[p2pu-webcraft] Is Cold Fusion Relevant for School of Webcraft?

[Miles Rausch]

Hi, everyone.

Pippa asked me to share my response to her with the collective group, to make a case for my study group's inclusion in the School of Webcraft. I'm including the full text of my reply here, so I apologize if the discussion has already covered some of these points.

If you have any questions or comments, I'm now a member of this mailing list, so feel free to fire away.

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Pippa:

I appreciate your concern. You're right regarding Adobe; their ColdFusion product is closed, expensive, and not entirely in the spirit of the Open Web. However, my aim with this group was to focus on popular open source CFML engines that are out there: OpenBD and Railo, namely.

CFML is really just a JVM language, allowing anyone with Java installed to host and run CFML applications. Both OpenBD (http://openbd.org) and Railo (http://getrailo.org) are freely available (in a number of formats, including source code) and allow contribution to their source code. Even Adobe ColdFusion has a free Developer Edition, although that source code is not available.

Given the intended focus on open source CFML, I feel my group is fully within the spirit of the Open Web and warrants inclusion in the School of Webcraft. I've updated my group to use CFML instead of ColdFusion. In this way, it focuses more on the language and less on the proprietary Adobe application server.

Does this clarification and these updates make this course a candidate for inclusion? If not, is there more I can do (or more evidence I can provide) to make my case? I know ColdFusion isn't a popular player on the web, and Adobe has long been the only provider, but I've fallen in love with the language, and I'll do what I can to help bolster the open source community behind it.

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Thank you,

Miles Rausch
http://www.milesrausch.com
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