Barney Boisvert has
posted a blog entry outlining his feelings on the NewAtlanta/MySpace.com Keynote from today at CFUnited, and it mirrors my sentiments quite well.
It's hard to sit and listen to what's effectively propaganda:
"We do lots of stuff really wrong, so we switched to .NET so stuff would be easier for us to keep our practices and still look fresh. So we like totally like NewAtlanta cuz they like made it so easy to stay lame"
It's just wrong, dude. I wouldn't wanna work for that, really... and it doesn't really reflect well on NewAtlanta:
"We fully support MySpace.com's right to be lame, and we're happy to profit from their ineptitude. While they may not promote any sort of best practices, they do have a lot of money and they are happy to give us some of it. As lame as our associate with them may make us look, the cash is well worth it and we're happy to participate, resulting in mutual lameness of a very well-funded nature."
Then again... I don't have much money, so maybe I should just shut up. I dunno. Something about it just made me queasy. I can't really explain it... to hear someone say that ColdFusion can't handle things, .NET can, and it's all swirling with unrestrained badness of practice... yay, Microsoft to the rescue! Macromedia can't do it... but Bill can. It's a straw man, top to bottom.
The only thing I'll add to Barney's comments (which you must go read
here now) is that whether is was a case study or a sales pitch the .NET effect was to make everyone involved look silly.
That's why I left... I couldn't risk the exposure.
Laterz!
Comments
Just my personal opinion, but I see alot of averse against New Atlanta. When they promote their product it is called propaganda, but when Macromedia promotes her product it is received with grace and people are enthousiastic.
Maybe it hurts people to see another player in town, maybe people are too connected with Macromedia or maybe people are oversupporting Macromedia or maybe it is the anti- .NET feeling of some people, but New Atlanta imo is really doing good work here and Blue Dragon is in comparison to CFMX7 really stable and so much faster in my testings.
Yes they have their own issues, but when I see a person stating that Blue Dragon has bugs it makes me wonder, have they also looked at the bugs CFMX7 had? Blue Dragon then would at least get a decent comparison.
For some reason I get the feeling they are, taking a more advanced developer centric approach with Blue Dragon than Macromedia is doing. They added some propetiary features which really is aimed towards daily usage, and I personally do not have that daily usage feeling when I look at a feature like Flash Forms in CFMX7.
A profiler for example, that is just something that is really aimed towards the advanced stuff and something you would use alot in your daily coding.
Posted By M. Schopman / Posted At 7/1/05 6:15 PM
Jared--great meeting you at CFUnited and I look forward to seeing how the conference you're planning shapes up.
However, I have to disagree with you a bit on your (and by extension Barney's I suppose) take on the New Atlanta/myspace.com situation. The impression I got from myspace.com's portion of the keynote was that they *used* to just throw code out on the server. Finally the gentleman speaking said "no more of that stuff" and when they had their best uptime in months, they started to understand things a bit better and began following better practices. I can't imagine that they could build their site to the phenomenal numbers they're seeing and still be doing things the way they originally did them.
myspace.com has gone through a growing process that most of us can't even fathom and they apparently learned many hard lessons as they went. Perhaps he didn't make the point strongly enough, but all of the "cowboy coding" stuff, from my impression of his talk, was the "where we were" portion. Granted he didn't follow that up to tell us where they are architecturally, etc. at this point, so maybe that's the reason for what I see as a very large misinterpretation of this keynote.
On small apps with small load you can crank out code and it'll work (not saying this is good, but it'll work). On medium apps with medium load you can crank out code and it'll work, provided you throw enough hardware at it. On apps with massive, massive traffic like this, as the speaker pointed out, all the hardware in the world isn't going to fix the problem. At some point you take a step back and clean up the mess, which was my impression of where they are now (or are getting to very quickly).
As for the New Atlanta/BlueDragon situation, in my opinion this is nothing but good for CF. In my mind here are the two most important points from this keynote presentation. Number one: CF can scale, period, no question. You and I may know that, but sometimes convincing others of this is a bit of an issue. CF doesn't necessarily have the best reputation on this point, but right or wrong we have to deal with this impression. The fact that we as CFers can point to myspace.com as a prime example of CF handling a huge site, that alone is pure gold.
