I got an interesting email from Tim Buntel (Macromedia's Senior Product Manager for ColdFusion) yesterday.
"We would like to hear more about your BlueDragon experience. If
you could write up a document detailing your experience, frustrations,
and the like, we could help you out with your request for a shiny new
license of ColdFusion MX 7 Standard."
So I might well get a
license of CFMX for myself without actually having to earn all the cash
and send it off to Macromedia. Nice for me (less work), nice for
Heather (maybe a late christmas present for her), and nice for
Macromedia as well (potentially some free – as in beer – advertising).
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
Hi Barney. From time to time we ask outside authors to write articles and other content; for our competitive information section of the Macromedia Developer Center, for example. You may be a good candidate for something like this. In some cases we may offer reviewers, members of the press, and other authors special evaluation versions of our software to allow folks an opportunity to look more deeply at what our technology can do. Given your experience, we think you may be excited to discover Blackstone, the planned next major release of ColdFusion, which we believe is incredibly powerful, stable, and feature rich. Happy holidays!
Tim
Very interesting. Is your document going to mention that most of your testing was done on a beta version of BlueDragon 6.2, or that all of your issues are being addressed in the final release? Or, at least, are you planning to wait for the final release to confirm that your issues are indeed fixed?
Is your document going to contain some of the complimentary quotes about New Atlanta and BlueDragon found in your blog, or is this intended to be a hatchet job? Here are some quotes taken directly from your previous blog entries:
"none of the other bugs were really more than inconveniences (other than the CFC lookup bug, which is fixed in the BD 6.2 beta)"
"I do have to give New Atlanta props for being on the ball getting issues like this resolved"
"New Atlanta has done a fantastic job with providing an alternate CFML runtime"
Although, I suppose the fact that Tim wants to commission a separate document specifically highlighting your "frustrations, and the like" and presumably leaving out the positive points, when everything else you've blogged so far has been open and public, pretty much answers that question. After all, he is paying for the report, so he should be able to dictate its contents.
In any case, thanks for your help in indentifying issues with certain "edge cases" (as you've described them), and helping make BlueDragon a better product.
Vince,
The document will be as close to Truth as I can make it. Have no fear of a "hatchet job". Tim's request was for my "experience, frustrations, and the like", not just my "frustrations, and the like". (hint: to piss Barney off, intentionally use incomplete quotes, or take them out of context, to further your own ends.) If the 6.2 release is made before the document is complete, I'll take the time to do a rundown of stuff that has been fixed over the beta, but the document as a whole will focus on my experience using 6.1 and the 6.2 beta. Overall, the document will probably reflect somewhat poorly on New Atlanta and BlueDragon, but that's just my opinion based on my experiences, not any anti-BlueDragon propaganda. I think that CFMX is, in general, a superior product. However, for certain situations, BD is a better choice (low-cost deployment, .NET integration, distribution scenarios, etc.). As I've said before, if BD was really all that horrible, I wouldn't use it.
Totally offtopic after this high level industry discussion, but where – where – is this free beer that people keep going on about?