Page 11 — ColdFusion MX’s Evil Twin?

One thing that took me by complete surprise during the creation of this article was the discovery of a product called BlueDragon, made by New Atlanta Communications. The BlueDragon product is a competing CFML Java-powered Web application server, just like the real CFMX. With its lower base price ($249/server), the product states that it supports a major subset of the CFML 5.0 syntax with slight variations outlined in its documentation. They plan to upgrade their syntax to be just as close to the CFML of ColdFusion MX as they can get it. They state that the real distinction is in BlueDragon’s ability to deploy CFML pages as compiled binaries without revealing any CFML source code. With BlueDragon, you can package your entire application into a standard J2EE WAR or EAR file for deployment to BEA WebLogic or IBM WebSphere without having to buy and install extra software — something one of the BlueDragon developers tells me Macromedia CFMX will not support.

I didn’t spend that much time with the free BlueDragon evaluation, but I was amazed at how similar the tags and administrative screens were to that of the real Macromedia ColdFusion.