Second: CFML is the only language in which you can write an app and deploy it *anywhere* on *anything*. This absolutely shouldn't be underestimated. A recent JCP initiative is addressing the ability to run apps written in any scripting language on J2EE. Sound familiar? In my mind this is the Java community's reaction to .NET. If .NET got one thing right, it was allowing people to write apps in multiple languages that all run on the same framework. If the JCP I'm referring to (I'd have to look up the number again for reference, but it's on my blog) goes forward, suddenly CF is on equal footing with every other scripting language on the planet that can run on J2EE. The specific language in which an application is written becomes irrelevant, and once language becomes less of a factor, we all benefit.
Add to this the fact that--thanks to BlueDragon--CF can run on .NET as well, then we have an extremely compelling story to tell with CF that opens up all the doors in the world to us as CF developers. To me that's nothing but good!
Posted By Matt Woodward / Posted At 7/1/05 8:40 PM
Hi Matt,
A few things to consider, when you say, "The impression I got from myspace.com's portion of the keynote was that they *used* to just throw code out on the server. Finally the gentleman speaking said "no more of that stuff" and when they had their best uptime in months, they started to understand things a bit better and began following better practices."
Then we have to consider the implication of how much more of an impact that might have had on their stability and productivity. Of course I don't know the correlation between this information and their migration to BD/.NET either, so I couldn't really speak to it.
Having said that, "CFML is the only language in which you can write an app and deploy it *anywhere* on *anything*. " feels to me like misleading marketing speak.
Not only can you write perfectly good code that will not deploy from CFMX ENT to CFMX STD, you can write perfectly good code that will not deploy from CFMX to BD and BD to CFMX. I couldn't speak to their versions, but I suspect it is the same from BD ENT to BD PRO.
And if you write only what is available to all platforms, then you give up some of the value provided by upgrades, integrations and vendor creativity...
Posted By Calvin / Posted At 7/1/05 8:52 PM
Hi Calvin--a couple of responses to your thoughts.
First, I think the discussion is getting a bit off-track because everyone (myself included) is making a great deal of assumptions about things as far as myspace.com's code and architecture go. There wasn't a line of code or any architectural diagrams anywhere in this presentation so many people (again myself included with my previous response) are taking broad generalizations and applying specifics to them that may or may not be accurate. The speaker was giving a narrative about where myspace.com was, where they are now, and where they're going, so you're absolutely correct to point out that we can't even begin to make a correlation between this high-level information and the switch to BlueDragon.
Second, I disagree with the categorization of being able to run CF anywhere as nothing but marketing speak, and I certainly don't think it's inaccurate or misleading. I think as with the discussion of myspace.com's situation, here too there are general comments that are having specifics applied to them that shouldn't be. My high-level point is that you can write an app in CFML that you can run on J2EE or .NET, and CFML is the only language (currently) with which you can do this.
Now getting down to specifics, sure you *can* write code in CF Enterprise that won't move to Standard, but at that point this is because there are features that are available in Enterprise that aren't available in Standard. This isn't about the code per se, this is about code that takes advantage of the features that are available in a particular product edition.
Similarly, if you take advantage of specific features in CFMX that aren't available in BlueDragon, or vice-versa, here again this is about features, not about the code itself. If you write implementation-agnostic CFML code chances are you can drop it on any edition of either product and it will run. I've taken numerous relatively complex apps that were written to run on CFMX and dropped them onto BlueDragon and they run without a single change. YMMV of course, but the possibility is definitely there and the specifics of the situation get better all the time.
What we're really seeing here, in my opinion, is the same thing that's been happening in the J2EE world for years. There are multiple J2EE vendors, all of which have their own unique appeal based on features, price, platforms, etc. The difference in the CF world is that there is no official standard spec that multiple CFML engine vendors can implement.
I understand your point, but I still think many people are underestimating the positive impact this will have (in my opinion) on the CF community as a whole. Options are a good thing, and CF developers have options in spades thanks to both Macromedia and New Atlanta.
Posted By Matt Woodward / Posted At 7/1/05 9:17 PM
Micha...
Dude, c'mon... did you even read what I said? I never said BD was buggy. In fact, I never said anything specific about BD at all. I should have given more specifics about the presentation in question, except that my post was predicated upon Barney's... so if you didn't read Barney's post in conjunction with mine then you'll have missed 90% of the point.
