Dear CF Enthusiasts, A few friends and I over the past 1 1/2 yrs have been working on creating an Open Source CFML parser engine that is somewhat similar to the commercial product (CF server). Currently, there is support for most of the tags/functions up to version 4.0 that don't have anything to do with platform dependencies (file permissions on unix - mode 777, etc). The engine is very basic and pretty much lame since we have no clue what the hell we are doing, it's a project that started mainly for amusement at the time. Although, one could actually install this software and run a pretty simple (very simple at this point) cfml driven web site (install requires someone with knowledge involving autoconf, make, gcc or MSVC) on a few different platforms (unix apache / win32 iis). We have also taken a stab at a CFML/HTML editor on linux using GTK+, this is also very pre-alpha. The editor (especially for non windows platforms) is quite complicated and would take awhile to complete due to the need for html editor/browser functionality (I believe the browser portion in HomeSite/CF Studio is implemented using the IE re-usable broswer technology, but I'm not sure). The database connection support is extremely limited with just MySQL/plain file (yes it's lame) support now, but other drivers could easily be added since the design of the software is extremely modular (we studied PHP engine src quite extensively). Everything is driven via an abstraction API (database drivers, thread libraries, web server api's, etc.) modular interface to ease the use of porting to multiple platforms. Most of the code is written in C as my C++ knowledge is very rusty, but getting better. I plan on converting to C++ as this will help many security hole related issues (buffer overflows, type checking, etc..) come to the fore front and would be more object oriented. As an intermediate user of the CFML language over the years I have had many ideas and additions that I wanted to add to Cold Fusion, but I thought it would be more fun to learn how to develop an actual engine to test the ideas first before recommending them. I would have to say developing one of these engines is not easy. We are a year and 1/2 into it (extremely part time. Sometimes taking off months to do other stuff ... like make a living) and have probably another few years of part time development (at least) to make it more feature rich/stable (unless of course this becomes a heavily worked on project by many of you guru developers out there). Even so, I am seriously considering trashing the whole project for something else. Allaire is just creating a kick ass product and their customer support is great. Some people ask why I am "re-inventing" the wheel. Again, it was started for fun. I guess my main reason for posting the expose of this software on the cf-list list is to put a 'feeler' out to see if people want an open source version. We wonder if developers would actually want to spend the time working on it with us. Many great innovations have came from open source software and it's damn fun as well. *8-) We haven't released the software to anyone and we're not planning on it until we get some legal advice and hear what people think. We also have no intentions of making Allaire lose revenue with this software. Like I said, it was just a fun and amusing project we started a year ago. Allaire has also released a crippled version that has most of the functionality of the regular server and it is free for many OS. Another reason why I'm considering trashing the project. As you can see I'm quite paranoid about this project, heh. If someone from Allaire is reading this, what are your thoughts on this ? Any thoughts, flames, etc would be great. Would any of you want an open source version ? If so what are the legal issues involved ? Is it possible to create something that is stable enough, rich feature set, and worth using ? Anyone else think this sort of development is fun besides me ? Is there any open source version already available (I haven't seen one, at least nothing that works worth a darn) ? I have mentioned a bit about the software on IRC #coldfusion / efnet and have gotten several positive inquires, but I still need to research this a little more. This list is great way to do that. Thanks, Jeff Bevill ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/cf-talk@houseoffusion.com/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists or send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
