I caught this on CF-Talk today, and immediately jumped over to the New Atlanta press release on the subject.

Vince Bonfanti, President of New Atlanta said, "This announcement is in direct response to community and customer feedback, who've seen most other web-scripting languages like JSP, PHP and ASP become commoditized as part of a free and/or open-source portion of various web application stacks."

This is very encouraging! One thing that I really, really dig about the developers of the various CFML engines out there: They listen to their users! And they don't just listen, but take action based upon what we've told them that we want.

According to the FAQ the open source version of BlueDragon will be "...nearly identical to the current commercial Java EE version of BlueDragon..." minus a few third-party commercial technologies which they cannot include. New Atlanta says that these differences will be minor [emphasis added] and will be "clearly published."

Also, according to the FAQ this new open source edition of BlueDragon will be released under the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2), just like MySQL and other popular open source projects.

I for one, am seriously pumped about this announcement! The small company I work for only uses ColdFusion on our really big projects and even then my boss doesn't like spending the money on it -- but that's his issue. For all of our smaller one-off projects I've been forced to learn a bit of PHP to work on those, and while I'm not afraid of working in PHP, I'm definitely more comfortable in CFML if only for the fact that I rarely have to look anything up! That's all just a matter of how familiar I am with the language, but I still think working with queries in PHP (without any frameworks like Cake and the like) is damn stupid. I just dislike the way they work. I spent almost a half a day once just trying to figure out how sessions worked in PHP! It would have been a lot easier if they had something like application.cfm or application.cfc.

Okay, so this wasn't meant to turn into a tirade on my dislike of PHP, but it's very nice to see a heavy hitter like New Atlanta stepping up and open sourcing their CFML engine.

Let's make sure everyone and their dog knows about this! Let's get some link love happening!

http://www.dzone.com/links/open_source_cfml_engine_on_the_way.html

http://digg.com/software/New_Atlanta_announces_free_open_source_BlueDragon_edition