I *use* BD's free edition for my clients who can't afford an instance of CFMX. And .NET may be a perfectly fine platform, though I haven't as yet had the need to work with it (which is a personal choice based on my own personal learning style and doesn't have much to do with the platform at all), but my post didn't even have anything to do with .NET! I refer specifically to the presentation, its content, and it's implications.
For the record Charlie, Vince and the NA crew do hard work and have an important product. I have a great deal of respect for them, and I think they deserve to profit from their efforts. It was the content of the presentation and the fact that misdirection and verbal smog were employed to make Macromedia look bad and MS/BD/.NET were employed to cover for bad development practices and a seriously flawed architecture.
And given the choice between a profiler, so I the geek can dig into my server's gutz more easily, or Flash Forms that allow me to approach RIAs (don't even go there, not here anyway) with greater ease and enhance user experiences... I will take that which has a visible impact that can be apreciated by my clients.
At this point, visible enhancements that let me do cool stuff fast make sales, and sales keep food on my table.*I* don't need a profiler, and neither (as yet, anyway) does the 95% of CF's userbase that instigate their place in the current software. Flash Forms have a much larger impact for the primary client base and the primary target project for CF. The rest of the tools are being added, one version at a time, until we've reached a point where even more users are provided for.
My question is this: Why do you feel the need to discount things I say simply because they don't whine about how horrid Macromedia is? Once again, you've entirely missed the point of my comments and gone in a completely different direction because I criticised anyone but Macromedia.
Let's try to keep things on topic, eh?
Laterz!
Posted By Jared Rypka-Hauer / Posted At 7/2/05 9:53 PM
Jared, I misread the posting, and the idea behind it, sorry my fault :)
Posted By M. Schopman / Posted At 7/4/05 9:39 AM
Hi Jared,
I'm sorry you interpreted our keynote presentation as an attack on Macromedia and ColdFusion. That wasn't our intention; rather, we tried to highlight MySpace, BlueDragon.NET, and CFML in a positive way. Unfortunately, the simple fact is that MySpace is being upgraded from CF5 to BlueDragon.NET (instead of CFMX) and no matter how we say it, some people are going to interpret that as an attack on ColdFusion.
I think you missed the point of the presentation, especially if you relied on Barney's distorted summary (Barney has a well-known anti-BlueDragon agenda, so I'd caution against taking anything he says about New Atlanta or BlueDragon at face value). I just posted a summary of the keynote, along with the actual presentation materials to my blog:
http://blog.newatlanta.com/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=DCE930CB-C4BB-BCD4-66AE12F14C9315A7
I'd suggest that you (or anyone else who's interested) review these before forming an opinion.
Regards,
Vince Bonfanti, New Atlanta
Posted By Vince Bonfanti / Posted At 7/4/05 11:38 AM
I'd say it's a little disingenuous to paint Barney as "anti-BlueDragon" - he uses BlueDragon and he simply reports on the incompatibilities he finds...
I rarely blog about those incompatibilities (although I recently explained why the Tartan application framework won't run on BlueDragon and how to modify Tartan so it would) but the incompatibilities are definitely real. I find it more constructive to post them to the bluedragon-interest mailing list, which is where everyone else seems to post incompatibility information...
Posted By Sean Corfield / Posted At 7/5/05 1:01 PM
Sean, you may disagree with my opinion of Barney, but calling me disingenuous is hardly warranted. I'm certainly not the only person to interpret Barney's comments as anti-BlueDragon and anti-New Atlanta; at least two people felt compelled to speak up in our defense:
http://www.reybango.com/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=12A67944-BBE3-14F9-4D6EFC0BFF41446D
http://mattwoodward.com/blog/index.cfm?CommentID=169
Barney was directly critical of BlueDragon and New Atlanta from the moment the MySpace deal was first announced last week (notice that he's the first person to respond to this thread):
http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/messages.cfm/forumid:4/threadid:40946#210710
I think he walked into the keynote with preconceived notions and walked out with the same negative attitude that he walked in with. His response was predictable and expected--basically he heard what he wanted to hear.
I find it telling that of all the positive things that could have been written--and have been written by others--after three days of a fantastic CFUNITED conference, the first and only (so far) topic Barney found worthy of blogging about was to make negative comments about MySpace, New Atlanta, and BlueDragon.
But that's just my opinion.
