Someone posted a message on the Atlanta ColdFusion User Group list asking what the recent
announcement about open sourcing the Flash Player scripting engine meant when looking at the bigger picture.
Adam Churvis replied with the following:
Among other things, it means that when the time comes (relatively soon), Adobe will most likely wash their hands clean of ColdFusion via the open source route as well, rather than by trying to dump it on another company. But it most likely also signifies that Adobe realizes its Flash-centric development model and tools cannot keep pace with Microsoft's XAML-based offerings. When you compare the two, Flash-based development looks like an unwieldy cobbled together tinkertoy. And there just isn't enough Adobe funding available to change that in any significant way, so they "give it up to the people" and let them join in for free.
Before I go any further I must say that I respect Adam. He's been an active community member for years, he knows his stuff, he is a great developer, and he's also a really good teacher and author. But honestly, this reply is so off base that it is just plain silly.
For starters, the announcement has nothing to with Flash per se and nothing to do with XAML alternatives, it is about the underlying scripting engine. The scripting engine has been open sourced, and future versions of Mozilla take advantage of this engine. They will run scripts (including JavaScript) faster, developers will be able to take advantage of ECMAScript advancements, and all Web apps will benefit from this (including script heavy apps like Ajax applications). But it has nothing to do with Flash itself Adam, that's simply misunderstanding the announcement. For an accurate assessment, read Frank Hecker's post on the subject.
And as for ColdFusion, whoa Adam, where did that come from? I'll state this quite emphatically - there are no plans to open source ColdFusion or dump it on anyone (and yes, I know some of you would love for us to open source CF, but that's a separate discussion). The only plans we have right now are the ones we are working on, building ColdFusion Scorpio (which is currently in alpha). So unless Adam has access to information that neither I nor the entire CF team has, the statement about "washing their hands clean of ColdFusion" (and "relatively soon", too) is not just meaningless and baseless conjecture, it's probably more accurately described as ignorant rambling (and I sure hope that it has nothing to do with him offering .NET training targeted at ColdFusion developers and with him being a "BlueDragon Alliance Founding Committee" member, that would be a real shame).
Ashwin has posted his highly rated MAX
Scorpio Server Monitoring presentation online.
