Slashdot Mirror
Abandonware, or 'Allaire Forums Open Sourced'
For those who don't know, Forums is a package of Cold Fusion templates which runs on a web server with Cold Fusion installed. You can see an example of it at forums.allaire.com.
I've been using Cold Fusion for a few years now, and my initial reaction was, "Why bother?" Allaire released the initial version of Forums in 1996, supported it for about 20 minutes or so[1], and began the process of abandoning it in favor of developing a lucrative "enterprise computing" package. Around 1998 or so, perhaps even 1997, people started asking for it to be open-sourced. In 1998 Allaire made a few bug fixes and released version 2 of the software, and in November 1999, they announced the software would be open-sourced. And yesterday, they actually did it. Of course, all of their Forums customers decided they were abandoned a few years ago, and found another product.
Now in one sense, Forums has always been "open source". Cold Fusion templates are interpreted, not compiled (and Forums was released before Allaire added even the weak encryption for templates that they now support), so anyone with a few weeks to kill could scrutinize the code and figure out how everything worked. Of course, redistributing modified versions of the code was a no-no, and if you made any modifications to it, even bug-fixes, then you lost all support from Allaire. Just like any compiled software product. In fact, I believe changing the templates was against the old license agreement, though I don't have a copy of the old license readily available.
So basically what they've done is make it freely downloadable. The license agreement is one of those bastardized we-took-our-standard-license-and-changed-a-few-words things that very obviously originated in the mind of a lawyer used to writing proprietary software licenses. I suppose it's open, but it sure isn't friendly about being open, know what I mean? It giveth with one hand, and taketh away with the other.
In any case, this is a classical example of the "abandoning a product while trying to keep our customers from feeling abandoned" open-source motivation. I'm dubious about its success, in this case or in the other cases where this is the motivation behind opening up a set of code. If Allaire had actually done this maybe three years ago, Forums would probably be a robust and stable product by now, and it would probably be driving a fair number of sales of the Cold Fusion application server. Instead, Allaire collected ($400 * #number_of_sales#) and pissed off (0.95 * #number_of_forums_customers#) by selling them a product with zero support.
Are people really going to flock to it now, spend a few hours parsing the license and trying to figure out if they can do anything useful with the code, and spontaneously develop a thriving user-group to support this thing? If Allaire can't even support it, why do they expect others to?
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it'll be a huge success, it'll turn into a beautiful open-source product and every Cold Fusion site worldwide will want their own set of discussion groups. Or maybe it'll just turn into another ghost site, lights on, but nobody home.
The open source/free software community is likely to see a lot more of these sorts of projects in the future. When your car gets old and feeble, and you don't feel like fixing it up anymore, you can donate it to Goodwill or to your local school for their auto shop course. Or you just take the plates off and drive it down to the waterfront, roll down the windows, leave the keys in it, and walk away.
When you don't feel like supporting your old software anymore, you dub it "open source", send out a press release touting your bold move, and dump it in the software burial grounds. It's a little better than previous burial methods (which involving interring the software in Yucca Mountain, permanent disposal), but maybe not very much.
Now Emmett is a little more optimistic. He notes that if even one person does something useful with the code, it's a net gain. And I suppose he's right. But the community is going to have to learn how to deal with "open source" code that is actually just a cynical move to dump some unsupported product and talk about how you're supporting the open source world.
Emmett: I agree with you, but there's always the point that someone will probably find a good use for it, even if it's to test it once and throw it away. OOP means that talented developers are talented in the reuse of code. I mean, if only one person picks it apart, takes 200 lines of code, and uses it to build some better, more efficient system of some sort, and GPL all of it, isn't that worth it? I think so, and I think it's the 'one person, somewhere' belief that keeps everything going. If they were serious about doing something, they would have used the GPL and been done with it.
The key here is that Allaire isn't thinking 'one person, somewhere,'
they're thinking, 'good PR,' while they'll turn this into a PR
extravaganza and say they're thinking 'one person, somewhere.' I think we're on the same page when I say we're both thinking 'too little, too late.' Don't confuse clever marketing and free advertising for innovation.
[1] A slight exaggeration. I believe Allaire actually supported the product for at least a week after they rolled it out.
I really wish people would stop using the word "propagate" when referring to DNS changes. DNS records do _NOT_ "propagate". They are fetched from authoritative servers when needed and then cached. If a change is made, and *your* server has cached records, it won't know about the changes until the records expire and it's forced to fetch them again from the authoritative servers.
Heh. If you want to learn a new definition of pain, try learning C, then Java, then C++. Getting used to OO from a poorly self-taught background of procedural programming is bad. Getting used to C++ 's complete butchery of C is worse. (welcome to reference hell)
Well it took a while for me to respond so I'm not sure if you'll ever read this but I was very glad to see a thoughtful response ... I'd felt that your other posts were too general to leave a real impact on technical readers and after reading this comment I felt bad about my being snide (but good about trying to make your original point more specific).
... so long as you had a generic interface [which'd probably be through the network -- sockets, serial ports, VT's] that those objects could use ... you never addressed this point when I brought it up before). That third option is CFX, which is the binary plugin interface for ColdFusion. You can write all sorts of custom tags in dll's which can be called by the Cold Fusion scripting engine. You have a certain set of objects through which you can communicate with CFServer (simplified by the CF SDK which comes with ColdFusion). It's really easy to wrap an existing C/C++ program up in a plugin tag like this ... and if we're talking about 100,000 line programs (and yes I've interfaced one of my own 100,000 line programs to a variety of script interpreters [including CF via this specific plugin interface and ASP/VBS/etc via implementation of IDispatch). I don't mean to comment on your coding style (especially since I haven't seen any of your code) ... but when you're making programs that big it's generally been my experience that it's a very good idea to abstract the control-interface ... so that the i/o isn't locked to any specific device (that makes it incredibly easy to offer many many different methods of control [be they ssh, www, serial, local abstract automation through scripting, or actual meatspace keyboard use). OK ... so enough on this subject, on to your next point.
... you can turn that into a more elegant report to give to new programmers (or anyone who needs to maintain the code) so that they'll understand the convention and anything else you want to tell them about the program or about your life.
... I'm sorry if you didn't mean for it to be funny but I was reminded of the "Gone with the Wind" bit -- "Frankly Kalani, I don't give a damn"). My point was really simple ... if we're not automatons then we've got some amount of free thought. The implication was: Use actual thought in programming departments. A little bit of documentation (even in that paper report form I described above) can work wonders. You don't need a single industry-wide standard by which every single programmer on the face of this Earth can write code ... so long as you have the means by which you may adopt your own standard (which is what happens with all other programming languages anyway).
... then you say that you're dealing with 100,000-line legacy programs. Obviously ColdFusion isn't a language well-suited to this sort of thing ... 100,000 lines of Cold Fusion is just silly, if not only because it's not a very standardized language anyway -- it's just a little web scripting language. Now, if those are 100,000 lines of junk and can be cleaned up, maybe it can be done in Cold Fusion ... but I'm guessing that they're probably 100,000 lines of good code. In which case you probably wouldn't want all that time to go to waste, right? So if you've got a program that big, why make just one interface (www) to it? I've addressed this in a previous part of my comment so I don't think I need to go into explicit detail but you ought to be able to abstract the input (control) interface to the program, as well as the output interface (I usually abstract the output interface by using a base "sink" object through which my program can send notification of events and pass chunks of data out ... this class can be inherited by a monitor object, a remote-connection object, a printer object, a serial-port object, etc -- if it's C then you could just use a vector of callback functions). Really, I think that you're glossing over some of the things I say and aren't acknowledging the validity of others. To say that they're "tricks" or "hacks" is, I think, inappropriate and even slanderous. It's just ridiculous ... if they can be clearly documented and used in a methodical, systematic way -- they're of use to you and are sensible techniques for big big programs (these are "hacks" that are designed to work specifically for BIG BIG programs -- something as elaborate as the techniques I've described would be overkill for little applications [which is where "hack" is more appropriately used]).
So to comment on my using cfinclude's. The interfaces to the "functions" are described in the headers of those files -- as long as that is the SOP at the company for which I used to work, everything goes smoothly. I don't agree that calling CustomTags looks better codewise only because my approach is a vertical extension of the same thing (and I get more flexibility).
For example:
CustomTag:
<CF_Foo param="bar">
My "Function":
The second method involves a little bit more typing but it allows a person to organize his/her function libraries within single files and it doesn't restrict your placement of them (a similar sort of thing could be done with CustomTags by using files as objects of sorts, single instance of course, where you make method calls by passing [as a parameter] the name of the method that you want to call).
That having been said, there are three other options, one of which I haven't brought up before: COM, CORBA, and CFX. I know that you're familiar with the COM and CORBA (both of which could be used as proxies to ANY kind of legacy system, btw
Yes, to a certain degree you are right, it is a problem with the IS depts, but the tool does make the problem worse by not defining a clear defined way to make functions and no - of course they are not code cranking automatons, and frankly I'm not even sure what your point is here...
So come up with a clearly defined way to make functions amongst your team, if the team is subject to high turnover rates (as I suspect most web-programming teams are), just sketch it out on a notepad and file it away
Now, the automaton thing, that was melodramatic flair on my part to make a point which I guess you didn't get (but I really laughed when I read this part of your comment
So now on to my final two responses. You say that you want to replicate a legacy system's behavior with a ColdFusion program
Thank you for your time.
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
I know this is off-topic but while you're going through server side scripting languages.... Has anyone got any experience with Java Server Pages (JSP)? What do you all think of them?
And yes, there are other alternative sources out there--but it should fall upon the people who create the software, not a third party.
