Alan Williamson went on the attack in an attempt to call out Adobe for their lack of ColdFusion updates/support. I commented on his blog but wanted to replicate it here. I hesitated to do this seeing as it would bring light to a tasteless marketing effort but think it could be worth the discussion.

So here is my response to Does Adobe really care about ColdFusion? Doubt it:

I’d say OpenBD is behind Railo. I didn’t even know OpenBD was still working. I thought it was dying slowly [not being funny, absolutely serious here].

You’re taking Ray’s posts wayyyyy out of context. DateTimeFormat is a simple improvement we’ve all dealt with for years through two function calls: DateFormat, TimeFormat. Ray is pulling simple upgrades out of Zeus and posting about them. Maybe if that was the only update this post would be spot on but it is just one of the smaller niceties being provided.

If you want a list of big features, Charlie did a preso recently [October 2011] where he outlined what’s new.

Here are some I’d say are “slightly” larger than DateTimeFormat:
– Automated Hotfix Mechanis
– Restricting Admin Access by IP Addres
– CSRF Protection
– XSS Protection
– Completely rethought scheduled tasks [too many updates here to list]
– Web sockets support; other HTML5 goodies too
– Closures
– Implicit CFC constructors
– CFC method chaining [no more ‘return this;’ required to method chain]
– Tomcat replaces jrun
– SOLR improvements
– Better java integration; auto-load jars and cfc access in java [see CFCProxy] are my favs
– jQuery used in Admin [death to java applets]
– Per-application VFS
– Web Services are now AXIS 2; adds REST support and is brain-dead simple yet very powerful

Those are just some of the highlights from Charlie’s preso. Does that change the scope of your post?

As for it taking a very long time for such a simple update, I think all software has a similar issue. It isn’t like DateTimeFormat was all that hard to achieve through a UDF.

But…for the sake of discussion, OpenBD isn’t free and clear here either:
Issue 33: cfprocessingdirective in the error handler page

That’s been open since 2008. This one is 2008 as well.

Maybe the issue tracker is outdated but until your house is clean…you might not want to talk about someone else’s.

😉

PS – I deploy mainly Railo these days so don’t think I’m an Adobe fanboy defending the mothership.

It is always good for the community to take up a cause and get a company to improve a product but for a competitor to lambast and claim they are the clear leader they must: 1) Not have the same issue(s), 2) literally be in the lead, 3) Do so with legit points showcasing where an impending update is a poor one.

As another side note, I mention Railo as my preferred CFML engine [namely because it is free and blazingly fast!!!] but lately I’ve been in Rails way more than CF.