Deploying CFML on.NET: Opportunities & Challenges Charlie Arehart, CTO New Atlanta Communications

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Overview Industry trend: the move to standard architectures Protecting your CFML investment The only way to deploy CFML on.NET: BlueDragon How easy it is The benefits of deploying CFML on.NET “Cost” of deploying CFML on.NET Resources for learning more

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC About Your Speaker CTO of New Atlanta Communications since April ‘03 Company based in Alpharetta, GA (30 miles north of Atlanta) 7 yrs CF experience (21 yrs in Enterprise IT) Co-author, ColdFusion MX Bible (Wiley) Frequent contributor to ColdFusion Dev Journal Past accomplishments of note Tech Editor, CFDJ Allaire/Macromedia Certified Adv CF Developer (4, 5, MX) Allaire/Macromedia Certified Instructor Team Macromedia Member & Customer Advisory Board Member Contributor to Macromedia Devnet, Dev Exchange Frequent speaker to user groups, conferences worldwide Also pursuing Masters at Dallas Theological Seminary part-time via Atlanta extension campus

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Industry Trends The technology platform “highway” has split, and most organizations today are faced with choosing directions between Sun's J2EE and Microsoft's.NET What if you’re org is moving to.NET? Management being persuaded by “standard architectures” Architectural committees often prefer.NET, see CF as proprietary Vendors focus on ASP.NET as the only tool for.NET web apps

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC ASP.NET Not the Only Answer.NET folks think ASP.NET is the only way to go And that converting CFML apps to that is only alternative Conversion to ASP.NET is no trivial undertaking For all but simplest applications, is not a simple matter Can be very expensive Retraining folks in ASP.NET,.NET framework, tools, design patterns, etc is not trivial And during that conversion, what about the existing apps? Spending time rewriting when you could be enhancing

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Protecting Your CFML Investment What if you could move the CFML to.NET and keep it running? Could just park it there, on new platform No need for CF Server (nor BD server) Can start integrating with.NET, if you’d like Or start converting CFML to ASP.NET at your own pace You can! BlueDragon offer the only means to run CFML on.NET BlueDragon also can run CFML on J2EE Don’t throw away your CFML investment!

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC BlueDragon for the Microsoft.NET Framework BlueDragon for the Microsoft.NET Framework runs CFML on.NET Uses standard.NET features to enable this Runs as an “http handler” (in.NET parlance) Does NOT rely on ColdFusion at all No ColdFusion Server Not even a BlueDragon Server Your CFML becomes just a.NET web application IIS is configured to hand requests for.CFM files to.NET.NET looks for a file describing how to handle CFM files We edit server-wide machine.config to describe this by default Optionally can configure on a virtual directory or site basis Config file XML entry points to BlueDragon.dll This is the BlueDragon CFML engine Same engine as our BlueDragon Server and J2EE editions Deployed as a.NET managed assembly Stored in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) by default

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Quick Overview: What is.NET? Some argue that.NET is Microsoft’s answer to J2EE Enterprise-class web application development capabilities Integrated into the operating system Can be added to Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and more On one level, is tantamount to an alternative to Java Similar libraries providing similar functionality Sometimes improving on things Java left out or did differently Can call upon.NET library APIs and components just as we can using CFOBJECT to call Java libraries and components While ASP.NET is the de facto standard way to create web apps in.NET, it’s not the only way.NET defines a specification to support other “http handlers” While Visual Studio is the de facto standard way to edit ASP.NET web apps, CFML folks need not bother You can continue to edit your CFML with favorite editors

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC How Easy It Is Let’s walk through deploying CFML as a.NET web app Show CFML code running “normally” on CF Server Show steps of running installer to configure BlueDragon for the Microsoft.NET Framework Show the CFML code running via BD/.NET Edit the CFML code, show that it detects changes like normal It’s still just CFML—deployed on.NET No CF server, no BlueDragon server required

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC CFML Processing Configuration Now all CFM templates on on all web sites (or those selected) are processed by BlueDragon Unless overridden at web site or directory level Could have CF and even BlueDragon Server also installed at the same time Use virtual directory or site to control handing CFM files to either Just by changing extension mappings in IIS See my November 2003 CFDJ article, “Configuring Your Development Server for CF5, CFMX, and BlueDragon” Available at NewAtlanta web site, under “editorials”

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC What Are the Benefits? But why bother with deployment on.NET? Most significant motivation is if it’s your only alternative because you must move to.NET At least still CFML BlueDragon/.NET license also less than half the cost of CFMX Enterprise Priced the same as our J2EE edition, another enterprise solution Several other benefits to enhance your CFML, even if you’re not being forced to move to.NET Have discussed similar benefits in April CFDJ article: “Making the Case for CFML on J2EE” Provided on the New Atlanta web site (newatlanta.com/bluedragon/) Most of the benefits described there apply to.NET as well Let’s look at a few of these, in brief…

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC CFML: Super-charged! Can integrate CFML and ASP.NET Share session, application, request scopes with ASP.NET pages Call.NET objects/classes/libraries CFML becomes a standard.NET component Can do with it anything that you’d do with an ASP.NET template Can leverage.NET declarative security, session persistence Examples of each of these is (or will be) offered in the document, “Deploying CFML on the Microsoft.NET Framework” Available freely on our site or with download