So, what you're saying, if I'm not mistaken, is that PHP-- a free software package-- should include the same quality of documentation as CF, a $500-$5000 program? Nonsense.
I'm NOT a programmer. Yet I learned a functiional amount of PHP in a few days from two books that I would have purchased anyway (Webmaster in a Nutshell and MySQL). Can't afford those? Pick up O'Reilly's Pocket Guide to PHP for about $10 & (along with the online docs) you'll be up to speed in no time.
Granted, the third party books on PHP have generally gotten less then stellar reviews. But when a language is this simple, what's it really matter?
Actually the problem with the server restarting itself every 20 minutes has been clearing up with each new beta release. I sit in front of Fusion Studio all day long and I love it for what it can do, granted I have limited experience with Perl or PHP, but I can get whatever I need to do done.
but don't they have to sign the copyright over to another party (like the FSF)?
Or they can at a later date (when someone's made the damm thing work properly) reclaim it?
or am i hopelessly confused here?
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
But... But... That goes against everything that Micros~1 has taught us!
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
...but I know you're going to be pissed off when you see this was modded to Flamebait and accuse Slashdot of censorship when this is simply not the case. So let me tell you why I agree with the moderators (obviously, thanks to the silly limitation on modding and posting in the same thread, I couldn't have modded it myself).
First, you exaggerate. Yes, Slashdot has problems every once in a while, as it moves to a new server. Every program I've seen has problems like this when you move the program. Note that I'm talking about moving as opposed to a simple reinstall. I'm talking about yanking a hard drive and slapping it into another machine, which is probably at least analogous to what the Slashdot guys did if not the exact thing. And with sites like this, that is necessary if you want to keep the archives intact.
Second, you don't cite a single example of how Slashdot doesn't "work." We all know examples, yes, such as when moving to a new server. But you never give any examples. You only throw an argument out there without supporting it. No matter what the argument is, that's a flame.
Third, you talk about "Slashdot's inability to scale to high loads." I'm assuming you're talking about the distributed Denial-of-Service attack Slashdot has been undergoing recently. I would hardly fault Slashdot for crumbling under such an attack; every site out there crumbles just as badly. That's how powerful these attacks really are.
Fourth, you don't know what you're arguing about; You talk about "Slashdot's unmaintainable PEARL code." You have obviously never even read the code. How do I know this? You don't even seem to know what Perl is, otherwise you would have at the absolute least spelled and capitalized it right. Even had you read the code, with no knowledge of Perl you would be in no position to decide whether or not it was unmaintainable. Spouting arguments with obviously no knowledge of what you're talking about is another characteristic of flames.
While we're at it, you talk about a product's "stability and performance" (I can only assume you meant the Forums software) but never cite numbers. Last I checked, Forums was less stable than Slashdot. It should also be known that Slashdot was proprietary, or essentially proprietary thanks to releases that didn't keep up with updates, for a long time, so it hasn't had the benefits of being Open-Source for all that long.
And finally, you're offtopic. The discussion here is about Forums, not Slash. If you want to talk about Slash, use the Slashdot-centric forums where they talk about this, or better yet go to Slashcode.org and talk about it there.
So please, spare us the flames, and don't get pissed off when they're modded down.
- Take a class in it, which will teach you syntax and not much else
- Figure it out yourself from the techniques you already know and the documentation you have
- (this is the big one) Learning how someone else did it
Way back when I was a wee tyke, when I was first getting the hang of Pascal, I would have given my left kidney to access the wealth of open source code today. Not because it's a free product, but because I could have learned things like fast hash functions and various optimizations without having to munge through the concepts myself. Something may be gained from the experience, I suppose, but the pain is considerably more than the gain.If software companies want to abandon software by making it open source, then scores of programmers in their crysalis stage are going to benefit. The customers were screwed already from the companies poor support policies, so they don't even enter into the equation.
With an eye to the future, I'd say that anything that will help people become programmers is a worthwhile endeavor. Isn't that what the geek community is about?
I wholeheartedly agree, coldfusion is far easier, but I find that it has serious maintainability issues.
Sure, you can make 'functions' by creating custom tags, but I find that most people who just pick up ColdFusion and start coding don't even know that you CAN create custom tags - so as a result, they create no functions, and maintainability quickly can become a nightmare (unless someone who actually KNOWS how to program can direct the other coders, and slap them on the hand when they don't code any damn functions)
just a personal rant about CF...I also wish there was a way to put more then one 'custom tag' in a file, so that I could group my functions, but instead - each and every function needs to be in a seperate file... and that sucks.
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
Aggreed.
I actually find the Tag based code paradigm to be very good. It makes this easier to manipulate on the output level than it can be using a traditional stream based system.
The cool thing about such languages is that, if developed correctly, they can both be ideal for the web, AND be powerful enough to handle complex stuff.
Well, it all depends.
Putting them into tags rather than functions has positives and negatives.
Actually, I think Allaire sees the future. A lot of scripting languages are moving towards being wrapped in XML, so many langugages might look like Cold Fusion.
I actually think that there are some flaws with Cold Fusion. The fact you can't create functions or objects can be a bit of a pain. But for what Cold Fusion sets out to do, both the built in functions and tag library seems to do the job. I only really use Custom Tags for recursive features, or to Black Box my stuff.
Just to toss in my few cents here. The guys over at Fusebox www.fusebox.org will probably pick this up and do something with it. They seem to be making a more structured way of developing fusion apps (I know.. bad word to use here). Personally I don't really think it matters what you use to spit out your page, as long as it WORKS. I'm sure I'm opening up a can of "but this works better", but I don't really care :)
In my opinion anything open source, or even close to it is a good thing because it seems that anything that is usefull that is open source seems to become better and more usefull. So what if Forums dosen't get reused or updated in any way shape or form, at least it IS out there for people to see and maybe play with to learn something new so they can bash out something that is usefull. So no matter what it is and for whatever reason, open source of anything is usable.
You shouldn't have too many problems.
The -T is key, it forces you to "launder" any outside data ( such as form inputs ) through a regular expression before you use it to affect other things outside the script. See chapter 6 of the Camel Book. I'm not really a security nut, but from my experience, perl does have some nice features to prevent you from pulling any obvious forehead slappers.
I've been programming for the Web since 1995. PHP is by far the better language I used. It is fast, it is flexible and above all, it is easy to mantain.
I deployed PHP in more than 5 flavours of Unix and in NT. It runs flawlessly in all of them.
If you can't say PHP is fast, easy to deploy and gets the job done in a hurry, you probably haven't used it enough.
And just for the record, I stated up front that I have never used CF. But I saw a lot of CF code here and there, and from a programming language point of view it is even worst than ASP.
I currently use Cold Fusion at work. I may not have to for long. For months I tried to convince my boss that Linux and PHP was a much better solution than Solaris and Cold Fusion. (And *much* more cost effective.)
Then I installed RedHat 6.2 on his Sparc 2.
He has changed his mind.
Now that he has seen what it can do on his home machine, he is more than impressed. PHP runs rings are ound Cold Fusion when it comes to features and timeliness of updates. I am *still* waiting for our 4.5.1 bug fix release for Solaris. I will probably have to call them and scream until I am blue in the face to get it, even though we have a paid subscription for the software.
Linux and PHP are just a better choice all around.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I can tell you that after working so long with Miva, PHP begins to look bizarre and with strange syntax. It would be difficult to switch between to extensive work with both at the same time.
Really? After working with Miva for about a year and a half, I became enamored with PHP after having discovered it. It was really like a breath of fresh air!
MivaScript has some very serious problems. First off, it has no serious database support. I can't access anything using SQL except for ODBC datasources. No support for Oracle. No support for Sybase. No support for mSQL. On top of that, you can only query the db. You can't insert or update values when using SQL in MivaScript. The xbase3 support in MivaScript is just miserable. Miva's xbase3 implementation doesn't even support multiple tables in a single database!
The other big problem I've got with MivaScript is the way it mixes the document and the program. Over several passes over one document, it is possible to get an utterly different page each time.
MivaScript also isn't as flexible as Coldfusion or PHP. You can't create external functions for MivaScript. You can't compile in new functionality (like PHP's support for the GD libraries) for MivaScript. Still, I do admit that the learning curve for MivaScript is very gentle. I learned the entire language in about a night. As long as you aren't doing anything too large, MivaScript is a nice quick solution that'll allow you to hack something together in an hour or two.
However, if you're doing anything like the big kids do, you really don't want to do it in Miva.
The coolest thing they offer (I think) is Miva Mia, which for testing before deployment beats the daylights out of Microsoft POS.. Oops..PWS. Miva Mia is by far the easiest to setup, no frills personal web server for Win32.
I don't mean to sound really harsh about Miva. After all, it's where I cut my teeth on server side scripting. Just don't be too resistant to giving these other technologies a fair shake!
Gah
I was not complainig about it costing money, just pointing out that there are open source platforms that can get the job done at least as well as CF. Actually, IMHO PHP and Python are far better than CF, but that is just my opinion.
Well, like I said, documentation. If PHP didn't have such poor documentation, I'd probably start using it. As it is, while I've thought about learning it for Flywire, they would rather I learn ASP instead, since they don't feel it has "enough market support".
I've created custom tags in CFML, mostly using CFMODULE. They work.
As far as Perl goes--well, the learning perl book from O'reilly was a poor book to read, IMO. I did find one to learn for Win32 systems. But I don't think Perl is as good as ASP, PHP, Miva, or CF in terms of handling HTML--I think it's better for traditional programers who like dealing with that stuff.
