I spend most of my days lately doing enterprise-ish type stuff in Java. Way back in the day though, my first paying programming job was writing Cold Fusion during the first dot-com upsurge. Since then I have always had a bit of a soft spot for CFML. I still think it is one of the best languages for non-pro programmers to write pages in and for professionals to do quick mock-ups with. When compared to PHP I think it is generally a better framework for prototyping and simple applications.

The one thing that has always kept me, and I’m sure many others, from choosing CFM for anything was the fact that the license costs over $1000 and not many web-hosts support it.

I sort of always thought Macromedia would open source Cold Fusion and I’m somewhat surprised Adobe hasn’t made moves in this direction. Over the past few years several projects have made some front is building an open source alternative. The smith project looked like it was the best option until it seemed to fizzle out earlier this year. Now, after clicking around I noticed a press release that Railo has joined Jboss and will be open sourced!

This is huge news if you are a fan of CFM. Jboss has a lot of clout and resources to get things done. I expect that they will release something that is solid and eventually compete on par with the offerings from Adobe itself.

This combined with the progress people have made running other languages on the JVM – Groovy, Scala, Ruby, PHP, and Python – makes java application servers a clear choice for running all sorts of scripted sites on true application servers.

Now, will someone please open source a port of ASP classic so I can host all my legacy apps on linux? (Sun, I’m looking at you. who is paying for Sun Java System ASP anyway?).