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Enterprise Solutions Can also leverage enterprise benefits of IIS 6 on server editions of Windows Past CFDJ, MM articles have described how CFML on J2EE can leverage multiple independent instances Same goes for CFML on IIS on Server editions of Windows Can have multiple web sites on single server CFML runs as a process on IIS (not a separate server) Can leverage features such as clustering, load balancing, fail-over, session replication and persistence Even without Server editions of Windows, BlueDragon/.NET offers unique solutions for managing multiple applications…

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Multiple Web Apps/Admin Consoles In IIS/.NET, each site/virtual directory is its own web application Could have own web.config file to control configuration of that directory and below One directory has security, session persistence, etc., others do not Indeed,.NET has an inheritance model, where web apps at one level inherit settings from higher level Again, CFML on.NET plays along, with unique benefits Each web app (web site/virtual directory) has its own BlueDragon Admin console Could configure debugging in one, not the other (or caching, datasources, etc.) Each web app could even have different versions of BlueDragon engine

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC When Can I Get Started? BlueDragon for the Microsoft.NET Framework is in “tech preview” mode Freely available now on our web site Is based on our 6.1 release, just recently released to production Will expire in a few weeks, by which time we’ll have a beta Expecting final release in Q4, if not sooner Some are licensing it now to run production apps We welcome that and seek strategic testers to identify/resolve any key issues Though again, anyone can now download and test

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC “Cost” of Deployment on.NET Expected Cost BlueDragon for the Microsoft.NET Framework: $2499 per CPU Resource utilization cost BlueDragon engine is just 2MB in size! Other dependent libraries total just 10MB in J2EE edition Reasonable to expect similar footprint on.NET

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC What About Mono? One last topic that some may ask about… Mono is an open-source implementation of the.NET framework (go-mono.org) Primarily oriented toward.NET on Linux and OS X Backed by Novell and others Does not implement all the features of.NET Has certain minimal goals in its current pre-release status So BlueDragon does not currently run on MONO We will be following its progress

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Why BlueDragon? Main reason so far is just that it runs CFML on.NET Naturally, you’ll wonder what it supports Substantially similar feature set to ColdFusion BlueDragon 6.1 supports CFMX 6.1 functionality CFCs, XML, web services, and more And all the other things you’d expect in CFML Including CFXs, CFOBJECT calls to Java, and lots more Currently lacks only a handful of tags CF4/5: CFAPPLET, CFGRID, CFREPORT And CFAUTHENTICATE, CFIMPERSONATE; obsoleted in CFMX CF/MX: CFCHART, CFLOGIN, CFTRACE (planning to add soon) Does offer enterprise database drivers, web server integration Database integration is based on ADO.NET in.NET edition What does it add? Besides the only way to run CFML on.NET?...

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Why BlueDragon? (cont.) Also several benefits over CFMX Available protection of CFML using precompiled or encrypted templates Readable only by BlueDragon. Cannot be converted back to source code A few extra tags, including: CFASSERT, CFIMAGE, CFIMAP Web spidering via CFINDEX (as well as text file and query indexing) Extra runtime state information reported in BD Admin console Automatically populates datasources from existing ODBC ones (Windows) BlueDragon has many other advantages to consider See And beyond.NET edition, again, have J2EE edition as well All same sort of benefits as.NET edition, but on J2EE server Also available standalone Server and Server JX editions Server edition is free (free for production!) Lacks only a few features All available for download as free trial, dev editions

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Who is New Atlanta New Atlanta is an established business with 11,000 paying customers in over 70 countries Been in the server-side Java business since 1997 ServletExec is still a highly regarded JSP/servlet engine It underlies BlueDragon Server/Server JX just like JRun underlies CFMX JTurbo is a highly regarded Type IV JDBC for SQL Server New Atlanta is known for strong support, responsiveness Got into BlueDragon to address critical needs of CFML developers not being served by CF Even so, Macromedia has had many positive things to say about BlueDragon

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC What Does Macromedia Think? Macromedia Directory of Technology Sean Corfield Has frequently blogged positive comments about BlueDragon in his personal site, corfield.org, or on our mailing list “Overall, it looks pretty good” “They're nice shirts - I have one and wear it to work sometimes :)” Ben Forta, senior CF Evangelist “I personally wish them all the best in their endeavors…I give the NA folks credit for innovating where they have opted to do.” B4EA519BCDD4F4C Tim Buntel, CF Product Manager “I'm sure that there's a way that we can not only serve the best interests of both Macromedia and New Atlanta, but of the community as a whole.” See buntel.com thread above

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Who’s Using BlueDragon? Hundreds of companies using the several versions Users of free Server edition don’t even need to tell us! Some key accounts American Airlines – crew reporting application LinuxWorld.com – yes, is CFML (served via.htm) Credit Suisse First Boston – complex security application Digital Insight - sells software to very large banks Fitz and Floyd – Retail store for collectibles Open Rental Desk – implements rental desk s/w in h/w stores Also, several hosting companies CF Dynamics Advanced Group.net Intent.net StreamingMedia Vivio Technologies More listed on our partner site

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Conclusion Deploying CFML on.NET is easy BlueDragon alone runs CFML as a native.NET web application It can bring many benefits, solve many problems Management, developers, vendors all need to be educated Understanding benefits of CFML deployed as a native.NET component Opens many doors for improvement of apps: Integration, performance, management, and more Allows CFML to live on as a valuable component in enterprise web application development CFML now the only language that runs on both J2EE and.NET

September 4, 2015 New Atlanta Communications, LLC Contact Information Charlie Arehart CTO, New Atlanta Communications newatlanta.com/bluedragon/ (678)