Last month Open BlueDragon was released by New Atlanta. At first I was excited, I thought it was a great idea and wished I could utlize it for my next project. But I was afraid of losing functionality, not only with what I had already integrated into my code, but also the features I have yet to implement. However, that was my initial off-the-cuff response before actually reading up and learning more about it. After listening to the CFWeekly podcast with Vince Bofanti on Open Source Bluedragon it gave me the push to say "yeah, I think this will work."

This isn't a small open source project with one or two guys managing what goes in it whenever they get the time to do so. It's pretty huge. New Atlanta is will continue to sell and support its paid version. There's a great steering committee of nine people committed to carefully decide what goes into each release. And already the Coldfusion community has immediately taken in and is quick to respond to the OpenBD version by releasing a VMWare, Amazon AMI, and an admin interface. I'm no longer fearful that this will stall and not go anywhere, or it'll fork and not try to keep up with what Adobe is doing.
I see this helping out the current CF community and really bringing in new developers who are looking for a solid, mature, completely open platform. Not only that, but with the open source, feature-rich applications in PHP, this gives us an easy opportunity to run both PHP and CFML side-by-side. Where you can install PHP forums and blogs on part of your site without having to reinvent the wheel. Then spend the rest of your time developing your actual application quickly in a powerful, mature, and free language.
Next weekend I'll install Open BlueDragon on my dev server and see how far I get converting things over. Expect my next post to cover this.
Choice Link
Yahoo's Best Practices
The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 34 best practices divided into 7 categories (content, server, cookie, css, javascript, images, and mobile).
Yahoo's Best Practices
The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 34 best practices divided into 7 categories (content, server, cookie, css, javascript, images, and mobile).









