JBoss partnership. I also love the idea of an "independent expert group," and think it would be wonderful to see it come together with the best interests of the community as a whole in mind.
6 Gert Franz // Jun 10, 2008 at 5:27 PM

Hi all,

thanks for all your support, Jeff you are with Railo for years now. This was a very important move for us. Partnering with JBoss was something that we were planning for a long time. What I especially like is the fact that we have a huge potential group of contributors from the Java community. And given the fact that there are still plenty CFML lovers out there I hope that a couple of them can be found in that community.
Nevertheless we will join JBoss on their JBoss.org world tour in fall this year in order to promote open source CFML powered by Railo. Not only "interesting days" but interesting times to come.
Oh and one thing I would like to mention. Railo is not only me Gert Franz! It's everybody who is behind the project. I would especially like to name "Michael Streit" our CTO who is the master brain behind Railo. You'll get to know the people behind Railo in the upcoming time.

Gert
7 Sean Corfield // Jun 12, 2008 at 7:43 AM

Just to clarify Mike's comment: we resigned for different reasons (read my blog for my reasons). Like Mike and many others, I am very excited about Railo's announcement and looking forward to being able to use and contribute to this new JBoss CFML project!

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