Dunno about the buggy comment, I routinely have CF templates doing dozens of complex queries against Oracle 7 and 8, Access, SQLServer, text files, you name it... It may have more to do with microsoft's bastardization of SQL than the drivers, many of which are, by the way, supplied through the OS, not CF...
The problem you get there is if you are trying not to create a DB backed web site, but instead a real web application.
The company I work for has created a program in ColdFusion to allow certain unnamed companies to exchange Purchase Orders, Quotes, and get back end access to part inventory & part information (including drawings & models), and for that, you need functions, or you have a terribly unmaintainable code base - our app has over 166 seperate 'custom tags' because when you design a web application instead of a web page, you need to start worrying about functional decomposition, coupling, code reuse, et al. And for this, ColdFusion can be really annoying. Espaically since it has SUCH a web page metaphore embedded in it, it's REALLY hard to get team members to call functions instead of just rewriting everything on each page.
ColdFusion I have finally determined is NOT a tool that should be used for business processes, complex issues, or really anything that is covered under the idea of an 'Application', instead of just making a database avalible on the web.
just my 2c
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
Back during 1996 I took a job as a web developer. The product the website was written in was ColdFusion 1.0 with some specific areas in 1.5. Coming from a programming background in C/C++ and pascal I found the shit to ColdFusion rather a pain.
Complete lack of programming structure, and the so called DBM/DBML files with their bad attempt at integration into HTML tag structures. With this language there was much that could be done and I decided to finish the site and clean things up. Part of this clean up with the installation and bug fixes for the Forums product.
The attempt was being made to use Forums to provide technical support, when they worked, for our customers. I remember recieving copies of updates and bugfixes on a semi regular basis, most of which broke something new and different each time.
After dealing with this for a short while we (ok I) decided to yank them down and re-write them because I was getting tired of users (customers) calling in and complaining about not understanding how to use forums.
I still wonder just where they got their initial design for the forums software. It would have been nice if they could have just ripped the perfectly usable and understandable system from Renegade or Maximus BBS systems. Atleast those I could very easily convice the users on how to use since it resembled the 3270 and 5250 green screens they were used to.
Also performance was horrid. On the Pentium 133, 128MB RAM (and if I remeber it cost us a few grand) with 2 4GB SCSI drives running Windows NT 3.51 (yes, real performance software I know) we could only get 1 page view every 3 - 5 seconds if someone was using the forums. After re-writing and converting/upgrading to ColdFusion 2.0 (which ran as a service instead of multi MB CGI) performance started increasing. Performance wasn't acceptable until leaving ColdFusion and another site re-write in InternetFacotry's SMX (running CommerceBuilder for the www server).
Now there is a good case for an abandond product as well. CommerceBuilder provided speed and integrated programming language, and much of what Apache and PHP on linux now provide. Too bad it too went the way of the scrap heap back in 1998.
Now merchant builder was a fun product to run, complete store with source and it was fast. It ran in code inside the server and was pretty. After the webserver war of netscape and microsoft started they became one of the casualties. Sure they ported their SMX to a IIS ISAPI module and moved merchant builder to it, which is all good, but they stoped supporting Commerce Builder.
Then Crack.Com in 99. They run out of money and "do-the-right-thing"(tm). They opensource their game with a $100,000 musical score and work on it, on their own dime, after the company ran out of money to finish it. Most famous for Abuse and getting many of us started using Linux (Mostly because slackware 2.x included Abuse and Doom), it is kind of sad to see this company go.
This pretty much shows the three basic ideas for a product when support is no longer available. Allaire drops it on the opensource people well after it could have been usefull and after alienating those long standing customers. Internet Factory in just completely dropping off the face of the planet and telling the customers to microsoft for their fix. And finally Crack.Com which gave their game away to the public domain.
I just hope Allaire in releasing this code realizes what they are doing and the PR appearnce they get from this. Not the kind bunch of every day geeks (a la Crack.Com), but the arrogance of holier-than-thou-I-got-rich-quick-and-you-didn't-m y-product-sucks-your-on-your-own-you-fix -the-problems attitude I have come to know and loath from Allaire once again.
PS. Yes I admit it, I still write applications in ColdFusion, if and only if I get hourly pay and 50% on top of that for headache medicine in order to deal with the language's lack of programming structures. (Yes I know it is starting to get some structure with the 4.x branch, but it still is no where close to speed, performance, and stability as Apache/PHP and dare I say it IIS/ASP.)
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
I never really had a problem with it, but it's a matter of style. I had to lol, I had the same problem with a few PERL packages, ended up doing the reverse in CF for a work tracking system. At the end of the day I had it talking to pagers and cutting ad-hoc graphs of response time for particular tech support people. [Jeez, they hated me for that one...] It drives C/PERL people up the wall, but it's a godsend if you have to hand off the app to a bunch of people who only know a bit of HTML. It really cuts down the phone calls.
Let's review which products are being or have been ported to Linux recently:
WordPerfect - after being demolished by Microsoft Office on Windows and MacOS then blowing a wad of cash on Java tech, they turned to the last available platform: Linux. And where has it gotten them?
InterBase and Sybase - two perennial losers in the database market decide to port to Linux before Oracle can. Result? Linux zealots still prefer to use MySQL for some reason.
Photogenics - long considered the best Amiga graphics program (which is something akin to being the best bullfighter in Alaska) whose primary platfrom is dead, except for a handful of zealots. So they port to the platftorm with the largest number of rabid OS advocates. Yet the program remains undepowered and crufty.
Borland JBuilder and Delphi - two cheap knockoffs of Microsoft's pioneering Visual Basic which are based on dead (Pascal) or brain-dead (Java) languages are no longer viable in competition with Visual Studio. So they get sent to Linux, where they will likely flounder on the corner of some teenage "hacker"'s hard drive.
Thank you Allaire for adding your name to this fine list of products. I hope that you will soon see results as good as Corel (going out of business), PowerSoft (washed up has-been, even in MS-land), Inprise (never recovered from the failure of DOS) and Paul Nolan (Amiga zealot par excellence, for whatever that's worth).
thank you
Yes, but when you have to deal with a project on that level, that's when you take the ASP style approach. In other words, develop COM objects, CORBA objects, EJB, or Servlets. Or you can deal with Stored Procedures in Oracle or Cold Fusion. I've used several COM objects with Cold Fusion. I never said Cold Fusion was the tool for EVERYTHING, but I have built large scale sites, including one B2C (e-commerce) site. It's weaker towards object-oriented stuff, but that doesn't mean it's a "junk platform". They're going in this direction. Next version of Cold Fusion will combine CF with Java, so you can deal with the best of both worlds.
I've used Cold Fusion for website development for about 3 years now, and I'd really like to stop.
To munge a phrase, Cold Fusion makes easy things easy and hard things much, much more difficult than they need to be.
And some people feel that it's the developer of the software's job to provide the materials used in learning. Not everyone wants to go through soruce code in order to learn a new tool, for most it's a huge waste of time.
However you do your learning, its still your way of doing it.
Even if it's through "getting started" type books proivded by the software company (or whomever is doing the docs for the software)? ;P
Don't be lazy and want everything.
Seriously, why not? what's the logic here, that computers and programming languages *should* be hard to use, and should be a trial to learn?
especially because its entire design is propreitary and meant to make a lot of money as a 'web programming langauge' for its authors
Is this RMS under a pseudonym? A lot of people are in the programming/computer business specifically to make money, what's the problem with that, morally and philisophically?
Proprietary doesn't automatically mean crap. There's a higher level of crapulence in proprietary software, but just because you've had bad experiences (or have heard about them here, and are just playing with the pack) with closed source apps doesn't mean they'll all "junk" as you say. I had a linux FS crap out on me 2 weeks ago, should I now be assuming that every OpenSource project is going to shit on my harddrive and crash? No, I'd be an idiot to do so, as you are when you assume all closed source software is Bad(tm)
First people call for companies to open the source to their old software so others can use and maintain it if they so choose. Now, Allaire does as many have asked (late or not) and all people can do is whine and moan.
I for one AM looking for a good chat forum, and though not for Cold Fusion, if the license of this software allows for it, I'd like to see how well this works and port the code over to my site (and share it with the community as well of course).
Maybe more of you nay-sayers should consider this: People who want to try working with code can look at the code to a fully working product and take it upon themselves to add features or otherwise bring it up to date. Personally, I think that would make for a great learning experience.
So now that you have your cake, stop compaining and EAT IT TOO.
Digital Wokan
I wanted to spend 8 years defending the US constitution.
I've wondered this many a time. In the shoes of an employed developer that actually cared about the future of my project, or in the shoes of an employer that cared about the same, I would not feel comfortable choosing a proprietary language. What happens when Allaire goes away some day? Will they promise to open source ColdFusion if they do? I doubt you'll find any company willing to make a last will and testament for their software -- they don't intend to fail. Sadly, however, it happens.
Does ColdFusion have a large enough user base and enough of a community built up around it to merit a workalike implementation, in the face of myriad other solutions?
This argument doesn't merely apply to ColdFusion, but to any proprietary language. I feel perfectly comfortable in using open standards such as C, C++, etc. You can count on them being around. Even projects based on pseudo-proprietary standards -- those that are not accepted industry standards, but are dictated by the language's project team, such as Perl and PHP, should stand the test of time fine. I don't see the entire Perl or PHP teams abandoning these projects, but if they did, you can rest assured that the community would carry the torch.
What of things like ColdFusion? I know next to nothing about the functionality of the language itself, and I admit that. I am not willing to bank my success on the success of another business. They go under, and then I'm stuck rewriting a bunch of code, or seeing it die like so many rats on a sinking ship.
