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DISCLAIMER: I write a regular column in the Adobe RIA newsletter (which I am paid for). However, I receive no incentives or discounts for promoting Adobe products. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own.
The past few months have brought about a lot of debate in the ColdFusion community, and I have been listening. Why? Well, I knew that I was going to need to deploy a CFML server for a project. The recent announcements meant that I needed to reconsider all of the CFML options: Adobe ColdFusion, Railo, Open BlueDragon, and Smith.
First, let me say that I was not looking to spend someone else's money here - this was a personal project, so whatever decision I made, I would be paying the entire cost out of pocket. Ultimately I chose Adobe ColdFusion 8. In my case, it made sense. Here were the factors that helped me make my decision. Hopefully this will be useful for others.
Cost: As always, cost was a factor. I was faced with a few options I could use for free (Railo Community / Open BlueDragon / Smith). And on the other side I had Adobe ColdFusion. The ColdFusion 8 standard license is $1299 - and the enterprise license is $7499 (these are US prices in US Dollars). The enterprise edition was not even an option because of the cost, and I will miss many of the enterprise features that I used during my time at Georgia Tech. At this point, the free options are looking like a better choice.
Familiarity: The truth is - I am used to Adobe ColdFusion. I have used it in a hosted environment, and I have deployed an enterprise server (while at Georgia Tech). For other developers, this might not be an issue (or other developers may be more familiar with other solutions like Blue Dragon). As a developer and server administrator, I have to factor in the time of installation and tuning. When I considered this, Adobe ColdFusion 8 Standard began to have an edge over the other choices.
Open Source: I have a different opinion on this than most people. This is not a big factor for me. I am not interested in tweaking the core CFML engine itself (at least to modify it beyond the options that are given by default). If this is a consideration for you, then you will probably want to go with one of the open source options (Railo, Open BlueDragon, or Smith).
Innovation: One of the deciding factors for me was seeing the new features that would be included with ColdFusion 9 (read my article on those features here). Baked in Hibernate support will be huge. I am also excited to see how Railo implements Hibernate (they have stated that they will also be adding Hibernate support). The CFML Advisory Committee will also help unify these implementations - which I think is great step forward, but at the moment most of the projects I regularly use are written for Adobe ColdFusion.
Flex / AIR Support: If you are a Flex or AIR developer there are many different backends that you can use with your application, but if you are going to use CFML, you need to have Adobe ColdFusion. The integration now with Flex and AIR is adequate, but the integration that will be present in ColdFusion 9, is the kind of tight integration that can only come from inter-company developer cooperation. This was a major part of the decision making process for me.
Conclusion
Due to all of those reasons, I decided on Adobe ColdFusion 8. I went to the online store - and purchased a ColdFusion 8 Standard license for $1299 USD (no, I didn't get any special discount on this one). I feel confident that I made the right choice, and I plan to pay the upgrade cost to ColdFusion 9 when it is available.
If I was in more of a traditional ColdFusion developer role (and not in a Flex/AIR developer role) I would be taking a serious look at Railo (especially with their recent annoncement). I think Open BlueDragon is still taking shape, and it will be interesting to see what direction it takes. As for Smith, I haven't heard much about them recently. With the other engines making big announcements, Smith seems to have faded into the background (I hope this isn't the case, but I haven't heard of their future plans).
What do you guys think?
I pretty much agree with everything you said, but again all these open source options are just making their way in the community, hopefully they will grow to be big projects and Adobe ColdFusion will only benifet from this (as we all)
@Raul - I totally agree. I certainly don't believe Adobe has the answer for everything - I think the community solutions will bring about some great solutions that might eventually make their way into Adobe ColdFusion. Also, I think in every situation competition leads to better solutions for everyone.
I totally agree also. First, your familiarity with Coldfusion means ALOT. Second, as you said, the innovations coming in CF9 are significant. --Good decision!!
David,
Just to clarify, if you choose CF standard instead of enterprise, you don't lose any core language features (creating PDFs, etc). With standard you are limited to one simultaneous shared request (all other requests are queued).
