BlueDragon.NET 7.1 at Microsoft TechEd
New Atlanta is sponsoring and exhibiting at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando next week, where we will showcase the upcoming BlueDragon.NET 7.1 release. As I've discussed in previous blog entries, the key new features of BD.NET 7.1 include:
- IIS 7.0 Integrated Pipeline (onRequestStart and onRequestEnd for all content types)
- IIS 7.0 Integrated Configuration
- IIS 7.0 Integrated Administration
In addition to demonstrating BD.NET 7.1 at TechEd, we are also announcing our new ColdFusion-to-.NET and ColdFusion-to-Java migration services. As experts in ColdFusion, ASP.NET, and Java technologies, New Atlanta is uniquely positioned to assist organizations that want to migrate their ColdFusion applications to either the ASP.NET or Java EE web application platforms. Look for additional information on these new services to be posted on our web site before the start of TechEd next week.
Comments (8) |
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Would it not be better to offer consultation on how to better their investment in CFML and ensure they are working in the right way.
I honestly can't see how consultation on migrating on to Pure Java / .Net solutions will help the CFML community. I see BD.net as a one time sale if people are migrating.
There are already established companies that offer these consulting services, that do a much better job than New Atlanta could (see www.alagad.com, for example). It doesn't make sense for us to try to compete with those consulting companies.
Consider this. Someone comes to us and says, "I've got this old application running on CF5. We still use it, but it's not being actively developed--in fact, I don't have any CF developers on staff anymore. We do all our new development in ASP.NET and I'd really like to move that old CF5 application to ASP.NET. Can you help me?" (this happens a lot, by the way). How should we respond?
The most direct path to a sale is to give the customer what he wants. In this case, the best answer is, "Yes, we can help you migrate to ASP.NET." This is what our migration strategy is all about.
If I answer, "No, I can't help you migrate to ASP.NET, but I can help you upgrade to CF8 and show you all the new cool features," the customer's most likely response is, "Well, thanks anyway, but that's not really what I want."
New Atlanta is in business to make money by offering products and services that help businesses solve problems.
The Open BlueDragon project is intended to help grow the CFML community. What more could we have possibly done to help the CFML community than to release the Java/J2EE BlueDragon source code and create the OpenBD project?
We realize that New Atlanta, as a commercial company focused primarily on Microsoft technologies, and OpenBD, as a Java-based open source community project, will often have divergent goals and agendas. That's why we've made a clear organizational separation between New Atlanta and OpenBD.
We have currently 5 companies talking to us about migrating their coldfusion applications to .net and using bd.net to facilitate that (we consider ourselves a CF shop). The biggest concern of all these organisations is finding good CF developers. Another agency i know of in the UK who like us has been using CF for an eternity has also just announced they are adopting other platforms.
People read what they want to read and personally it all seems a lot of bluster. I don't think that anyone can pretend that a significant investment hasn't been made by New Atlanta in the Java based codebase and that giving that to the community to build on wasn't done for the right reasons. Imagine if the cumaltive effort exserted in fire stoaking was put into helping with these open source initiatives what could be achieved ?
Alex said:
"The biggest concern of all these organisations is finding good CF developers."
That, if anything, is mostly likely to cause the demise CF rather than other issues. Adobe appear clueless to that and have completely neglected the educational market, from school kids to university students and adults wanting to learn a new skill. Pricing CF well out of their reach and making the only free version impractical to use outside of a laboratory will not by any stretch of the imagination help produce a new generation of CF talent - which is what we're seeing now.
With respect to the entire community who I look upon as friends and colleagues, they are the same people I see again and again. There is no new blood. If people aren't taught a skill and have no incentive to learn it then it will die out.
Projects like OpenBD and Railo are the only real chance CFML has to lure fresh talent our way. We need bright school leavers and graduates to speak CFML so we have both a larger pool of developers to pick from and at competitive rates rather than veteran rates. We shouldn't have to hire developers with 6+ years CFML experience (because there's so little choice) when sometimes a project needs no more than a couple of years experience at half the price.
I took a look at Visual Web Studio Express 2008 today and wondered how many tens of thousands of people have downloaded it and started learning .Net for free (which has a really smart IDE). Sorry for the long comment.