If a new type of vehicle propulsion system were invented, and it was totally proprietary, but superior to internal combustion in every way, do you think society would adopt it, and adopt a dependency on the proprietors of the system? Even in the face of alternatives such as hydrogen, solar power, nuclear power, etc etc etc?
I've rambled long enough on this topic, I just felt that it was odd that nobody else had brought this point into the discussion.
Cold Fusion 4.0 supports Query Caching and Dynamic Page Caching for dynamic pages that don't need to be updated often. I have been programming in CF for 2 years now and enjoy its functionality and ease of development. I find it to be a very customizable and dynamic language, especially with the new functionality in CF 4.5. I have not coded much with PHP, so I can not comment on a comparison with CF at the moment, but I hope to someday master PHP as well. I recommend that you download the CFML Language Referance Guide from http://www.allaire.com/handlers/index.cfm?ID=13381 &Method=Full& Title=ColdFusion%204%2E5%20 Documentation&Cache=False
Look, I just made you read my signature.
Of course, if what you're after is "Become a Perl Guru in 21 Minutes" in the manner of the huge hordes of crummy VB books you might be disappointed, but I think we have enough software-by-cookbook already.
Steff
1. Yes, there are other DNS servers, but BIND must surely be the most widely used on the 'net.
/immediately/ fetch the updated zone when it recieves the notify from the master, irregardless of whether any client asked for a record or not, and irregardless of whether it still has records cached that havn't expired yet.
2. I am trying to correct your mistaken belief that DNS servers don't push zone changes.
A BIND 8 slave will
Also, DNS NOTIFY is part of the DNS spec, so other servers are free to implement it.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
I don't think the point to open sourcing is to prove anyone's generosity. That's potlatch you're thinking of. I'd say criticizing anyone for open sourcing his software is pretty far out of line.
If I write some software, I sure wouldn't want people (who DIDN'T write it)nagging me about which terms I make the source available to them. No one has a right to my code. I wrote it.
The open source movement is exactly like any other economic model - it's only ever going to work as long as the participants regard it as being in their own interest to participate. Generosity has nothing to do with it. And open source is winning because it works for everyone, not because people are suddenly getting nicer.
Just off hand, I can think an excellent application for open source dying software - education. For example, a quick glance at the terms suggests to me that you could use the code as an example in a book about programming.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
sendmail, bind, the gimp DOES count - it kicks ass, xmms, /proc, top, kill, the entire GNU file utils set (better than the shit you get in windows, better than the shit you get w/commercial unices), vim, all of the modern window managers, the BSD tcp/ip stack, gcc, perl, python, ftp, telnet, gzip, (g)tar, any of the free print servers, diff, patch, of course, cvs, (linux's) fdisk, ipf/ipchains, (g)sed, (g)awk, cron, take your pick of shells, bsd's NFS services..
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Nothing else you posted supports this. True, some of it is more for the good publicity than anything else, but you can't say that nobody will gain anything from this release. And while the "community" (Whatever that is) may not benefit greatly from it, people who are current users of the software certainly will.
However, I would agree that retro-actively creating open source projects with such a restrictive license is not the most best way to do things for the potential hacker, but it's better than nothing.
Adam
Well, everyone uses UBB on cgi now anyways: http://www.infopop.com/services_ubb/services_ubb.h tml
But perhaps someone can use it.
--
If you are using Windows for Coldfusion you can get all sorts of extensions that make the program useful.
Most of those extentions do not exist for Solaris.
I do not intend to have to move to an unstable platform to get a few features.
Besides, PHP give me much of the functionality of Perl without having to add in the security problems of Perl.
As for the language syntax, if you have a Perl and C background, it is a no-brainer. I knwo that it is alot to ask to insist that people have a programming background to write applications. I guess that is what seperates the professional programmers from the web wannabies and Visual Basic coders.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Retro-actively open-sourcing dead or dying commercial software packages has absolutely no value at all to the open source community. These things are publicity stunts designed to make companies look open source-friendly. As was noted in a previous comment, PHP burns rings around Cold Fusion.
Quake.
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
I'm not saying it's a junk platform, but I don't think it is suited for creating full fledged e-commerce applications. And yes it can talk to corba, com & Active X, (it's connectivity is better on win32, which sucks, because frankly servers should NEVER be IIS.....) but even if you want to create something complicated it's function model blows.... (back to the Tags thing....)
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
Abandonware doesn't hurt anyone. The real problem is the inverse problem, i.e., the weirdo refusal by various tech companies to release IP rights on way-obsolete, no-question-it's-ancient products for no apparent reason. What up with that?
While the Cold Fusion documentation may be adequate for explaining what the tags do, it does a pretty poor job of telling you how to best use the product. A particularly serious shortcoming is lack of explanation as to how to structure an application. The result, as noted by another poster, is Cold Fusion's well-earned reputation for being hard to maintain.
Andrew Semprebon EQ Systems Inc.
In the PHP FAQ, there's a section on PHP vs. Coldfusion. Also, there's a link to an article by a CF and PHP developer, making the comparison.
I found it REALLY useful.
(I almost never flame based on moderation, but this simply cannot slide.)
I may not entirely agree with the post I am responding to, and I certainly prefer php over cold fusion (though I've only used either for limited work), but to moderate this down as OFFTOPIC is absurd.
The poster's comments, whether or not you agree with them, were certainly on topic and apropos.
I hope I have the opportunity to nail your sorry ass in meta-moderation, and that any future moderation priveleges are denied you.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
I have no idea, what kind of monster will a programmer turn into if he will learn C++ without prior knowledge of C
[Maniacal laughter in the distance...]
FWIW my first language was Modula-2, then I dabbled a bit in Lisp and then went directly to C++. I can code in C, though it's painful (I have to remember which C++ features I can't use). I guess that makes me a monster...
[Maniacal laughter coming closer...]
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Coldfusion 4.5.1 Solaris has been out for a month now, buck-o.
More power to you man. I am also a ColdFusion developer and although I, unlike you, find C++ fun.. coldfusion has its merits because it's a very very rapid development language. It simplifies very common problems in web app development and reduces them to their essence, which is an insightful design on the part of ColdFusion's creators, and is in-line with the philosophy you presented in your post.
Cold Fusion is designed to be easy to use. It's very powerful and my company has built its entire website around it. If you couldn't figure it out, that doesn't mean it doesn't WORK, got it? That just means there's something wrong with YOU.
The biggest difference between PHP and Cold Fusion is that the latter has a marketing department. Anyone can say that PHP/ASP/Cold Fusion slices and dices, but you'll get more mileage out of a proof of concept. Look at your current constraints; e.g., must run with IIS and SQL Server on this W2K box. See if PHP fits. If so, spend a day or two rewriting some of your CF pages.
One caveat I'd mention right now is that you'll get the best performance out of mod_php or the ISAPI module. If you have to use the CGI executable, PHP is at an immediate disadvantage. You also may get a slight boost from using persistent database connections.
BTW, here's a list of High-Profile sites running PHP. Do you get more hits than Volvo?
Has Sun made a foray into open source? Last I knew they were still using the SCSL which isn't "open source" unless you mean "you can see the source code". /bin/false on a Solaris machine?
Sun's always been a tad Microsofty for my taste... anybody ever read
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I should also point out that while I know how to program (to an extent, anyway) I am no programmer; I don't do it for a living and never have. I have a passing familiarity with C, I know no Perl, and PHP was a dead cinch to pick up. Have you actually given it a try, or are you relying on something someone else told you? I should think anyone with even a little programming background (and since it appears you do this for a living I would hope that includes you) would find it easy.
As someone pointed out, Cold Fusion has always been an interpreted language. Therefore, giving away the source for Forums will actually generate revenue in sales of their interpreter, since you need to buy that for this for your web server, right?
So, they get to be "good guys" for giving away source to something you can't run without buying their product anyways, right?
Roy
I'm having trouble understanding this. I know that the open source community has, in the past, _begged_ and _pleaded_ for old, uninteresting software to be released to us. And now that it's actually starting to happen, it's just a PR stunt? That's the friggin' point! We've finally managed to give them enough of a good reason to actually do it. YAY.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Nice points, dude. I'm in the Computer Engineering program at school, learning C++, Assembly, and whatnot and it's pretty easy to look down at those "high-level" languages. But like you said, as long as you get the job done and people like it, more power to ya.
But seriously, the first day of that I programmed with php on my new job I was given a task for a simple admin to a web page. After looking at some example code and such, I was done within an hour. Now that's ease of use. Of course, I have a pretty solid programming background with experience in c/c++, pascal, a little asm... Just stuff I learned in college when I got my BS in Computer Science.
For someone WITHOUT a programming background it might be different, I'm not to sure since that's not me, and I simply can't relate. I suppose CF's hold your hand approach to documentation might be a little bit easier, but when I was reading CF docs for porting a few windows CF apps over to linux, I got annoyed by all that extra crap they put in the docs. They were too bad I guess, but I still prefer my php docs anyday. Oh yeah... and #php on efnet is by FAR one of the most helpful resources to those REALLY hard to figure out problems :)
---
It's rather elitist to say people who use VB or other "high level" languages are "professional programmers".
Just a little bit of background. I had a Bachelor of Arts in MIS. I graduated from college in 1992. I learned COBOL, systems analysis, SQL, and database concepts. Yet, I had trouble finding work for 4-5 years, and worked in non-programing service jobs.
I had skill, but no opening. I tried to learn C++, but found it too abstract and rather difficult.
Then in 1995, I started learning HTML. A friend of mine started a company. I learned Cold Fusion. Since that time, I've become a solid developer, working as both a implemented (creating the markup) and coder. While others who have no programming experience whatsoever may do poor things with Cold Fusion, I was able to put my training to good use.
