I put your lunch in the fridge … next to the ColdFusion container

Brian LeGros | June 3rd, 2007 | programming  

Well, no sooner do I finish blogging about the new scripting integration in Java 6 then did Sean Corfield start to play around with it in the context of CF8. His examples have given me a better understanding of the capabilities of the Invocable interface as it applies to JSR 223 compliant languages. Looks like he had some issues initially going from PHP to CF but the transition to JRuby seemed to have gone pretty smoothly.

From the little I can tell, a CFML engine implementing JSR 223 would open up tons of possibilities for Java containers (possibly even integration of JEE specifications — JTA). ColdFusion application servers could be built using the same scripting engine but provide different features. I could see Smith and possibly Railo benefiting from this initially so I guess I can understand why Adobe was against complying. Adobe has such a monopoly on the CF app server market, even creating the CFML engine to be JSR 223 compliant might cause a demand for it to be open-sourced.

Man, wouldn’t that be awesome?!? An open source CFML engine based on Java. I wonder what types of performance hits we’d have to take, if any? I guess that’d be the great thing, we could choose our implementation at that point. I can’t see BlueDragon, Railo, and Smith not jumping right onto that band wagon and evening the app server playing ground. From some of the review’s Sean’s done on alternative CF servers (also here), I could see this as being that factor that makes people stand up and take notice. Right now, only Adobe can truly say they are 100% CFML compliant because they control the language and the direction of the language, not to mention the audience. An Adobe endorsed CFML engine would mean such great things for our community. I could really see a lot of innovation from tool makers and app server creators alike. Imagine if Mark Drew could create a local context to execute CFML code w/o needing hooks for server to be configured?

Ok, so I’m ranting now, but some cool stuff none the less. Nice intro to the CF community on these technologies Sean.



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Discussion

  1. Maxim Porges Says:
    June 4th, 2007 at 7:04 pm

    I’d definitely like to see this happen. I think Adobe has been opening the coffers to a certain extent with the open sourcing of various parts of Flex, and they’d do well to follow a similar approach with CF. I mean, they gave the AS3 engine away for Tamarin; why not do something similar for CF?

    Then again, maybe this is a moot point now that CF has been deemed a dying technology. :) (Seriously, that ComputerWorld list was a complete fallacy [or is that phallusy?]).

    - max

  2. me Says:
    June 4th, 2007 at 7:32 pm

    @Max

    For sure man. Can you imagine if they opened up Tamarin to be JSR 223 compliant. Oh geesh, you could use CF as an AS3 container. That would be amazing.

    I looked around to see if it has support for JSR 223, but I couldn’t find out if it did or not. I know Rhino does, but Tamarin would be so much cooler.

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