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Adobe to make their ColdFusion product open source

by on April 1, 2009 in CFML

In an unexpected move, Adobe have released their ColdFusion product to the open source community. In the associated press release Adobe stated the following reasons for the move:

“Adobe have always tried to bring a better and more capable product to the users. In recent years, however, improvements have plateaued. With the release of OpenBlueDragon and Railo Open Source there are thousands of people out there using those two products. This has made it increasingly difficult to justify the ongoing high cost of developing the ColdFusion Server on our own. In the end it’s the user who suffers.

The logical conclusion is to open up the problem and try to crowd source the server in the hope that the developer community picks it up.

We may see some teething problems at the start, but we think it will become the standard and everyone will work together to make it the best CFML server out there.”

However, some industry experts think this is just another example of Adobe trying to secure its position in the market. A source that wanted to remain anonymous said;

“Adobe has always tried to tight their customers to their ColdFusion Server offering. Some may start to question what value Adobe are adding; if they don’t control the core engine of ColdFusion server anymore; how can they make millions with open sourcing the server now?”

For Railo this move could as well mean the end of their open source offering. This has come to no better time, since Railo just released their Railo Open Source version today, the exact day that Adobe has decided to release their ColdFusion Server as open source. Might this be another move from the “giant” Adobe to control the CFML market?

Railo were contacted; and declined to comment, except to state that Railo considered the CFML server market dead and that building extensions and hosting for CFML projects were the tools of the future.

OpenBlueDragon has released a statement that they have studied the algorithm and have noted some bizarre elements; for instance is the CFDocument syntax, a feature that will create PDF documents from any web site, based on open source libraries. One might wonder, why this is so, since Adobe is the creator of PDF.

Adam Lehman, Adobe’s ColdFusion Product Manager has apparently stepped down in what the company say is a completely unrelated matter. However, inside sources say he is absolutely against the move and feels that Adobe have ‘thrown in the towel’.

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Why a open source Digital Asset Management System is the right tool for the mid-market space

by on February 24, 2009 in Digital Asset Management, Razuna

There have been some recent reports flowing around that there are dwindling solutions for the mid-market space in the Digital Asset Management (DAM) environment. While this is certainly true, we would like to give you a different aspect of your needs and why a open source Digital Asset Management System, like Razuna, might be the solution to your needs.

The Price paradigm

Let’s start by what most “S” and “M” (of the SMEs out there) are sooner or later confronted with, the license cost. In the past most “S & M” organizations have been put off by the need for a Digital Asset Management System, by the license cost alone. No wonder, when Enterprise vendors usually charge from $50000 – $150000 for a single license. Sure, those Enterprise vendors will sell you a scaled down solution for less then that, but remember the “hidden” costs (usually you need some very good server hardware to justify the software), and also the upgrade costs. At the end you might end up in the upper $70000 class with your “scaled down” solution. Of course, if you need such a system and use the additional benefits of it (usually they are Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions with a dedicated DAM part) then we will not hold you back. But since this post is about the mid-market space we concentrate on other solutions.

On the other hand you will have a couple of solutions on the lower price range, that go from $5000 – $15000. Usually, those systems will suffice you for some time, but when you are growing from a “S” to a “M” your DAM might have some scalability issues. The ability to scale is a important issue and one that should not be taken lightly. Just imagine what effort you have to undertake to move from one system to another (exporting your assets and importing them). Most often DAM systems are not compatible to each other and informations like Meta-Data, Keywords, and more might get lost in the transition. Not to speak of the time involved and wasted for your employees to adopt to a new system.

So, let us turn our attention to a open source Digital Asset Management offering. Of course, the most obvious advantage is that you are able to use it for free (according to the open source license). But should the “free” tag really be the only driving factor? We think not.

So, let’s look in what you should be looking out for in a DAM solution.

Scalability

A open source Digital Asset Management System gives you freedom. Not only freedom of license costs, but also freedom to expand on the existing code base, deploy many servers (load balancing) without additional server licenses and flexibility. You won’t have to go from a standard to a Enterprise Edition to be allowed to add more users or add more assets.

Faster reaction and community driven

I don’t know what your experiences are with locked down proprietary systems, but mine, in regards to bug fixes and enhancements, were “not open minded”. Meaning, you see the need to feature “XYZ” and submit it to the vendor. Usually, you get a feedback that it might be considered and then it is shelfed off to some internal system.

With a open source Digital Asset Management System, or let’s say in the case of our open source Digital Asset Management Razuna and the developers involved, you can join our growing numbers of Razuna users and can actively engage in discussions and put forward feature requests. Just recently we released a new version and 3 feature requests from our customer base were included. No only that, but turnaround time for new releases are around 2 months and you as the customer even has access our Source Code repository where you can get the latest code changes anytime.

Support

Support and Training for your Digital Asset Management solution should not be undermined. It is a important aspect that you should consider. What are the reaction times, how fast would a bug be fixed, how can the organization be reached and so on.

