This is a simple call to the ColdFusion community. Thanks to the wonderful efforts by Ray, Ben Rob and others (let me know who else) we have RIAForge. I have a simple question I’d like to pose.
We are all well aware of the many open source applications written for other languages. What is on your much wished for short list of open source tools not yet available for ColdFusion? Or, if a tool exists but you would like another option, name it!
This is your chance to not only tell the CF community what you want, but also a chance to maybe jump in and help develop a much needed application.
Vince Collins
May 15, 2008 at 10:57 am
I think the most obvious one is working IDE.
May 15, 2008 at 11:42 am
I’ll second that. And, to contribute another, I really really want a good code/test coverage tool for CF.
May 15, 2008 at 11:54 am
In addition to tools FOR CF developers such as Marc and rgruchalski have suggested, I’m also asking for open source applications WRITTEN IN CF that you wished existed.
May 15, 2008 at 12:29 pm
How about instead of complete open source apps on Riaforge, we have small pluggable apps that can be combined with others to form a project?
Take the Django web framework for example. They strongly encourage you to write small apps that do one thing and do it well. These apps are then available on Google Code for download. If I want to write a blog application, I don’t need to write everything. There is already a comments application written that I can plug in. Tags? No need to write this one either. Another pluggable app has been written for tagging.
This is what the CF community needs. Don’t repeat yourself is a very good principle to follow.
May 15, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Well, the fact that you’re using a PHP-based blog engine (WordPress) for your ColdFusion blog may be telling…
May 15, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Tony, using the PHP-based WordPress has nothing to do with ColdFusion succeeding or dieing. It has EVERYTHING to do with finding an application that works for me. BlogCFC is a perfectly viable option except that I really wanted to be a part of the blog community on WordPress.com
I like a hamburger. Somethings I eat at Wendys, sometimes, Burger King and sometimes McDonalds. It all depends on if it’s on the way to where I’m going.
I want CF to have more applications and more flavors of similar applications so that I and everyone else out there has more choices.
May 15, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Easy Vincent — I never said you didn’t want CF to succeed. I’m just pointing out that it seems to me that in your eyes the CF community is ’sorely missing’ a blog community comparable to WP. I’m on your side when it comes to wanting CF developers to have more choices.
May 15, 2008 at 2:01 pm
What open source applications do you want to see Tony?
May 15, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I’d like to see a good OS e-commerce application for CF. I remember there being rumblings of an effort being put together for that, but I haven’t heard anything come out of it.
I also think the CF community is lacking in the CMS space. Farcry is great, but it’s also pretty huge resource-wise so I see it as an enterprise-level solution. Others that I’ve seen are on the other end of the spectrum — too simple for my purposes (Katapult, Bytespring), or not mature enough.
In general, though, it would be great if there were more community-driven projects. PHP projects like WP, Joomla, Drupal have large teams of developers while it seems like most CF open source projects are one-man shows (or are managed by very small teams).
May 15, 2008 at 4:13 pm
There are many reasons and I did a post about this.
http://www.coldfusioncommunity.org/profiles/blog/show?id=1439641%3ABlogPost%3A26506
LOL…. cf developers are too busy man… they don’t have time for open source ……. LOL
May 15, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I think Ray Camden has accomplished quite a bit with his open-source apps - he’s certainly laid out a nice foundation.
It would be nice to see the community step up and help ‘polish’ them a bit and make them more competitive with other open-source equivalents.
I think the CF community is slowing waking up to the power of open-source - there has been renewed interest around CFEclipse, Open Blue Dragon, etc…
May 15, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I’m sorry guys, but you’re thinking way too small.
Microsoft is replacing ColdFusion in the Enterprise by rolling out CMS’s (Sharepoint) and CRM’s (DynamicCRM) as well as other business applications.
Sure these cost - bigtime (Microsoft typical lock-in licences) but with the rolling out of these apps comes the support infrastructure to go with it. In the last 3 months I’ve worked in two places like that: .NET lock-in based on the applications purchased. CF gets pushed on the outer because it’s only for custom stand-alone applications.
Why have ColdFusion8 talking to .NET DLL’s when you can write C# code to do the same? It’s part of the “cradle-to-grave” approach Microsoft has taken - from OS to Broswer (try MOSS in Safari a Mac and see how far you get).