Just because something is easier doesn't make it any less "professional". I know people with more programming experience than myself who poorly document their code, use bad HTML, and don't think about proper design and source control. Clients ask my company for solutions. I provide them.
Languages and Applications should strive to be easier to use. That was the whole point of 4GLs and AIs and other developments. I'd rather spend 8 hours a day coding than 12.
Do I admire the people with more experience and skill. Yes. But does that mean that other people with talent are "wannabees". No. Our clients are happy with the work we've done. And in the end, that's all that matters.
This is an enormous improvement over taking obsolete stuff and hiding it forever, or even worse, destroying it! That used to be the coorporate mindset, and is extremely painful for the engineers who worked so hard on the software to see their work abandoned.
Stop complaining about a good thing. Perhaps much more valuable "obsolete" stuff might be released if we show good will (Sun's NeWS was a recent example discussed here).
Long ago I wrote several programs, among them a version of Forth for OS/2 Forth/2, which was a fun project for me. It turns out several people actually started using it for real work. When I realized I wasn't going to play with it any more, I did something similar, released a new version (with the fixes I had done) with all of the source code in it, so that someone else could take up the banner, if they so intended. It was a fun project, I'm glad I helped out people, and was especially please to have a nice way to end the project. I highly recommend this approach to any of you who have a project you're done with, for whatever reason.
--Mike--
Can anyone point me to a nice, level headed comparison between PHP and Cold Fusion? Does one have a higher overhead? Does one cache database results? We're going to be choosing a web application development language at work soon, and if I can say "Well Cold Fusion is nice, but..." I'd be happier with the open source solution.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Okay, just to clarify.
When I get Allaire docs, I receive at least two good books. A reference manual, which has all the docs sorted by function/tag. And a training manual, which explains the basics.
Both, I believe, are important.
On the PHP web site, I reviewed the PHP code. However, it was not very good for casual reading--a case of a web page actually being harder than a book.
The acid test for me was to find out how to do the basics--which in my mind is to connect to a database. Coming from an application where all you need to do is write straightforward SQL within a tag with no other stuff, I found it hard to find information about how to access my database.
The ODBC section had functions, but since it was listed in manual format it was a bit difficult to see an example as you would write it.
Once I purchased a few PHP books, it became easy. But that's the key thing I am concerned about.
Allaire may cost me more money, but that training manual was well worth it, and it is easier to install and configure. Granted, PHP may actually be a powerful platform, but from what I've seen when I looked at the core provider--it focused more on functions and less on explaining things. What IS a sephamore, for instance?
That's where I have found certain areas lacking. Sometimes the reference manuals for languages are a little too "insider". And yes, there are other alternative sources out there--but it should fall upon the people who create the software, not a third party.
Documentation is important--not just the reference manual either. I am critical of an Allaire project called Spectra because the docs for that aren't as well written as the CF Docs. Sometimes, that makes all the difference.
It sounds like your "team members" are not disciplined to function as a team. There is a group of CF developers that have developed what is called the "FUSEBOX" methodology for developing CF websites. It is very popular and creates very "re-usable" modules. CF is like PHP, is like PERL, is like ASP, is like ANY OTHER programming platform. Some will like it and some will not. That's the GREAT thing about the WEB. There are so may ways to accomplish the same thing. You pick the one you like the best and you go with it. The results can be the same (if the programmer actually KNOWS what they are doing!) CF in the hands of someone like Ben Forta or Michael Dinowitz is much more powerful than CF in the hands of most of the folks posting here (myself included). It's the same for all platforms. So why BASH the product. If you like PHP, it's because you are better with it. If you like CF, it's because you're better with it!
EXACTLY!! Most of the people posting here bashing CF have exactly no idea what they are talking about. CF is stronger than ASP in terms of simplicity of coding. 25:1 lines of ASP to ColdFusion for the same task seems quite realistic.
Not suited for creating full fledged e-commerce applications? Nobody ever told Toys-R-Us that! Or are they not a full fledged e-commerce application?
What? Connectivity Shakey at best? Sorry, but I've been using CF with native Oracle drivers on Oracle 7 and Oracle 8 on tables of over 3 million records and it's SOLID AS A ROCK! You are blowing smoke out your butt! Don't make comments like that when you don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about!
PHP is easy to get started with and from there you can quickly bootstrap your way up to the more complex stuff.
I can't believe this. First everybody moans about how awful closed source software is, and how much better it would be if you could tweak it. But then when a company decides that they don't want the code any more and throws it to the public (points about the license taken), that isn't good either! Would you rather that code remain behind closed doors forever, never seeing the light of day under any circumstances? Geez.
-----
You connect the dots, you pick up the pieces.
So some of us are not americans and our english is not so kosher...
CF is worse than ASP in at least two ways: it is not free and it is not so well supported. Also, ASP has some heritage, being a bastardized VB.
But I really don't care. Allaire can do whatever it wants with its proprietary language. I mantain that the open source technologies out there are better and can get the job done. And many clients of my company seem to agree. That is enough for me.
a commercial project may have bit the financial big one but it /could/ have well written and/or still userful parts for other projects...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I haven't read the Allaire license, but my guess if that somewhere in there it says you can't take their code and GPL it...
And neither was Slashcode. I actually was hired by Rob way back when to slap together Slashcode for him. I still get hired for consulting. He gave me $1000 and a new Dell at the time. Had I known it would get this big I'd have asked for a chunk of the advertising revenue.
No thanks. If Homesite is the product my clients keep making forms with tags in it, then I'd rather not see it go any further than it has already. People making an HTML editor for a web forms environment should at least read DTDs ...
Unless they're pre-emptively XML'ing things of course.
Anyone else remember IntelliDraw? It was what Visio wants to be when it grows up. (Some of the early IntelliDraw developers went on to found Visio.) I still consider IntelliDraw the ideal cross-platform business- and technical-graphics software tool. Adobe got the product when they engulfed Aldus, and killed it (I assume because of perceived competition with Illustrator).
Now that Visio has achieved their wet dream of being assimilated by the Borg (they never released their program for any platform but Winduhs), I think it would behoove Adobe to open-source IntelliDraw as a Visio-killer. IntelliDraw isn't making them any money now, and Illustrator has evolved toward the fine-art direction rather than the practical diagramming that IntelliDraw was so perfect for. So I'd say Adobe has nothing to lose (and can score a big blow against M$) by open-sourcing IntelliDraw.
Simpletoneity, n. -- The phenomenon of many people all doing the same stupid thing at the same time.
If you've ever worked at a business that purchased a commercial product to do a basic task, and found yourself in a situation where the company no longer supported it but also was unwilling to release the source code so that you could make minor modifications to "keep it alive" until you could find a suitable replacement, the idea of a company open sourcing a product instead of abandoning it makes you feel all giddy inside.
I've found myself hex editing code or writing complicated wrappers in order to support extremely minor environment changes (upgrading patchlevels of another product) that could have been changed in seconds had I the source code to rework. I can't count how many abandoned but perfectly good packages were thrown out due for Y2K because the company was unwilling to test it and we had no facilities too.
I've advised that companies who buy expensive software contracts or packaages build in an option to purchase that software source should the developer choose to abandon it.
But if the authors don't love a piece of software, then why should anyone else?
Alot of this abandoned code was never loved by anyone , and it shows. Who wants the cruft produced by programmers who were just putting in their hours?
Oh, wait, that's supposed to be the best kind of software! It can't be worth anything if you didn't pay for it and people were not forced to work on it grudgingly.
I'd say the most important part of the Free Software movement is that it produces code that is loved by its creators .
Just like children, code that is loved is well adjusted and confident. In this analogy proprietary code is the equivalent of the morally deformed child who spent his early life in an orphanage and wound up spending his teen years in the Hitler youth corps.
Personally, I love the PHP documentation. It's concise and to the point--I rarely spend more than 15 seconds finding exactly the information I'm looking for, because it's so logically laid out, and if it takes any longer than that, I just grep for it.
:-)
It's not a tutorial, it's not an introduction, it's not a style guide or a talking paper clip. It tells you exactly as much as you need to know if you understand the basic idea of what server-side scripting is but never heard of PHP.
And if you've ever programmed in C, you'll find that you rarely have to look at the syntax portion of the manual at all. One read through should do the trick, once you've finished ooh-ing and aah-ing at all the high-level things you're allowed to do...
"If a change is made, and *your* server has cached records, it won't know about the changes until the records expire"
BIND 8 has a notify mechanism whereby the master informs the other listed NS's if a zone changes.
edit the serial number on a zone and do ndc reload zone. then watch the logs as your server notifies the slaves.. then seconds later watch as named reports loads of zone transfers..
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Forums did, incidentally, use Allaire's 'encrypted templates' technology -- but only one of the many files that make it up made use of it. This was used to enforce the 30-day trial version, but served little other purpose. I guess it'd be possible to override this, but the average ColdFusion programmer wouldn't know how.
Fact is, ColdFusion has been overtaken. I've done a great deal of work using the product, and it still has a number of advantages in a corporate environment such easy access to LDAP and integration with NTLM security in the Windows version. However, it's really hobbled by the lack of support for such basics as functions and file handling. If you want to do anything beyond ColdFusion's predefined tags, you're stuck. Sure, you can extend ColdFusion using C++, but that's another skill level entirely. At last, there's a Linux version... but PHP blows it away anyways.
Then I guess you found a base for your perl code at Matt's script archive cause if you can't code something in CF that you can program in perl within a week then you must be clueless
I remember demo'ing Intellidraw once, a long time ago, and making plans to purchase it - but I got distracted by Viso and Illustrator (which I currently use as a diagram tool, even though its totally yucky to do this)...
