Today was a busy news day for me. Most of it just personal stuff, but the story of the day in the world of ColdFusion is the departure of Adobe, or more specifically Adam Lehman, from the CFML Advisory Committee. I say it’s big news, but it seems to me that it will be the big event in ColdFusion history that no one will really know, or care too much about. Sad? Perhaps.

For those who do not know what the CFML Advisory Committee is allow me a brief detour to give the 60-second rundown. The CFML Advisory Committee, as defined by their own website is to “…define what is ‘core’ to the ColdFusion Markup Language, how that core should behave and what is considered ‘extended core’ - what language features useful CFML processors should implement - as well as offering guidelines for vendors to provide extensions to CFML in a consistent manner.” It seems like a noble goal for certain.

For those who might wonder why such a concept would even matter, consider the C++ language. Originally created by one guy in 1979 it gained an enormous amount of popularity. With this popularity and general acceptance by the development community, as well as the growing software industry, comes vendors, developers, and businesses clamoring to get in on the action. Libraries are built, custom extensions to the language, with each one trying to be the next “standard”. Over time you had various flavors or the language, extensions that cause portability issues, all which violated the original intent of the language.

Then in 1998 the ISO standards group (and a few others who’s acronyms I cannot name) finalized a standards document detailing how the language should behave, the semantics of code, and what libraries would come standard with the language.

This is the idea behind CFML Advisory Committee. Standardize the CFML language. Ensure that regardless of the vendor certain behaviors and language elements will be present and accounted for. An idea that, from the day I heard about it, I have agreed with. This is good for ColdFusion.

It would seem that the committee will not be able to achieve its goal. Blame politics, corporate agenda, or even personality conflicts, the end result remains the same. We are back to Adobe defining how the language will work, and the other vendors follow suit.

This is not necessarily a bad thing entirely. I won’t go on the record and state it’s a good thing entirely either. But it does raise some interesting questions in my mind, especially for me.

In his post Adam Lehman states “…the ColdFusion ACPs will be the CFML Advisory Panel for ColdFusion X and beyond.” As I am an Adobe ColdFusion ACP I certainly appreciate being able to provide my feedback to Adobe regarding the direction of the language.

Being in the ACP program, however, presents an interesting challenge. Adobe generally does not see fit to share information about the direction of the ColdFusion language to the general populous, and as an ACP I am under NDA for a good number of things. If Adobe were to formalize our role in the feedback process I wonder how much tighter the NDA becomes. Should that happen how limiting will my discussions with individuals involved in open source CFML be? Is that good for the ColdFusion language, such restrictions, or is it better perhaps to encourage open communication and solicit valuable feedback from the very community that supports your product?

Whatever the case I will continue supporting the ColdFusion community, it’s members, the language, and my desire to spread the nerdy love. To all I say happy coding!