Daemon’s “Farcry” is a great OSS start for ColdFusion, and FarCry is more than a well featured CMS, it’s an application framework that can be used for other things (like CRM’s, and much the same way as Dynamics is for MS’s business applications).
Unfortunatly, Farcry has no profile and hardly any love from Adobe. The best Adobe can offer is bloody LiveCycle for workflows … at up to a quarter of a million dollars to do so.
@Vince
“using the PHP-based WordPress has nothing to do with ColdFusion succeeding or dieing.”
you’re a disconcerning user with “power-user” reasons. But for the great unwashed, surely you can’t deny the install base that WordPress, Drupal and other PHP applications has created? It’s not just the PHP runtime on servers, it’s the bodies deploying these applications, the profile and the experiance gained.
@Sana
“LOL…. cf developers are too busy man… they don’t have time for open source ……. LOL”
yes, I agree with you, although I’d take it a step further and suggest that releaseing CF apps as OSS is not first and formost in people’s minds when finishing projects.
there are lots of OSS projects in RIAforge, but it’s mostly helper stuff/frameworks, etc. Not a lot of actual applications. And while I appreciate Ray’s BlogCFC, I’ve hit limitations with it and I’m not sure if branching it is the way to go.
for the large code-base that’s out there, there’s not a lot of useful .NET (ASP.NET) OSS applications either. I suspect the similarity between this and ColdFusion projects comes down to commercialisation and interlectual property. Businesses commission the writing of CF code and they want a return on their investment, as only pointy-hair’d managers can see.
think bigger guys, past pissy little applications. think “ColdFusion environment”
May 15, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Thinking “too small”? By whose standards, I wonder. Not all of us operate in the enterprise environment, barry. I’m a one-man freelancer who works with small businesses and organizations and most of my sites go on shared servers. I design and develop my sites and use CF because I can be more productive with it than with anything else. In the markets I work in, I never compete with any Microsoft products. I think there are more of us “little guys” using CF than people think and for most of our clients, a framework/CMS like FarCry is overkill, but it would be great if we had CF equivalents of Drupal and Joomla, for example. Those “pissy llittle applications” are my bread and butter.
May 16, 2008 at 4:57 am
“Those “pissy llittle applications” are my bread and butter.”
sure. and good on you for using CF because it make good business sense for you.
earlier this year I needed to keep CF alive when they were just about to move to PHP for their applications - all for $$$/licencing reasons. I needed an LMS (or a CMS reworked as an LMS for content delivery), a full featured wiki and a bunch of blogs with central admin.
I tried really hard: Farcry, Ray’s CanvasWiki and Rays’s BlogCFC. Unfortunatly, there’s PHP-based apps that cover all of that, inc Moodle LMS. Moodle beat me with Farcry simply because it was purpose built for the job and both CanvasWiki and BlogCFC came up just a touch too short.
Later, in another enterprise, there was a re-evaluation of supported platforms. Because of the .NET investment it was decided to shrink ColdFusion in favour of ASP.NET because CF was deemed only to be needed for smallish standalone applications that don’t need integrating into other systems. Whereas .NET skills could be used to extend Sharepoint and Dynamics.
by all reports, CF is still very healthy and doing well - mostly because it remains good value for money due to ease of development. But it desperatly needs a bunch of killer apps to give it more profile. All I’m saying is that getting the big end of town interested is a fast way of getting that profile. And sadly, from what I’ve been able to find, Farcry stands alone. And that’s a missed opportunity. I could really do with a OSS CF CRM.
ok, I’ll conceed. lets have both - big and small. now how come it ain’t happening?
May 16, 2008 at 8:10 am
Good discussion…
I think many are keying in on the word “sorely” in my title. I just want to know what open source applications you guys and gals consistently find yourself wishing you had at your disposal. We all come from different camps, some are single developers, others work on a structured, commercial organization. Some are CF only shops and others are fighting to keep CF alive in their organization.
In the end, businesses and individuals alike want tools that work. What is your much-wished for list of tools that currently don’t exist as open source for ColdFusion?
