I ?? Lucee

Last month I gave a talk titled "I Love Lucee" at the Tomcat track of ApacheCon (link to video below though the preview thumbnail is not showing).

Lucee is a Rapid Application Development platform, consisting of an application server, language implementation, and a framework. It makes the development of powerful applications simple, fast, and easy.

When I started building Web Applications more than 20 years ago, there were few choices for writing the back end code, with the most popular being Perl, Classic ASP, and ColdFusion.

ColdFusion was by far the most powerful option, and was quickly adopted by Fortune 500 companies and Government agencies. It had one major flaw compared to the others though: its two editions, Standard and Enterprise, were Expensive and Very Expensive (respectively).

In the early 2000s, when development was being outsourced to Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, the popularity of ColdFusion started its decline as free and open source alternatives, like PHP and Ruby, and later Node.js, became more popular.

I often "joke" that if there had been a free version of ColdFusion in 2003 then WordPress would have been written in CFML (the language that ColdFusion uses), and no one would ever hear of PHP. But alas, that wasn't the case. PHP became popular, and ColdFusion lost its luster.

Since I wanted to provide my clients with options that do not include the high price tag of ColdFusion, and I didn't like the "Black Box" concept of the closed source ColdFusion product, I kept looking for alternatives.

I've tried every viable option, including JSP, PHP, Ruby, ASP, ASP.NET, Python, and later even Node.js and Go. They just would not compare. One line of CFML code would have to be replaced by several, or in some cases dozens, of lines in the other languages. Not only that development would be much slower with these other languages, run time would end up being slower in many of them as well. It just didn't make any sense to make the switch.

Salvation finally arrived in the form of the Railo Application Server. Railo was a free and open source implementation of the CFML platform. It was created by Micha Offner and Gert Franz (who later became my friends and colleagues), who open sourced it in 2008.

It was written in Java, which was perfect for me as I was already proficient in it, so I quickly started contributing to the project. Shortly afterwards I became a committer, and a few years later when some people tried to pull the project towards a more restrictive license (and possibly closed-source) - I didn't think twice when Micha told me that he is planning to fork Railo to a new project and asked me if I'm interested in joining him.

Lucee was born.

Since then much development has been done and new features are being added on a regular basis. Modern features like parallelism, lambdas, and closures are built-in. More and more organizations are replacing their Adobe ColdFusion servers with Lucee to save on licensing costs and take advantage of enhancements that are implemented only in Lucee.

The future? Python made a comeback. Postgres made a comeback. I believe that CFML can make a comeback too. If you know HTML and JavaScript, then learning CFML and CFScript is a breeze as they are very intuitive, and you can start developing powerful applications in a matter of days.

The slides from my talk are available at: