BlueDragon 7 - Coldfusion's Little Sister is Growing Up
You probably already know about BlueDragon. It's a fine ap server from the folks over at New Atlanta (the makers of Jturbo and ServletExec). BlueDragon is an interpretive engine for CFML that is a direct competitor to Coldfusion. Last night I was privileged to see a presentations by Josh Adams from New Atlanta at the Nebraska CFUG on the upcoming release of Blue Dragon 7. I have always thought that one of the knocks on BlueDragon is that BD is forced to play "catch up". The folks at New Atlanta have to wait and see what features appear in Coldfusion and then hurry to implement them in the next version of BD. I was pleasantly pleased and surprised to see that the next version of BlueDragon may force Adobe to play a bit of catch up on their own. It has a number of quite innovative features and I was duly impressed. Here are some of the more impressive things I saw or heard about.
Thread Management
A request can spawn worker threads for asynchronous work. The request can "fire and forget" these threads or "rejoin" them (wait for each of them to finish). In the example that Josh used a call to a web service was done 4 times serially at a cost of around 1000 milliseconds (1 second). He then modified the code to create 3 threads and made each call to the webservice asynchronous to the request thread. It looked something like this:
<cfreturn wsCall.getData("somevar")/>
</cfthread>
<cfthread name="b">
<cfreturn wsCall.getData("somevar")/>
</cfthread>
<cfthread name="c">
<cfreturn wsCall.getData("somevar")/>
</cfthread>
<!--- let the request thread do some
work as well
--->
<cfset d = wscall.getData("somevar")/>
<cfscript>
/* joinThread() makes the request wait
for the specified thread to finish.
Cfjoin is the tag aquivelent
*/
joinThread(a);
joinThread(b);
joinThread(c);
</cfscript>
<cfoutput>
#a.returnvariable.rs.column#
#b.returnvariable.rs.column#
#c.returnvariable.rs.column#
</cfoutput>
Of course you can also use cfthread to fire off worker threads and allow the request to proceed. One possible use of it that might not be evident at first is to avoid double submits. Sometimes the reason that double submits occurs is that the user becomes impatient with the length of time the request is taking. Using CFTHREAD you could offload the time consuming data processes to a separate thread and take the use right to feedback - much like a gateway or message queue. I have an upload tool that does a data import from an excel file that could greatly benefit from such an approach.
Cfquery "Background" Attribute
This is really just a specialized use of threads for handling database interactions. If you set Background="true" in your cfquery tag the server will spawn a separate worker thread for that database call and allow the rest of the request to continue. The example that Josh gave us was a logging routine that ran in the onRequestEnd() function in application.cfc. The logging function inserted some Cgi params into the database as a tracking tool for users of the site. Such routines are pretty common (Farcry has such a routine enabled by default). Setting background to true allowed this query to run "in the background" and queue up with other such queries without impacting the request - very cool.
Cfquery "CacheUntilchanged" (.NET and MSSSQL)
A nice feature of the .NET version of BD allows you to add the "cacheUntilChanged" attribute to a query (not sure if I spelled that correctly). This attribute works exclusively with MSSQL. If data changes on the DB Server the cache handler is notified that the cache needs to be expired. The next request for that data results in a call to the DB. Using this method you could ensure that queries are run only when they are necessary. That is very cool.
onMissingTemplate() Function in Application.cfc
Josh briefly showed us this tag in the application.cfc template. it allows you to take specific actions if the page requested is not found.
Conclusions
Overall I'd say that BD deserves another look. I was most intrigued that Josh indicated a new pricing structure may be coming for BD.NET more along the lines of the "standard" version. I understand they are trying to cater to the enterprise market but in my opinion the CPU pricing for BD.NET is too high of an entry point - especially with CF enterprise in the same space. According to Josh they will be offering a version of BD.NET that is more akin to their JX pricing. I think that is a move in the right direction. It is nice to see a product that competes with Coldfusion on it's own turf and seems poised for new success. Congradulations to New Atlanta for an outstanding effort.
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No one seems to know when CFMX will run natively under 64-bit, but it sure would help with our apps!
1. Multi-threading support (hinted at by the unofficial cfthread tag released several months back)
2. JDK 1.6 support and 64-bit support (really HAS to be in this release to keep up with changing platforms and growing RAM requirements of large application servers)
The onMissingTemplate() function in Application.cfc would be useful and if it's not already slated for the release the inclusion in BlueDragon 7 might prompt them to add it to their feature list.
The background query would be a nice use of the threading and perhaps like the onMissingTemplate() they might include it because it's present in BlueDragon 7. I'm not sure if they'll be able to include the cachedUntilChanged option to cfquery calls because I haven't seen a Java implementation of this communication, only between SQL and a .NET application or module.
Other things that I've heard mentioned about BlueDragon that makes sense for inclusion in the next release of ColdFusion include the addition of interfaces for CFCs to expand on the object oriented capabilities.
This is all just speculation and we'll have to wait and see when the next version is released or at least the feature list is announced.
I appreciate your perspective - please use a more diplomatic approach in your language. Something like "I was disappointed... The product seemed behind Adobe by a couple generations...." would go down better than just "Blue Dragon is Terrible". Also noted that this post was made before BD open source in 2007 - a full 2 years ago.
Love the "isavepets" thing by the way :)
Blue Dragon.NET is a 'difficult' product to work with if you are an Adobe ColdFusion developer since you don't have the core Java library which most people use.
Also, web services, via remote CFC, return completely different information than that of Adobe making Flex applications that use the WebService much more difficult.
Thanks about the isavepet thing, it is running on Adobe ColdFusion 8 :-)