After drafting the following blog entry, I realized it was quite lengthy and could benefit from an introductory paragraph. In summary, this blog entry is intended to answer the following questions that are regularly posed to us by BlueDragon customers and prospects:

• Why should we migrate to BlueDragon.NET?
• Why did New Atlanta create the Open BlueDragon project?
• What is the future of BlueDragon and New Atlanta?

The main message is that the dominant trends in the web application server market over the past several years present considerable challenges to ColdFusion/CFML developers, and that BlueDragon is uniquely positioned to help CFML developers respond to those challenges.

New Atlanta and its predecessor organizations have been involved in the development of web application server products for more than 13 years; nearly the past 8 years have been spent working on BlueDragon, our ColdFusion-compatible CFML server. This blog entry is a discussion of the trends we've observed in the web application server market during that time, and the impact of those trends on our strategic thinking regarding the BlueDragon product line.

This discussion is primarily intended for BlueDragon customers and prospects, that they might gain a better understanding of why we've made some of the decisions we have in the past and what the future holds for BlueDragon. This discussion might also be of some interest to users of Adobe ColdFusion, since these trends may also impact that company and its product line.

The following statements contain generalizations that aren't true in all cases. Some are obvious and uncontroversial, while others might trigger vigorous debate. However, we believe that all of these statements are true and that these trends will continue or accelerate in the future:

• The market for web application server operating systems is roughly evenly divided between Windows and Linux. Use of "big iron" UNIX (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.) for web application servers has almost disappeared.
• Organizations that choose Windows for their web application platform tend to prefer Microsoft products and technologies such as IIS, ASP.NET, and SQL Server. When they use non-Microsoft products and technologies, it's usually for legacy reasons. Organizations that choose Windows and Microsoft solutions are generally willing to pay for products and services. Open source solutions have little impact in the Microsoft market.
• Organizations that choose Linux for their web application platform tend to prefer open source solutions such as Apache, PHP, and MySQL (the well-known LAMP stack). Other open source technologies such as Ruby on Rails, and Java-based open source solutions (JBoss, Tomcat, Jetty, etc.) are also widely used on Linux. Organizations that choose Linux and other open source solutions tend to not want to pay for products or services (there are significant exceptions to this, primarily enterprise-level organizations that have mission critical applications for which they purchase either commercial product licenses--in order to get support--or purchase support contracts for open source solutions).
• The use of Java and Java-based products on Windows is steadily declining and being replaced with .NET and .NET-based products. In the future, almost all Windows-based development will be done using .NET-based technologies, and Java will be used primarily on Linux.
• The market for ColdFusion and ColdFusion-compatible CFML servers is not growing--and may be declining--as a direct result of the trends listed above. Sales of CFML servers over the past several years have been made almost entirely to existing CFML users.
• The use of Mac OS X as a client operating system is increasing, but its use as a web application server platform is practically non-existent.

Most important among these trends is the stark division of the web application server market into two almost mutually exclusive camps: Windows/Microsoft/.NET on one side, and Linux/Java/Open Source on the other. In this environment, a commercial Java-based CFML server doesn't fit very well: (a) on the Windows side, the market wants .NET-based solutions, not Java; and, (b) Linux users don't want to pay for closed, proprietary commercial products, preferring free open source solutions.

The context of this division into two distinct camps explains two major decisions made last year regarding the BlueDragon product line:

• The creation of the Open BlueDragon project. We created the open source edition of BlueDragon to directly address the needs of Linux users who demand a completely free, unrestricted, community-driven solution (see this blog entry for further discussion of our goals related to Open BlueDragon).
• The decision to market BlueDragon.NET to Windows users as a tool for migrating to ASP.NET. While not involving any technical changes to BlueDragon.NET, this change in marketing emphasis more directly addresses the concerns of Windows users, which primarily boil down to: how well does this solution integrate with other .NET-based products and technologies?

What do these trends imply for the future of BlueDragon?

• We will continue to look for opportunities for tighter integration between BlueDragon.NET, the underlying IIS and ASP.NET platform, and other Microsoft products such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Silverlight, and Azure. The most recent example is the IIS 7.0 Integrated Configuration and Administration feature added in the BlueDragon.NET 7.1 release, which is currently in public beta testing.
• We will continue to incorporate the most popular features of Adobe ColdFusion in future BlueDragon releases, and strive for maximum compatibility between the BlueDragon and ColdFusion implementations. Compatibility is critical for organizations that are migrating CFML applications from ColdFusion to BlueDragon. We've been busy working on the next major release of BlueDragon to implement the most important features introduced in ColdFusion 8 and 9.
• We will continue to develop new features to enhance the CFML language in the tradition of BlueDragon-first innovations--many of which eventually were implemented in CF8--such as: CFIMAGE, CFC Interfaces, CFTHREAD, and CFZIP. Expect many of these new features to appear first in Open BlueDragon and later in the commercial releases.

A final question worth addressing: Given these trends and the possibility of a declining CFML server market, what does the long-term future hold for BlueDragon? The answer is two-fold. First, we believe there is a large base of existing CFML applications that organizations will want to migrate to the Microsoft .NET platform, and that this migration will accelerate in the future. Second, we believe that the Java-based editions of BlueDragon offer significant advantages for those CFML users who choose to remain on a commercial Java-based platform; in fact, two of the largest sales in the history of BlueDragon were closed in just the past three months, for deployment on the IBM WebSphere Java EE server. We believe these two platforms represent a sufficient revenue opportunity to sustain and grow a company the size of New Atlanta for many years to come.

If trends described above continue or accelerate--as we believe they will--then closed, proprietary, expensive, Java-based CFML servers will become increasingly irrelevant to the wider web application server market. Future growth of the CFML server market rests on two pillars: (1) tight integration with .NET and other Microsoft products and technologies as demanded by Windows users; and, (2) a free, open source, community-driven project as demanded by Linux users. With BlueDragon.NET and the Open BlueDragon project, New Atlanta is positioned to take maximum advantage of these trends and continue to thrive and prosper and serve our customers for many years to come.

If you're a CFML developer, then it's very likely you've already been affected by these trends, or will be in the near future. If your primary web application platform is Windows, you're either already feeling pressure to move to ASP.NET, or soon will. If your primary web application platform is Linux, you're either already feeling pressure to move to PHP, Ruby on Rails, Groovy, or some other open source solution, or soon will. In either case, there's a BlueDragon solution--BlueDragon.NET for Windows, and Open BlueDragon for Linux--that allows you to continue using CFML while also meeting the demands and requirements of your chosen platform.