I read between the lines of this post by ColdFusion’s new Product Manager and I think I’ve extracted a couple of facts. One answers a question I’ve been puzzling over for a long time, and the others are just interesting tidbits.
- ColdFusion 9 will NOT be free.
- ColdFusion 9 is close to beta (or already there).
- Bolt releases will be faster than ColdFusion releases.
Here’s how I got there. For the first point, we need only read this statement from Adam’s post: “…your expectations are different for [Adobe ColdFusion] than they are for our open source competition. When you pay for something, you expect more.” He didn’t come out and say that they will charge for CF 9, but I think that statement makes it clear that they are going to charge for either ColdFusion itself, or the new IDE (Bolt), or both.The second point was extracted from this statement: “This means that if a feature isn’t completed by the first beta, you don’t ship it.” Now, you have to read the rest of the post to understand that he is talking about dropping features from ColdFusion/Bolt (to ship it sooner and at higher quality than if they kept the features in this release). So the assumption is that since they are dropping features, and Adam says that you have to do this if the features aren’t completed by the Beta, then the CF team is probably at or close to a beta release.The third point is just a simple statement that Adam made, no reading between the lines: “Desktop software like Bolt can be rev’d a lot faster than server software can. Meaning, you probably won’t have to wait as long as you do in between ColdFusion releases…” Now, we can’t ignore that very important word “probably” in there, but it’s still interesting, and of course it makes sense.This brings to mind another question: will the community be able to easily add “plugins” into Bolt? One would think so, because it’s built on Eclipse. But the question will be how much Adobe helps or hinders such plugins, and whether or not it will be easy to bolt stuff in (pardon the pun). 🙂