Posted By Vince Bonfanti / Posted At 7/5/05 6:59 PM
Yes, I would have expected Rey and Matt to spring to your defence since they are both self-confessed BlueDragon fans (Rey refers to you as "my boys at New Atlanta").
You also fail to point out that in the cf-talk thread you quote, Barney says "They [New Atlanta] are doing a fantastic job competing in a market that is utterly stacked against them." and he also praises New Atlanta for "be[ing] massively receptive to use[r] feedback, provide a free edition, etc."
Painting Barney as some rabid BlueDragon-hater to devalue his comments is disingenuous.
Posted By Sean Corfield / Posted At 7/5/05 8:57 PM
http://www.wowgold1000.com
http://www.wowgold800.com
http://www.wowgoldme.com
http://www.wowgoldvip.com
http://www.wowgoldchina.com
http://www.powerleveling365.com
http://www.powerlevelingus.com
http://www.igxee.com
http://wow.igwww.com
http://www.cheap-wow-gold.de
Posted By wow gold / Posted At 12/22/08 8:50 PM
LJMxvK <a href="http://nzzqomotnxnj.com/">nzzqomotnxnj</a>, [url=http://ywwnhumsjvql.com/]ywwnhumsjvql[/url], [link=http://khqusvaawbgj.com/]khqusvaawbgj[/link], http://evlthrvldxnl.com/
Posted By bdigwegfd / Posted At 10/3/09 5:02 AM
Nice site.
Look here:
<a href= http://xanaxtramadol.com/software-poker-texas-hold-em/map.html >software poker texas hold em</a> [url=http://xanaxtramadol.com/software-poker-texas-hold-em/map.html]software poker texas hold em[/url] <a href= http://buyasoma.com/online-gambling-start-site/map.html >online gambling start site</a> [url=http://buyasoma.com/online-gambling-start-site/map.html]online gambling start site[/url] <a href= http://xanaxtramadol.com/homeowners-insurance/map.html >homeowners insurance</a> [url=http://xanaxtramadol.com/homeowners-insurance/map.html]homeowners insurance[/url] <a href= http://buyasoma.com/Acetaminophen/map.html >Acetaminophen</a> [url=http://buyasoma.com/Acetaminophen/map.html]Acetaminophen[/url] <a href= http://xanaxtramadol.com/international-pharmacy/map.html >international pharmacy</a> [url=http://xanaxtramadol.com/international-pharmacy/map.html]international pharmacy[/url] <a href= http://buyasoma.com/leads-mlm/map.html >leads mlm</a> [url=http://buyasoma.com/leads-mlm/map.html]leads mlm[/url] <a href= http://buyasoma.com/life-insurance-companies/map.html >life insurance companies</a> [url=http://buyasoma.com/life-insurance-companies/map.html]life insurance companies[/url]
Posted By qbd_pzvwu / Posted At 10/4/09 5:07 AM
Nice site.
Look here:
<a href= <a href="http://buyapropecia.com/more/map.html">more</a>
></a> [url=<a href="http://buyapropecia.com/more/map.html">more</a>
][/url] <a href= <a href="http://buyapropecia.com/boysfood/map.html">boysfood</a>
></a> [url=<a href="http://buyapropecia.com/boysfood/map.html">boysfood</a>
][/url] <a href= <a href="http://buyapropecia.com/skype/map.html">skype</a>
></a> [url=<a href="http://buyapropecia.com/skype/map.html">skype</a>
][/url] <a href= <a href="http://buyapropecia.com/free-spyware/map.html">free spyware</a>
></a> [url=<a href="http://buyapropecia.com/free-spyware/map.html">free spyware</a>
][/url] <a href= <a href="http://buyapropecia.com/mercado-libre/map.html">mercado libre</a>
></a> [url=<a href="http://buyapropecia.com/mercado-libre/map.html">mercado libre</a>
][/url] <a href= <a href="http://buyapropecia.com/sex-tube/map.html">sex tube</a>
></a> [url=<a href="http://buyapropecia.com/sex-tube/map.html">sex tube</a>
][/url] <a href= <a href="http://buyapropecia.com/abilify-online/map.html">abilify online</a>
></a> [url=<a href="http://buyapropecia.com/abilify-online/map.html">abilify online</a>
][/url]
Posted By qxh_bgfcq / Posted At 10/11/09 4:16 AM