Adobe Adding CMS Capabilities to ColdFusion?
I'm not saying (nor do I know) that Adobe will or will not ever integrate Content Management System features into the ColdFusion product. It is something that wouldn't suprise me to see at some point. Let me explain why.
First, there is (was) Spectra - the Allaire CMS written entirely in ColdFusion. At the time it was an impressive example of what you can do with CF, but it had serious architectural and performance issues and, ultimately, failed as a product. There clearly is a market (otherwise Spectra never would have existed, companies like Paperthin wouldn't be alive and well, and there wouldn't be so many CF based CMS offerings available) and the first priority of the CF Product Team when deciding what new features to add to the product has always been, in my experience, features that can be monetized. In other words, the features that Adobe thinks will help sell more licenses or that their biggest spenders (paying customers) want get high priority. CMS capabilities could be on this list.
The second reason to think it could happen is to look at LiveCycle ES. About 2 weeks ago, Adobe announced that they are adding Content Management capabilities to LiveCycle ES by integrating the open source Alfresco CMS (http://www.alfresco.com/). Clearly, someone at the company not only still believes there's a CMS market out there that Adobe should go after, but this recent announcement describes a CMS in which you have CMS functionality delivering content that takes advantage of the best in data visualization, user experience, and document management by leveraging Flex 3 and Acrobat. If I were a large enterprise company (or making purchasing decisions for one) I'd want to "run out and get me some". The Adobe Press Release, by the way, is online at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200806/061708AdobeLiveCycleES.html.
Getting back to the topic at hand - "why would I say that there's a chance Adobe could integrate CMS functionality into CF?" - there's a third reason, which these first two offer evidence to support. When Allaire (just prior to the Macromedia acquisition) first publicly announced and showed the Java-based CFML server that would become CFMX (they showed this in the keynote at DevCon 2000 in Washington, DC) they cited a few reasons for the server rewrite. One of the primary reasons cited in that keynote for the move to Java, if my memory serves correct, was the abundance of open source code available that they could take advantage of. Hmmm... sound familiar? If not, go back a paragraph and re-read what I said about LiveCycle ES having an integrated Alfresco CMS. I can't think of any technical or legal reason that Adobe couldn't also just integrate Alfresco with CF - so adding CMS functionality to CF isn't really such a daunting task for the engineering team, is it? The idea that CF would be made better because the CF Engineering team can take advantage of the Java Community has, so far, held-up very well. So many of the CF features are really open source Java exposed in a nice friendly way (log4J, JAAS, etc.) and CFUnited this year included a sneak peak of CF with integrated Hibernate ORM functionality.
I don't want to say anything more about the topic of Open Source Java being dropped into CF, as I do plan to write extensively about the future of CF, as I see it, in the very near future. I was thinking about the new CMS functionality in LCES and it got me thinking... and I just thought I would share. By the way, with regards to whether or not integrating CMS functionality into CF would be a good thing or not, I'm on the fence. There's definitely a large part of me that really detests the idea, but in all honesty I couldn't blame them... it probably would help sell a lot more servers. It would, unfortunately, most likely put a lot of CF developers out of a job, too. What do you think?
First, there is (was) Spectra - the Allaire CMS written entirely in ColdFusion. At the time it was an impressive example of what you can do with CF, but it had serious architectural and performance issues and, ultimately, failed as a product. There clearly is a market (otherwise Spectra never would have existed, companies like Paperthin wouldn't be alive and well, and there wouldn't be so many CF based CMS offerings available) and the first priority of the CF Product Team when deciding what new features to add to the product has always been, in my experience, features that can be monetized. In other words, the features that Adobe thinks will help sell more licenses or that their biggest spenders (paying customers) want get high priority. CMS capabilities could be on this list.
The second reason to think it could happen is to look at LiveCycle ES. About 2 weeks ago, Adobe announced that they are adding Content Management capabilities to LiveCycle ES by integrating the open source Alfresco CMS (http://www.alfresco.com/). Clearly, someone at the company not only still believes there's a CMS market out there that Adobe should go after, but this recent announcement describes a CMS in which you have CMS functionality delivering content that takes advantage of the best in data visualization, user experience, and document management by leveraging Flex 3 and Acrobat. If I were a large enterprise company (or making purchasing decisions for one) I'd want to "run out and get me some". The Adobe Press Release, by the way, is online at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200806/061708AdobeLiveCycleES.html.