So do you know if there are any older versions of Intellidraw available anywhere, for sale even?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The Correct URL is http://www.forumspot.org
DNS generally takes about 24 hours to propagate. Or at least that's what the guys at SourceForge told me.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Go to ForumSpot.org
The URL should be http://www.forumspot.org
the correct url is: http://www.forumspot.org/
First posting isn't trolling. It's...first posting.
After messing around with Cold Fusion for several weeks, trying to do anything reasonably beyond the included toolkits, I was extremely frustrated. I finally got our Support Ticket system coded and online after almost a month.
Just for kicks, I re-wrote the whole thing from scratch in Perl. Took me about a week to write and debug, and I even worked in more features. And when all was said and done, I had a faster product.
Point of note: this was my very first Perl project. I found Perl actually far easier.
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Yep, they are not the type of application I am reffering to.
Their system is a sales system, where CF shines, but if you want to take an existing application, (such as a legacy system) and supply all of it's functionality on the web, cold fusion is not a good language for that. Reason? Because it is counter intuative as to how you make functions (Custom Tags).
If the language obfuscates how you functionally decompose the problem, most people who are workign on it won't do it. Why? Because the reality is that most people who program are sittign in IS departments, and because of the way it is managed they don't try to do things right, but instead try to do them as fast as possible. Because of this, they will not investigate how to make functions in Cold Fusion - because frankly it is not immediatly clear as to what you have to do.
Back the the subject at hand - Yes, Toys-R-Us has an e-commerce web site, but I would aregue (unless there are vast parts that are unseen) that it is not truely an application - The area I am talking is b2b (business to business) ecommerce applications, where you have to create business rules based upon the processes of a business, interface with all of their legacy systems, and do it an a clearly maintainable way. Cold Fusion does the first one ok, the second one wonderfully, and falls down on the third.
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
While I personaly agree that most OSS projects are better then their closed source counterparts, I don't see the OSS model takin over the world in it's entirety. After all, it's a classic case of good Vs evil. Without the closed source projects where would some of the challange come from for the opern source projects?
Face it, while alliar may dole out buggy software, without projects like it, some of the community just wouldn't have the drive to say, "I think I want to try and make a better version of that." I am a firm beleiver of open source and wish that I could program in any lang so that I could contribute something. But without the closed source, there is no Open Source.
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
It's not "integration of IE with Windows" that makes that possible. It's just a matter of having a decent API to the browser. IBM's WebExplorer OS/2 browser let you do this 5 or 6 years ago, just by supplying a DLL that let you embed its browser window in your own apps.
I miss Meept.
This may become a more common occurance now that "Open Source" is the buzz-word of the minute. I seem to remember reading (on /.) that Interbase was abandoned by Inprise/Borland when some of the project's key players jumped ship. I guess the difference in this case is that Interbase adds a very cool RDBMS to the open-source movement's stable of powerful RDBMS's (a stable which is pretty empty at the moment, save for PostgreSQL) while Forums (from the sounds of it) doesn't add much at all.
Correct, as a matter of a fact, the computer I type this from is Win NT/Apache/CF 4.5. However, I have found thus far, that if an IS department requires that you run the web server on Win32, they will invariably requite that you use IIS. This is my personal experience tainting this, but so far I have yet to find a counter example. So from the enterprise point of view, if CF is run on Windows, it runs on IIS.
Right, so, after all of that I guess my point is just that ColdFusion is a useful product and can save a LOT of time when it's used as it was intended to be used (it does require a different approach than traditional procedural or object-oriented programming demands)
And I don't deny that. What you refered to was as far as I could tell basically a database backed website. And I am perfectly happy saying that ColdFusion may well be the best environment in which to solve that problem on the market. However, the area I am dealing with, where I find ColdFusion falls down is creating full fledged business applications - the type of web business applications that a person might be doing their entire job in.
Devon Jones
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
So I posted an elaborate example of how CF can be used in an elegant and clearly-functional way ... yet I received no response.
... if it does NOT have an abstract interface (it consists of modal dialogs or takes device-specific input) then it wouldn't be simple to move to the web with ANYTHING (obviously it'd be easier to do with the original source code but arguing that porting that program to the web would be easier with C++ than with CF is just silly ... obviously it would be easier with C++ if the application was written in C++ and you had all of the source code right there).
... you seem to have a fixation on custom tags, which are mostly useless but do have some advantages. With custom tags you can make functions that must be globally available. If you have 50 different websites on one machine, you might want to make a custom tag for error logging, so that all 50 websites will send their log data to the same place and you won't have to manage tons of seperate text files. You might want to write an abstract credit card billing function and throw it into a custom tag so that all 50 sites can have easy billing code ... obviously you should not make a custom tag if it does something like enumerate all of the books in 1 site's bookstore. You make broad sweeping statements, sir, without backing them up (and I would remark that your use of "it's" has been incorrect, which I politely addressed in my last comment but which you ignored).
... they're usually stifled by their own lack of creativity or they've just chosen a different, and more suitable, tool for the job. I would argue that CF is a vital component to any system (well, not CF specifically but a script interpreter). It makes it simple to glue together the hard-wired, tuned, special-purpose programs which make up a system (yes I'm describing the Unix outlook but it's a lot more present in the Windows world than you'd think).
... but it sounds like you're describing a problem with "IS" departments more than you're describing a problem with any particular language. All programming languages will allow hideous code if the programmer is in a hurry ... I don't think that there's anything that will really change that.
... but it's much more useful than you give it credit for ... what I am trying to say here is that you have to do a bit of experimentation with ANY language if you're going to really find out what you can do with it.
... well I wish I hadn't made my argument earlier since you obviously have come around in your own message.
... yet, I still haven't had one email asking me for help or even an explanation of how the system works. It's so obvious that the new programmer hasn't had to ask for explanations of anything.
Their [Toys R Us'] system is a sales system, where CF shines, but if you want to take an existing application, (such as a legacy system) and supply all of it's functionality on the web, cold fusion is not a good language for that. Reason? Because it is counter intuative as to how you make functions (Custom Tags).
First of all, its (a legacy system's) "functionality" can be exposed to the web if the legacy system has some kind of simple abstract interface (through pipes or sockets or whatever) then it would be MORE THAN SIMPLE to expose it to the web with Cold Fusion
On to the next thing
If the language obfuscates how you functionally decompose the problem, most people who are workign on it won't do it.
Oh come on, use some creativity. Did you read my last comment about how to easily create reusable, well-documented CF code? You are arguing that a language which is, in itself, sequential in the purest form (running directly from top to bottom without subtle code-branching) is useless to procedural programmers. I would then submit to you, any assembler for any processor.
But none of that really has anything to do with your point, of course, that people just won't do it. It is important to note that, with my previous paragraph as a basis, people are NOT refusing to make programs in CF because they're stifled by its lack of flexibility
the reality is that most people who program are sittign in IS departments, and because of the way it is managed they don't try to do things right, but instead try to do them as fast as possible.
That's why ColdFusion was made, really. It lets you do things as fast as possible (though you'll have some ugly code, as with every other language) and also lets you organize web-related code and data in a very obvious and simple way (though it takes a little bit more time to document your code). I don't mean to be snide
Because of this, they will not investigate how to make functions in Cold Fusion - because frankly it is not immediatly clear as to what you have to do.
They won't investigate how to make functions because it is not immediately clear as to what you have to do? Gee, that sounds pretty lazy, frankly. When you're using a new programming language you don't always know, immediately, how to write a function header. Are you saying that your "IS" deparments should consist of automatons, thoughtless creatures who just crank out code mechanically? Do you think that's productive? Do you think that leads to a good product? Don't you think that's kind of cowardly? I'm not trying to say that CF is a panacea, hell I'm not even a huge fan of the scripting language
Back the the subject at hand - Yes, Toys-R-Us has an e-commerce web site, but I would aregue (unless there are vast parts that are unseen) that it is not truely an application
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
7. Computer Science - A computer program with a user interface.
So why don't you "aregue" what is "truely" an application?
The area I am talking is b2b (business to business) ecommerce applications, where you have to create business rules based upon the processes of a business, interface with all of their legacy systems, and do it an a clearly maintainable way. Cold Fusion does the first one ok, the second one wonderfully, and falls down on the third.
So before you say that it can't interface with legacy systems and now you say that it can do it wonderfully
Now, I can't help but laugh at your assertion that CF doesn't allow clearly maintainable code. I've written two very long messages to you now, explaining how to write elegant code in CF and how simple it is to bind other programs together. It is up to the programmer to make maintainable code and your comment says more about you, or your "IS" department, than it does about the language.
That bookstore that I mentioned in my previous comment was a small part of a bigger business. The business (www.selfpub.com) allows people to submit their written work and have it published, at less cost than traditional vanity presses because books are only printed as they are ordered and bulk orders aren't required to get published. Because the actual printing business is seperate I had to write a few programs to allow the exchange of information between the webserver (which handles incoming and outgoing data) and the machines of the printing-press network. Those programs were pulsed (sent streams of data) by CF scripts (on the webserver end) and have been used without problems since I left that company. The greatest thing is that this company is full of inexperienced technical people, I was the only programmer (and I was only hired because I was a really young kid and couldn't ask for lots of money)
So, in closing, I'd really like it if you'd take that comment back.
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
I couldn't say based on terms of engineering, of course.
You missed PHP in there, which IMO kicks ASP's ass. =)
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
--
This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It could be laid out a little better, but the docs worked fine for me.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Now, maybe this won't mean anything, maybe it'll mean that the community of Forums will be able to still turn to people with knowledge when their program breaks, maybe it'll mean that they'll inspire a new competitor. But it means that this program, unlike so many other commercial projects, will still live, even after it meets "commercial" death.
