BlueDragon at work

November 17, 2004 · 7 Comment s

With our impending move to .NET we ran into an issue where we need an additional ColdFusion server here in our Glasgow office to run an HR application. Our web/application servers are actually based in England, so this meant we needed an additional ColdFusion license. This was good news, as it meant, instead of only having CF5 boxes (also with .NET), we would now have a CFMX6.1 server. One problem though, justifying £929 for a CFMX Standard license that is basically only going to be used in the very short term. Needless to say, those who control the purse strings were not impressed. Well, two days later we have BlueDragon 6.1 (the free edition) in testing with the HR app (built with Fusebox 3) and it's all going nicely. This is my first try with BlueDragon - in fact, the company I work for had never even heard of it - and while it doesn't immediately appeal to me (if it was up to me I'd go with CFMX6.1 instead) as a solution it's gotten us out of a hole and saved the company £929 in the process. Now before anyone asks for specifics on why I'd go for CFMX6.1 before BlueDragon ... maybe it's because I've got so much invested in CFMX from a personal standpoint, or maybe it's the old better the devil you know. Regardless, the fact there is a free edition of BlueDragon that solves our needs (albeit temporarily) has done us a favour.

Tags: ColdFusion · BlueDragon

7 response s so far ↓

1 Vince Bonfanti // Nov 17, 2004 at 2:02 PM

Glad to hear BlueDragon is working for you. Regarding your "investment" in ColdFusion, the whole point of BlueDragon is to protect that investment by providing solutions to needs that aren't met by Macromedia's products (such as exactly the situation you're in now).

You mention that you're moving to .NET--I assume you're aware of BlueDragon.NET, which allows you to run your CFML applications natively on .NET and integrate them with ASP.NET web applications?
2 johnb // Nov 17, 2004 at 2:16 PM

I'm certainly giving BlueDragon more thought these days - i'm really excited by the better compatibility with 6.2 except i'm curious where/how they're going to go to keep up with CF7??
3 Andy Allan // Nov 17, 2004 at 2:17 PM

Hey Vince, yeah I am aware of the .NET version.

The move to .NET has come about as we were taken over by a huge American Engineering firm, and they are basically a Microsoft house. Unfortunately, this means what we develop in HAS to be Microsoft "owned", for want of a better word. And because of this, they've already said no to BlueDragon because it isn't Microsoft *sigh*.

We've all moved down the pecking order, so whereas we used to have a say in things, we now don't have any. The BlueDragon free edition will probably kick around for some time and give us a backup for certain things, but I don't see us investing in it.
4 Vince Bonfanti // Nov 17, 2004 at 3:15 PM

Well, BlueDragon isn't owned by Microsoft (of course), but New Atlanta is a Microsoft Certified Partner (see the logo on our home page), and Microsoft has written and published on their web site a case study of BlueDragon.NET:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/casestudy.asp?casestudyid=15864

We're currently working closely with Microsoft on some very large accounts in the U.S. You may want to point this out to your management.
5 Vince Bonfanti // Nov 17, 2004 at 3:20 PM

"Keeping up" with CF7 won't be too difficult. CF7 (Blankstone) is an incremental feauture release on top of the existing CFMX base, without major architectural changes. Based on the information that's publicly avaialable, we're already prototyped some of the major new features of Blackstone.

What's interesting is that in many ways CF7 is finally catching up to BlueDragon (some of these feature BD has had since 2002):

- standard J2EE WAR/EAR deployment
- deployment of source-less precompiled templates
- CFC serialization
- etc.

For people who are interested in the unique features of BlueDragon, such as native deployment on .NET and ASP.NET integration, the more interesting question is: How is ColdFusion going to keep up with BlueDragon?
6 Vince Bonfanti // Nov 17, 2004 at 3:21 PM

Whoops, "Blankstone" was a typo, and not slam on CF7.
7 Andy Allan // Nov 17, 2004 at 3:25 PM

Tried that one too Vince ... the fact is we're having to adopt our ways, etc to their specification and that simply rules out anything that isn't C#

Basically everything we've ever built is either being scrapped completely or ported over (and that isn't a lot).

You just gotta love takeovers.