So far…
Tools for CF developers:
“Working IDE”
“Good Code/Test coverage tool for CF”
Applications:
“E-Commerce Application”
“Group-efforts to improve existing open source CF applications, possible branching efforts”
“LMS - Learning Management System”
“CRM - Customer Relationship Management”
Let’s keep this going…
May 16, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I think one of the things that hurts the CF opensource community is the framework segregation. Now I know Im part of that segregation because I choose to use a single framework and typical wont use OS applications that are in another framework. When you compare django and ruby on rails opensource communities to ColdFusion, you really arent comparing apples to apples. The comment made earlier about small applications being “plugged in” to django, will not work for ColdFusion, well for the most part anyways. RoR is the same way, if you want authentication in your application, its pretty common to download the restful_authentication plugin for your app and viola, you have authentication, complete with cookie based logins if you want, forgotten password functionality, and a self registration form.
You couldnt write this for ColdFusion because you would need at minimum 5 versions, one with no framework, a Mach-ii version, Coldbox Version, Fusebox Version and a Model-Glue version..
Dont get me wrong, Im all for the idea of smaller pluggable apps. I would love to have them readily available but the segregation poses bigger issues.
I think if we ‘did’ have the opensource apps for things like authentication, security, tagging, etc… you would probably see more opensource applications being developed because the time factor is reduced.
May 18, 2008 at 8:01 am
@Russ
no disrespect mate, but there may be another way. When I look at apps, I’m considering them as stand alone “do thing and do it well” situation. I’d much rather have well defined integration points between apps than formal plug-ins. you mentioned RonR - maybe as more of those apps develop and more people put forth their own best mouse traps, RonR will end up with some of the untidyness that PHP has.
Maybe it’s because I think in terms of SOA, and when it comes to authentication, I have to look across all apps for a single sign-on anyway (at least as a known user with just a password to add - just like Google and Yahoo already do as you move through their spaces).
I have no problems at all with an app using Transfer and ColdSpring vs another with MachII and another with Model-Glue. Just so long as I can get to each’s generated data to broadcast to other apps, feed in read-only data from elsewhere and tap into facades or delegate extra processing.
the number of active frameworks authors ain’t that big and I’m sure they can get to some level of understanding. Shoot- CFObjective just finished, pity this wasn’t brought up a month ago…
May 19, 2008 at 9:17 am
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May 29, 2008 at 9:06 am
I think CF does lack some killer apps as already stated in the discussion. Look for ecommerce apps, forum apps, blog apps, wiki, cms, dms etc and what not written in PHP and you will get atleast 10 options to choose from, all free and open source. Look at oscommerce or xcart for example, their user base is astonishing now. People get hired just because they know how oscommerce or xcart or smarty etc work.
Having said that, I would never expect one open source app that does everything for me. Its always nice to have more options available to chose from. I might be needing a simple CMS for my project but honestly speaking I wont go with Farcry because that would be just an overkill. Farcry is great but it doesnt suit every situation obviously.
here is a little list of apps that would be nice to see:-
1) ecommerce apps
workflow/approval based systems
2) document management systems
3) content management systems
4) mailing list managers
5) calendar/event publishign systems
6) generic form processing libraries
7) ad management apps
9) helpdesk/ticket system
I could list a lot more and some of these are really easy to do and I am sure most of these already exist out there (written in CF) but they are not easy to find, and if they exist, they are not free.
The CF community is doing good work in coming up with a lot of frameworks so we can write our code effectively and efficiently but I honestly beleive if some of those efforts were spent on writing some open source apps, it would have been better for a lot of people because not everyone uses frameworks and there is no real need to use a framework in most cases specially if the project is done by not more than 1 or 2 developers.
Just my 2 cents.
June 15, 2008 at 8:50 am
I’ve long wanted a phpMyAdmin equivalent; and now that we have CFDBInfo in CF8, it’s possible. I just don’t have the drive or the spare time to start it up myself.
August 27, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Well, for what is worth I’m considering releasing our VICO suite of applications:
VHD [Help Desk (Issue Ticket\Test Case)]
VSF [Sales Force Mgm (Cold Lead, Opportunity, Account etc)
VPM [Project Management]
Time Tracker
Expense Management
Invoice
Purchase Order
Knowledge Base
Portal
Admin
Asset Management
Calendar \ Contact Management
as dual licensing (commercial open source under GPL3).
The idea is to have a ColdFusion offering similar in power, visibility and recognition as other platforms have (sugarCRM for example).
Will see how it goes. If you guys have any suggestions, ideas please let me know
Regards
Marius