Now if only Microsoft would open source Win 3.1; it's much cooler than win 95.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Dude, you have no idea what you're talking about.
I've been programming in CF and ASP for two years, and PHP for 1. They all have their pros and cons.
The more flexibility you have as a developer, the better off you are. I prefer CF because it's fast and easy to deploy. You can write 25 lines of ASP for every 1 line of CF.
It's astounding to see all the CF bashing here. My take on the bashing is this: 3/4 of the people here bashing CF have never used it.
If you use it regularly, you know it's fast, it's easy to deploy, and it gets the job done in a hurry. Can't say the same for ASP or PHP.
Now, "open source" doesn't mean anything in particular, but I dare you to port the code to PHP and see how open the source is with a nontransferable license.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
I particularly enjoyed how they had to program a Windows Registry Emulator that needs to be run alongside the server on Solaris. I was cracking my ass up when I saw that.
I'm not saying it's a junk platform, but I don't think it is suited for creating full fledged e-commerce applications. ... if it's not used for high-load, ultra-functional websites, then it's just a toy.
... it can use either component standard where available (You can purchase a version of the COM on Solaris which will allow CF to use the interfaces defined by ActiveX [OLE]). You attempt to defile Allaire's Win32 product by saying that "servers should never be IIS," in the process you ignore O'Reilly WebSite, OmniHTTPd, Netscape's web server (I don't remember what it's called), and Apache! All of those webservers that were mentioned can make use of the CF scripting engine (OmniHTTPd can only do it through its CGI support, I believe, as Allaire has written web server extensions for the ISAPI, NSAPI, and ASAPI 'standards' -- none of which are supported by Omni). Of course, there are several more web servers for Win32 which can be used to host CF content but that's not really the point I'm trying to bring home. I'd really like to know what you mean by "better connectivity" with regard to component standards. If you don't have the COM on Solaris than obviously you have "0 connectivity" (God how I despise that term) and thus you cannot make use of the standard ActiveX (OLE) interfaces. Similarly, you can't use CORBA on Win32 platforms if you don't have an installed ORB.
... all CF documents are processed within the context of the webserver's process, the CF engine keeps a pool of connection objects open (the number is set by default to some number I can't remember but you can change it) and this winds up slicing quite a bit of time off of response to document requests. If you don't believe me, write a program to connect to a network server (running whatever OS you like, so long as it isn't Win32 w/ ActivePerl) and continuously request a perl-generated document over a period of about 1 or 2 minutes (the time length is arbitrary) and then write a program (or include this in the previous program you wrote) to request a CF document from a Win32 network server (so long as it isn't running OmniHTTPd, since it has no in-process server extension features and just spawns off new processes of the CGI interface to the CF engine on each request) ... you'll find a marked difference in latency.
... it would also output links to the available pages (it derived the URL from the document which had included it) ... the only thing that I had to do, in those documents which I wanted to divide into pages, was to create the recordset I'd normally use for outputting those records and set NUM_RECORDS to MyRecordset.RecordCount, then (in my output loop) I used the RECORD_START and RECORD_END variables to control the records which were output. I had a similar approach to the management of updates or insertions in any of these different sections. I wrote a file called cfgDBOperation.cfm which took a comma-delimited list of the form-fields/table-fields which were confirmed available (step 1), confirmed to contain the correct type/content of value (step 2: optional on a field-by-field basis), and then performed the actual operation through a generated SQL statement (The field-input line would look something like "Name,1,1,Price,2,1,OptionalVal,1,0" as "n1,n2,n3" where n1 was the name of the field, n2 was the type of data to be contained in the field (the meaning of the values was contained in the comment header for the file), and n3 was a boolean value indicating whether or not to perform a check on the field). The file would set a variable called COMMAND_RESULT (if I remember correctly) as well as COMMAND_TITLE and COMMAND_MESSAGE. The possible values for COMMAND_RESULT were 1, 2, or 3 (with 1 being "no problem," 2 being "warning: some problems encountered," and 3 being "an error was raised which prevented the command from executing"). None of these values were handled by any of the files which dealt with individual customizable elements of the site either, each one of those documents included start_cfgtmpl.cfm at the start of document execution and then end_cfgtmpl.cfm at the end of document execution ... these documents controlled the formatting of the page and the output of these special variables which were set by other "abstract" CF documents.
/center
... there's really not anything to it (the actual portion of the bookstore which the customer sees is written with a similar approach except that it draws data from these tables and displays things [shipping methods, payment methods, books, author info, etc etc] rather than allowing them to be updated).
... this was required because one day the log file for the webserver grew to 450MB and the network administrator tried to figure out what website brought that traffic by opening the logfile with WinNT notepad (which locked up the machine as virtual memory was allocated in chunks to accomodate the large text file)). Really, this isn't even my job ... I'm a 19 year-old second-year college student and I'm currently unemployed (kthielen@hotmail.com) but I wouldn't deny the benefits of ColdFusion, it's a pretty nice product if it's in the hands of a well-organized mind ... just like any other programming language.
Sounds like you're saying that it's a junk platform
And yes it can talk to corba, com & Active X, (it's connectivity is better on win32, which sucks, because frankly servers should NEVER be IIS.....)
Its "connectivity" to ActiveX (OLE) is limited to Win32, CORBA works just fine for any other platform
So, all of your slander aside, there is a very important reason to use CF on a Win32 platform (with a non-MS webserver if you hate IIS): in-process document processing
but even if you want to create something complicated it's function model blows.... (back to the Tags thing....)
Its function model is lacking some extensibility, I agree. Still, with the ability to use "ActiveX" objects (at least any COM object that supports IDispatch) and CORBA objects, you're pretty well accomodated there. You may be interested, if you ever have to work on any CF stuff, in a few of my design choices at my previous job.
The problem was to create an administrative section for the bookstore portion of www.selfpub.com (if you go there, forgive the ugly interface, that was the creation of my "boss" and not myself). There were many things that needed to be edited and each corresponded to a table in a relational database (including a "Settings" table I always create to handle simple settings which apply to the site as a whole). I made a file to divide database records from any of these sections into "pages," cfgPageSplitter.cfm, which would set the value of NUM_PAGES, CURRENT_PAGE, RECORD_START, and RECORD_END
Example:
--Global Templates--
cfgPageSplitter.cfm
cfgDBOperation.cfm
start_cfgtmpl.cfm
end_cfgtmpl.cfm
--Bookstore Config Templates--
cfgAuthors.cfm
cfgBooks.cfm
cfgRatingSystems.cfm
cfgBookCategories.cfm
cfgShippingMethods.cfm
cfgSettings.cfm
--inside cfgAuthors.cfm (pseudocode)--
if IsDefined("COMMAND")
set CmdFields="Name,1,1,Desc,2,1,MaxFilespace,2,1"
include template="cfgDBOperation.cfm"
end if
include template="start_cfgtmpl.cfm"
query name="Authors" datasource="Selfpub"
SELECT * FROM Authors
end query
set MaxRecords=Authors.RecordCount
include template="cfgPageSplitter.cfm"
center
(here's where the regular document comes in)
output query="Authors" from="#RECORD_START#" to="#RECORD_END#"
(a table is output here with input fields for each field in the authors table and a command button with the name of "COMMAND" which allows updating or deleting of existing records)
end output
(add a blank table here with all fields used above but set "COMMAND" to "Add Entry" to allow new records to be created)
include template="end_cfgtmpl.cfm"
That's a pretty simple way to make an administrative section
Right, so, after all of that I guess my point is just that ColdFusion is a useful product and can save a LOT of time when it's used as it was intended to be used (it does require a different approach than traditional procedural or object-oriented programming demands). I am by no means an expert in this field, I'm sure that others could supply you with more information and could point out other useful ways that CF can be used. I thought it was an OK product but I didn't really like the company for which I was working while using that product. The time I spent writing things in C, C++, Java, or VB was greater than any time I spent with ColdFusion (I even had to write a little CGI program in C to spit out little chunks of huge log files
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
HUH? I used Cold Fusion Studio (HomeSite + CF Stuff) and it doesn't put a CLOSING in it. Your 'Client' is clueless then for doing this and you sir are Just AS clueless for not realizing that the Homesite product has a completly customizable TAG library for your editing. If it ANNOYS you that much inform then that you can fix their studios so they won't put an incorrect closing tag. Maybe your Just confused about tags.
Just because ppl can program 'real' languages does not mean they can program for the web.
If this 'abandonware' became super successful (hint go and download it and use it if you can), they would definitally notice and hopefully/maybe would open source and freely distribute their better products (i.e. the best HTML editor on the planet and a kickass app. server among other things)! Do your part and make them think this is worth their while!
It's native now.
CF 5.0 is being rewritten in java and will run native on all major platforms.
You're using an old version, dude.
Depending on the license they released it under, I doubt you would want to reuse any of it. Not to mention that it's pretty old and there are lots of GPL'd equivilents (that don't use cold fusion). A quick search on freshmeat turns up 17 different web based forums and I'd bet that's only a small amount of the ones availiable.
Am I missing something? does this Allaire system have some special feature?
However, we should be happy that it's a step in the right direction. I have seen literally hundreds of posts on Slashdot expressing the desire for companies to open up products that are aging, instead of just shelving them. Here, Allaire has done this (sort of), and they're being criticized for the manner in which it was handled.
I agree that Allaire deserves some criticism for their half-hearted approach, but we should remember that they didn't have to do anything: they could have just abandoned this product. Someone there is facing in the right direction, so let's not be so hasty to beat them down for thier blunders.