Getting back to the topic at hand - "why would I say that there's a chance Adobe could integrate CMS functionality into CF?" - there's a third reason, which these first two offer evidence to support. When Allaire (just prior to the Macromedia acquisition) first publicly announced and showed the Java-based CFML server that would become CFMX (they showed this in the keynote at DevCon 2000 in Washington, DC) they cited a few reasons for the server rewrite. One of the primary reasons cited in that keynote for the move to Java, if my memory serves correct, was the abundance of open source code available that they could take advantage of. Hmmm... sound familiar? If not, go back a paragraph and re-read what I said about LiveCycle ES having an integrated Alfresco CMS. I can't think of any technical or legal reason that Adobe couldn't also just integrate Alfresco with CF - so adding CMS functionality to CF isn't really such a daunting task for the engineering team, is it? The idea that CF would be made better because the CF Engineering team can take advantage of the Java Community has, so far, held-up very well. So many of the CF features are really open source Java exposed in a nice friendly way (log4J, JAAS, etc.) and CFUnited this year included a sneak peak of CF with integrated Hibernate ORM functionality.
I don't want to say anything more about the topic of Open Source Java being dropped into CF, as I do plan to write extensively about the future of CF, as I see it, in the very near future. I was thinking about the new CMS functionality in LCES and it got me thinking... and I just thought I would share. By the way, with regards to whether or not integrating CMS functionality into CF would be a good thing or not, I'm on the fence. There's definitely a large part of me that really detests the idea, but in all honesty I couldn't blame them... it probably would help sell a lot more servers. It would, unfortunately, most likely put a lot of CF developers out of a job, too. What do you think?
Plus Clients always want something better to compete with other companies.
Alfio - you are correct that a built-in CMS won't necessarily put a lot of people out of work... but it could (or their jobs could become unbearable - who wants to configure a CMS all day?). One thing is for sure though - when I think about the solutions companies I've worked for in the past, I can't think of one that a built-in CMS wouldn't be fairly likely to hurt financially.
After all, so much of what we do on a project boils down to displaying content and allowing the client to manage that content. For a project to drop from 6 months of development to 6 weeks of development because CF already does it all for you, would certainly affect profitability.
Of course, that's not necessarily how it would play out - it depends on what the implementation looks like... and, to be honest, even if the 'worst case' scenario did happen - Adobe would be perfectly justified saying that we, as solutions companies, need to continue to evolve along with the Adobe products. I know a lot of developers and companies already that have shifted most of their focus to the Flex/RIA space (it could even be said that I am one of them) - which is exactly the way in which we should evolve if we're staying current with the industry, with what people want, and with Adobe's vision.
Just something to think about... this could all be a moot point, as well.
A quick search for "sharepoint consulting" returned 16,200 results!
Still, the fact remains that a fair chunk of many CF contracts does involve writing custom CMS-like behavior, so there could be an impact on company revue streams. On the other hand, companies could find that projects become shorter and smaller budget, but there are many more of them out there.
I suppose there's only one way we'll ever know...
My 2 cents.
First, the whole point of LCES is to empower a company/organization to do more of the things that create profit/benefit rather than develop (and maintain) a custom IT infrastructure. Admittedly I'm not a big ColdFusion guy (haven't had the opportunity, but hope to), but I pay attention to what is going on with it, and I'm not seeing a lot in the way of "workflows" and BPM happening with it, at least in the not-nearly-as-hardcoded way that formal BPM systems, like LCES, do.
The individual LC components are indeed pretty killer on their own, but the power, the "sales opportunity", the maximal benefit to a customer lies in the integration with the Workflow component.
Second, Alfresco may or may not be the right tool, depending on what your needs are. For example, the current shipping version of Alfresco doesn't provide much in terms of "site management" along the lines of Joomla or Drupal, for example. The Web Content Management features (robust and killer) are coming in v.3 due later this year. For formal content management, workflow, etc., the current version is killer.
That said, Alfresco is Java-based, with a robust API capable of delivering services and content through a few different mechanisms that ColdFusion is well-suited to use. What I think you are really asking for is a ColdFusion-driven front-end to Alfresco, complete with website infrastructure capabilities. I would think Alfresco would stand to benefit more from releasing such a thing than Adobe.
However, Adobe has done all sorts of good work to create a LiveCycle "front-end" for Alfresco, and would be well-suited to participate/author/whatever a ColdFusion front-end of some sort. Moreover, Adobe has yet to push the integration of CF and LCES (at least as much as they could) -- or more directly, they haven't pushed CF as an ideal server-based solution to integrate LCES services into both Flex and HTML RIAs, websites, etc.
Convince them of THAT, and you'll likely get some traction.