July 21 2010 9:56 AM by Adam
filed under ColdFusion (30 comments)

5 months ago: I stepped down from the OpenCFML Advisory Committee amid a bit of drama. The next morning I wrote the following post and asked Ray Camden, Ben Forta and Rob Brooks-Bilson to review. They agreed that it was an accurate account and gave me the ok to post it. However, in the end, I decided to sit on it and cool my emotions.

Today: I'm sitting with the CF engineering team wading through language enhancement requests for ColdFusion X and I'm reminded of OpenCFML. I was planning to talk about Adobe's withdrawn during the 'State of the Union' part of our CFunited 2010 keynote, but it's a bit of a downer. Plus, there is too much to be said that can't be captured. So, without further ado, here is the post I drafted back in February.

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OpenCFML is dead. Well, at least it is for me and Adobe. That's what I told the remaining advisory members last night when I put in my resignation. The sad part is that it's been dead for nearly 10 months. It was just a hard pill to swallow and an easier one to ignore.

Last week Peter Farrell quietly resigned stating he was too busy to keep up with the day-to-day activities of the board. I thought this was extremely odd, but kept my confusion to myself. I mean, we hadn't sent more than 3-4 emails in the past 6 months. I've got my first child on the way and the shadow of 'no time' has been steadily creeping up on me. But I never once thought the zero-activity OpenCFML board was the place to cut back. But who am I to judge? It was his call.

Yesterday, the topic of a replacement was brought up and Sean Corfield and Matt Woodward both offered up worthy nominations. I chimed in and recommend we add Alan Williamson. The fact that this particular nomination came from me might shock you since he's the driving force behind OpenBD. But let me digress… a few months ago Alan and I got on the phone to sort out some differences. We talked for 45-60 minutes about some of our perceptions of each other, our projects and our goals. It seemed as if we had really misunderstood each other and that we shared a ton of middle-ground. During this conversation I shared some of my frustration with the OpenCFML board and proclaimed he would be a great addition to the board. So fast forward to today, when the opportunity arose, I nominated him. I also made the recommendation to expand the group to include more community members. While it wouldn't be prudent for an expanded group to have full voting rights, I wanted to increase the amount of friendly voices and visibility into the project.

And then, to my surprise, I stumble onto the Conventional CFML Wisdom group. A new group created to gather public opinion and discussion on the direction of CFML. I have to say, I was surprised to see this group. I was even more surprised to see that the most active participants were members of the OpenCFML advisory panel. Sean, Matt and Peter were leading discussions and drafting a new specification for CFLOOP. In a healthy working group of peers, you might expect Sean or Matt to mention the existence of this group to the rest of the OpenCFML board. After all, the member list is public. They could clearly see that Ben, Ray, Rob nor I had joined, so it was probably a good chance we had no clue about it. At the very least, this explained why Peter so abruptly resigned.

The fact that Matt and Sean failed to mention the mere existence of this new effort speaks volumes. It illustrates the core problems with the OpenCFML effort, a severe lack of openness, not only with the community, but with each other. I do not believe the OpenCFML board can achieve its goals with such fragmentation which led to my resignation.

In the end, the community isn't losing much at all with the demise of the OpenCFML board. The real beneficiaries were Railo and OpenBD who wanted a CFML standard that would allow ColdFusion customers to easily switch to their clone engines. Even though it meant a lot of work for me and Adobe and introduced risk into our business, I felt it was the right thing to do. In the end, the only vendor to submit recommendations to CFML2009 was Adobe. I shared all of the CFML/CFSCRIPT enhancements of CF9 in hopes of fostering a collaborative environment. Sadly the deadline for submissions came and passed without a single contribution from Railo or OpenBD. Matt claimed the OpenBD team was too unorganized to submit tags like CFJAVASCRIPT and CFSTYLESHEET (tags I had hope to include in CF9). Sean claimed that Railo wanted to wait a version (or two) to see how new Railo tags were accepted by the community before making a formal recommendation.

It is today, as it was before. Innovation and progress in CFML is driven exclusively by the ColdFusion community. Adobe is merely a vessel that pours those ideas into ColdFusion and spread CFML advancements throughout the world. As a community, we never needed the OpenCFML board to guide or document feedback.

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As far as I am concerned, the ColdFusion ACPs will be the CFML Advisory Panel for ColdFusion X and beyond. We'll be asking them to review and sign-off on all of our language enhancements (very soon).

I really want to thank Ben, Rob and Ray for the work they put into the OpenCFML. Rob and Ray specifically donated a large amount of time to this effort and they don't even work for a CFML server vendor! Of course, they are both ACPs, so they will still be driving the next generation of CFML along with the other 50+ members.

RIP OpenCFML, Viva ColdFusion!