You do miss out on enterprise features like multiple instances, clustering, the server monitor (and monitor API) and native Exchange integration.
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf8_featurecomp.pdf
I'm not sure how pertinent it is to your project, but I'd add that the native ajax integration with CF8 is very powerful. I think there is a lot more Adobe could have done with it, but for 90% of what most people want, the standard out of the box features will suffice.
Cheers,
Davo
I love ColdFusion but essentially what's going on here is that you know and are comfortable with ColdFusion so you spent $1300 bucks on it. I love it but $1300 I would've went the way of groovy/grails or php. After all, there are other advantages to it. You have another language you're familiar with for the old resume. And even with the ramp up time for for $1300 + ongoing upgrade costs you should still come out ahead for yourself.
PHP?
PHP is way too expensive. "But", you exclaim, "it's free!".
Not when you consider development time, debugging, and app maintenance and enhancement time not to mention developer transitions. At my rates I can pay for the CF server in saved time in about 3 weeks.
PHP should be used by people who have absolutely no money and lots of time. It should not be considered a viable choice by most businesses. Because it costs too much.
asp.net and CF for high end sites and CF for most others.
In all honesty, this article was just to focus on the different CFML engines (as opposed to choosing ColdFusion over other languages). Covering CFML's benefits compared to other languages could be a whole other set of articles.
I'm confused? It seems like the majority of your decision (Flex and Innovation(?)) were based on eventually upgrading to CF9 - whose features haven't even been announced yet?
What was lacking in the open-source CFML alternatives?
Did you actually download and try them to compare features, configuration, management, etc?
Why didn't you simply host this application somewhere?
Not trying to dismiss your solution - but would like more information on your decision making process.
@Jim - All valid points. I was trying to cram a big thought process into a small article - let me address these issues one by one.
1. While no official announcement has been made as CF 9 features - Ben Forta made known the direction Adobe is taking with his keynote at CFUnited. He explained the upcoming Hibernate support at well as AIR synchronization (and many other features).
2. The open source alternatives were lacking a few things specifically for me. First, the project I was using was based on the Farcry 5 Beta. In this case a few of the Farcry features are not fully compatible with some of the open source versions. Verity (the built in indexing server) is a big benefit to get out of the box with CF - and I have used it heavily.
3. I have downloaded and worked with both Railo and Open BlueDragon. Part of this goes back to my point of familiarity - it took me quite a bit more time to get both of these solutions working properly as opposed to Adobe ColdFusion. In addition with Adobe ColdFusion, I get the ability to tune my application with the Server Monitor in the developer edition before I deploy it to my CF 8 Standard server. While I could still tune it in the developer edition and then deploy it to one of the OS solutions, you have no assurance that your code tuning has a positive effects on the other platforms.
4. In this case - I needed a level of control I couldn't achieve with a hosted solution. Trust me I tried - but Farcry 5 does not yet live happily in a hosted environment. Also, I have a few other projects that I will be deploying on this server in the future and it affords me a degree of flexibility that was worth the price (at least for me - others may feel differently).
Hope that clears up a few issues.
If I was a self employed developer, I'd not think twice about buying CF8 and taking a tax deduction. Otherwise, I don't see how the majority of working tech-heads would be able to afford it with personal funds nor is it understandable why they would want to splurge in such a way.
Don't get me wrong. I absolutely love the product and have used it at work since version 3. But it's a server product targeted at companies - not individuals. That being said, I keep the developer version installed on my computer all the time along with SQL Server Express which is another server product which I'd never purchase for myself.
Thank your explains. I am as developer and server administrator in my company(8grams Tech at Indonesia
Country) for making data visualitation on chart. This is very helpfully my choice about product must purchase
or opensource that will use support with CFM7 and new version. Because i'll interest to pay it. But i see in
Coldfusion 7-8 isn't support all data visualitation chart like gauge, map, dashbord, bubble etc (such in www.anychart.com and other). Will it be add new feature in CF9 ? I Hope CF9 Teams be focus at chart
development. Please give me suggest and solution, How to packaging and deploying my coldfusion project
file?