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
openspot.com doesn't look like it's related to Allaire.
Can't find related press release at http://www.allaire.com/co mpany/pressbox/pressreleases.cfm.
This story sure looks like coming from nowhere!
So I like many others in my position use Cold Fusion in my office, and would like to get some momentum behind a movement to get off of Cold Fusion and onto PHP. The one problem tat I am finding is that despite their similar natures, there is almost never a comparison between the two. PHP is mostly compared to ASP, JSP & Zope, and Cold Fusion is mostly compared to ASP & other proprietary engines - but I never seem to find any information on how the two compare.
What I would really need to convince the PHBs is:
a. a comparison on how they hold up under heavy loads
b. a comparison of features
c. a comparison of how interoperable they are with other languages/toolkits
PHP looks better, but without any proof that it can hold up under the loads that cold fusion can (or beat CF) I can't get any movement.....
thanks.
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
Retro-actively open-sourcing dead or dying commercial software packages has absolutely no value at all to the open source community. These things are publicity stunts designed to make companies look open source-friendly. As was noted in a previous comment, PHP burns rings around Cold Fusion.
You'll see more of this bringing out of the dead, but don't for a minute mistake it for any kind of real generousity on the part of contributors.
What this really is, directly and not-so-directly, is an admission that open source is winning against commercial software. Yes, there are a few remaining frontiers; commercial-quality RDBMS, OS->hardware integration and so forth, but open source has won the web and there's no real point to fighting the march of progress.
It's funny to see all the companies trying (but failing) to jump on the open source band wagon. It's clear that they want to appeal to the open sourcers, but are wary of lost revenue and the loss of full control. It makes perfect sense to dump an abandoned program into 'open source land' - they lose nothing, we gain a little, and it makes them look good to the public. That being said, I don't think this instance will really matter. I don't think many of us are jumping up and down about this. I urge companies to not dabble in open sourcing, but to embrace it and not od a half-assed attempt.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
I have found thus far, that if an IS department requires that you run the web server on Win32, they will invariably requite that you use IIS. This is my personal experience tainting this, but so far I have yet to find a counter example. So from the enterprise point of view, if CF is run on Windows, it runs on IIS.
... there are many heavily-used alternatives to IIS and your argument doesn't hold water.
... as you've said in two other posts.
... there has usually been some other component to the site which doesn't just spit out information from some table.
;)
... I despise buzzwords (I had a bad experience at my last job where my "boss" used all sorts of buzzwords, usually in an incorrect context, and never actually attempted to understand anything that he was trying to "manage").
I don't think that the sales figures on WebSite agree with you there. I am not a big fan of the terms "IS" or "enterprise" as I'm not a big fan of any overused (and eventually meaningless) business term. How many "IS" departments have you been through (if you're going to make broad statements about the entire industry then you ought to at least back them up with some kind of statistical significance)? Living in central california, I only saw a couple of people using IIS and they were usually just as clueless about technology as my "bosses." Of course, if you are determined to use IIS but understand that it is a security risk, you could always put up a FreeBSD/OpenBSD webserver and just delegate allowed requests to the IIS machine, that'd make it more secure. I'm sorry but I don't buy your "enterprise point of view" nor do I believe that the rules for any intelligently-run business should be so inane
And I don't deny that.
You do if you say that it is impossible to write clearly maintainable code with reusable modules
What you refered to was as far as I could tell basically a database backed website.
It actually consisted of a lot more than that. There were some complicated exchanges that took place between several machines on the network and which CF did fine. There were also network services run on the local machine (I wrote a general-purpose network server which I've been thinking about releasing for public use) which called CF scripts and which could be manipulated by CF scripts. There are very few sites that I've seen which were purely database-driven
And I am perfectly happy saying that ColdFusion may well be the best environment in which to solve that problem on the market.
Say whatever you'd like
However, the area I am dealing with, where I find ColdFusion falls down is creating full fledged business applications - the type of web business applications that a person might be doing their entire job in.
You don't even define "full-fledged business applications." I addressed this point in your second post and didn't feel like you even understood what it meant. You seem to have some kind of arbitrary level of complexity at which an application is born. Again, I'm not really interested in hailing the glory of CF, I prefer to write in assembler or C++, but I don't like misinformation of any kind. Cold Fusion is just a scripting language, like any other scripting language it is limited to the capabilities of the interpreter. If the interpreter provides access to abstract interfaces, you can conceptually do anything with the scripting language (provided that you make use of those abstract interfaces when you need to do something that the language doesn't normally allow).
Please, if you respond to this, leave out the buzzwords
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
If you look at some of the sites created with ColdFusion it becomes apparent that in the right hands, it can indeed create large scale e-commerce sites. And I think that's the same with almost any of the major development platforms. If you know your stuff, it doesn't matter whether you use PHP, ASP or any other language. Most stuff I do is done in large corporate settings. We need to look at some of these technologies in a slightly different way. I can't spend weeks teaching someone PHP, PERL, or TCL and how to hook anyone of them into Apache so that it outputs reports from FoxPro or Access. ColdFusion suits our purposes well. It's a good tool. Bob
Eh, well.. that's kindof what I meant.. I called it "open source" because Sun didn't make it all the way to Open Source.
__
A customer of ours needed Forums for a colocated server. When we contacted Allaire to get pricing, we were told that the product was going to be released as open source on such-and-such date and that it was silly for us to purchase it. After waiting for such-and-such date to pass (and then three more weeks) and after talking to other Allaire reps who had no knowledge of any sort of open-sourcing, we shelled out the $400 for Forums (of course our customer paid us $600 for it). That was within the last 60 days. I can only hope that our customer's ColdFusion server stays up more than Allaire's does, at least half of the time I go to www.allaire.com it returns some sort of CF server error. Heck, the first time I ever went there to get the preliminary information on purchasing CF and Forums the site returned a CF error for 4 hours.
Jeff
I'm only dabbling in the book, but you are correct. Even the first book you mentioned gave me more than the php.net docs.
But Shouldn't php.net have that type of documentation in the first place? Ideally, I shouldn't have to go to a third party for the stuff I need. Microsoft and Allaire have that type of documentation either in the box or via some well-written help files/on-line docs.
In my mind, until we get stuff of similar quality from a few of the open source projects, I'll take the commercial packages over the free or open source ones. After all--it's not my concern over which philosophy of software wins--it's what tool is easiest to use.
I agree 100%. What also ticks me off is the comment I saw about needing weeks to do in CF what could be done in hours in Perl. Well, I bet I could do what he did in hours in CF, but weeks in Perl. It's all in what your used to.
Also - did I read right? Did someone complain about CF costing money? Well, geeze, I guess Allaire is evil then, right?
Well, the copywrite notice in /bin/false is slightly less ludicrous than the one in /bin/true. It's the same notice but at least /bin/false has (one line of) code. /bin/true is entirely comments.
/bin/true is at version 1.6. What did the earlier versions do? How does one enhanse or fix a null program?.... 6 times!
What's really amazing is that the comments indicate that
I've used Cold Fusion for 3 years now, and have seen the product since 2.0. In my opinion, Cold Fusion is a lot better than PHP because of the way it works. The tag based metaphor focuses on the Output of Database information into HTML. You can just type in an SQL query and output it without having to deal with all that Command/Recordset and object crap. It's a great mix for people with moderate programing background who do not like the low level C++/Java stuff. You may have some criticism about Cold Fusion having bugs, but they make up for it in a lot more things. Cold Fusion has much easier concepts to learn and use, and while PHP may be powerful--the documentation just sucks. That is a problem. Every Open Source project I see is not geared towards training the language to people. I have been initially excited about PHP, Zope, and Perl, but I have found the documentation to be written for "the geek", while the books on Cold Fusion, both from Allaire and from Ben Forta, focus on training new people, as well as teaching advanced concepts. Only now with a few books on PHP on the market can I really start working with it. Many of us want to deal with stuff that's more or less as easy to use as a 4GL, or deal with complex configurations. I'd rather use CF's web based administrator and CFML on IIS and Windows NT than deal with PHP's INI files on a Linux box. Allaire may not follow the GPL or the Open Source Philosophy, but they are a lot better than the Microsoft path, and they are less insular.
Most businesses still cannot (and will continue to for some time) grasp the basic idea of giving something away. In their world, if you give something away, you earn no money in return. This is true. They also presume support will continue to derive the same income, as the number of users hasn't increased much over a period of N. Hence, the logical conclusion is that without that source of revenue, they need to cut back expenditures to survive. Not very optimal - they lose profits. The flipside that they don't realize is that by open sourcing something, you can decrease your maintenance costs and increase your user base (if properly executed).
Companies don't see the long-term benefit. And, to be honest, open source is risky - there is no guarantee of high market penetration, as always.. and companies do NOT like risk, especially an unknown one - and there is unsufficient data right now to make a long-term commitment for many companies.
I know everyone is now shouting "FUD! FUD!" but this is how companies think, so you'd better warm up to the idea. Open source developers for the most part aren't getting rich - Microsoft developers are. That's a pretty powerful statement. So, if you want companies to open source a live product, instead of one that is no longer generating revenue (at which point it doesn't matter much what happens to the software, so the decision to go open source is easier) maybe we should concentrate on producing some hard numbers on companies that have taken the plunge.. and what happened 5 years later.
Better URLs for information about this seems to be http://www.allaire.com/products/forums/ and http://www.forumspot.org/
Allaire does have news on it, but you must click on "Products" first. Forums is the last product listed, and it says there that all content related to Forums has been moved to forumspot.org. That is why there is no mention of it in the press releases.