So yeah, as I said in the other thread, I went to Edinburgh for a conference a few weeks back, and by far the biggest news from the conference has to be: Railo is going Open Source! (cool)
Railo is an alternative CFML engine to Adobe ColdFusion, already far cheaper (and with lots of extra useful features), but at Scotch on the Rocks they announced that they will be going completely open source - but better than that, they will be joining JBoss.org and thus opening a gateway to the larger Java community.
There's a lot more CFML news that should convince people who have previously dismissed it to re-consider:
- Adobe have started an Open Process Initiative, to be a lot more open about what is happening with ColdFusion, including a public bug tracker/feature request.
- Adobe are giving the full Enterprise edition of ColdFusion away free for Educational use.
- Adobe, Railo, and some key community figures have formed a CFML Advisory Committee to create a CFML language that all the engines can adhere to.
- Railo 3.0 is out soon, with cool cfvideo and cfvideoplayer functionality to make converting between formats and displaying movies on pages /really/ simple.
- Railo is going Open Source under LGPLv2, as of Railo 3.1 due out later this year
- Railo is joining JBoss, and will be providing simple support for things like Hibernate ORM, Clustering, and lots more.
- BlueDragon went Open Source under GPLv3 earlier this year.
- All engines (but particularly Railo and CF8) have/are introducing extra syntax improvements, including to CFScript for strange people that don't like tags.
In addition to all that, the number of frameworks for CFML has been growing rapidly...
with Fusebox, Mach-ii, ModelGlue, ColdBox, and more providing MVC-style controller circuits.
there's Transfer, Reactor, and several others for ORM
and ColdSpring and LightWire both offering IoC and AOP
etc
The next year is going to be a great time for CFML developers - PHP, Python and Ruby better watch out.