Yesterday I’ve had a chat with AgentM and we were talking about IgniteFusion (which I honestly never dealt with before). With that, I’ve had a look around the web and my email inbox and decided to compile a brief overview:
1. Blue Dragon
2. IgniteFusion
3. Coral WebBuilder
4. Railo
BlueDragon is obviously the most famous one. I’ve heard a lot of good stuff about IgniteFusion and Railo from various sources, never played with Coral’s WebBuilder but as far as I got it from their site, they’re following a different concept.
The most crucial issue about alternative CF engines is probably the language and it’s compability to Macromedia’s implementation of CFML. All of them offer some sort of comparison tables to give you an idea if and how you might be able to run your applications.
I want to add one thing to this theme: If you take a global view to these engines, they’ll probably have their market. I’m an ISP in Germany and I’ve tried to gain profit out of BlueDragon. It was impossible to me to introduce this engine to my customers as an alternative, even if the packets were priced lower than 50% of the CF-MX6/7-packets. I got 2 paying Customers and about 5 test-drives within a year! That’s not worth keeping a server up & monitored.
I’ve tried the BlueDragon-Engine and it was fine – I also offered a project released with BD and was satisfied. But unfortunately the CF-Market here in Germany seems to be too small for such experiments with commercial backgrounds.
Perhaps I’ll give one of these engines another try in some time…
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