Again, true open source vendors, give you the option to subscribe to a support plan that gives you added value and not bind you to upgrades that are only applied when you still pay a hefty annual fee. Because what really matters, is your deployment of the system.

To summarize the above, one could simply say that, a true open source Digital Asset Management System gives you freedom to plan, deploy and scale your Small, Medium and Enterprise organization.

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The OpenBD release wrapup

by on December 9, 2008 in CFML, Razuna

So, after 6 month of hard work (but it was always fun), the OpenBD team released Version 1.0 of OpenBD. Actually, it should have been labeled as Version 10, instead of 1.0, but the team wanted to make it clear that this is a fresh start, a new beginning, a “Yes, we can” statement to the CFML community.

For all those who always wanted a free and open source solution for their CFML deployment, there isn’t really any excuse anymore to not just download OpenBD and take it for a drive. You will see, that your code will run with almost no modification. There are a couple of very neat features built in. The OpenBD Blog has already covered this in length, so I am just pointing out the really cool ones here:

Amazon Services in CFML code
Are you working with any Amazon Services (AWS) like S3 or SimpleDB? If not, you really should, because it was never so cheap and easy to store files and/or store records in the cloud. Now, within OpenBD (and because we are “Cloud freaks”) and we like to “eat our own dog food” we made it very easy to work with S3 and SimpleDB in CFML.

For example to store a file in S3 you issue 2 lines of code like;

imgFile = FileReadBinary(‘e:\\tmp\\22.jpg’);
FileWrite(‘s3://[accesskey]@[secret]/mybucket/22.jpg’, imgFile );

That’s it, nothing else. Really cool.

MemCache
If you are in the business of scalability you will love that OpenBD supports the popular MemCache module. Scaling out to many requests and setting this up is now no $9000 business anymore and right here, right now for you to use.

Admin Console
All right, true, this is not a feature per se. Some have even argued that a CFML server without an Admin console is not even worth looking at (guys you never worked with Linux, right and then probably only in Gnome…). So for all those people and also for those that like to work with config files and don’t need a GUI for it, you will be happy to see that Matt Woodward has put in a lot of work and energy to create a Admin Console for OpenBD (It comes bundled with the OpenBD download).

I have to say that I love it. It simple works, does what you expect from it and you won’t have to restart OpenBD anymore after any changes. Matt has many more ideas for the Admin console and I have to say that I am impressed and look so much forward to the future.

More about the new tags and the rest of OpenBD features can be found at the OpenBD Wiki.

But apart from all features you know what gets me more excited with the whole OpenBD Open Source project? The incredible support that you receive from the OpenBD team (no, not me and I am not talking about or praising myself), I mean the great (and FAST support) you will get on the OpenBD public talklist. You support a bug or request to the team and mostly within hours you will get a reply form the core developers or from any member of the team. If it is really a bug, the core team will mostly fix it within 24 hours.

If you have a project or a solution and you always wanted to open source it but could not do so because your main engine (CFML that is, what else?) whas not open sourced you have no excuse anymore then to download OpenBD now and start building that next cool web application. Just as we have done with our very own open source Digital Asset Management Razuna; all build with OpenBD!

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SixSigns announces free open source Enterprise Media Asset Management

by on March 27, 2008 in CFML, Razuna

SixSigns is announcing today that we have plans to release our Enterprise Media Asset Management (MAM) as a free open source edition (based on ColdFusion). Our MAM system has been previously deployed as a licensed system and is currently in use by over 70 organizations. Our plan has always been to release the system as a open source solution, but it only made sense since New Atlanta’s announcement of releasing BlueDragon as open source last week.

As said, we are still in the planning of the open source edition, but here is a summary:

  • The MAM system will be released under the AGPL license. The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works, specifically designed to ensure cooperation with the community in the case of network server software.
  • A dual-license will be offered for customers that need it.
  • The system itself comes with a integrated Web Content Management (CMS) and can be tailored to fit any needs.
  • The current system is based on ColdFusion and the Oracle database. Currently all media assets are stored within the database and Oracle features special hooks for digital media assets. But users would have to have the Oracle database 10g R2 (at least in the standard edition one). We will change this to enable additional databases (especially MySQL) to really offer a complete open source solution (our system, Blue Dragon J2EE and database).
  • We will offer and provide different support packages to give organizations the level of support that they need.
  • We are planning to release the open source edition in about two month. As said we are rebuilding some parts of it to support different databases (thus rewriting search, indexing and handling of media assets) and have to rewrite some other code to suite BlueDragon’s CFML support.
  • BlueDragon J2EE edition will be released as a virtual image (VMWare), thus we will offer a fully installed version of our system on top of the virtual image as a free download as well.

We are in the middle of building a new website for the open source system and will make some more announcements on this blog in the near future. If you do have any questions or comments please leave a comment here.

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