Coldfusion MG Enterprise/OS

[Anonymous]

Anyone had any luck prgramming the basic MG interface in Coldfusion using Java Classes with CFObject? Would love to make a CFC wrapper that handles all the basic functions within the API juts need a kick start getting the API to work within Coldfusion.

[Anonymous]

I agree with you if somebody could offer more information about it ... we
love coldfusion 🙂
Kalmy

wrote in message news:5366218@discussion.autodesk.com...
Anyone had any luck prgramming the basic MG interface in Coldfusion using
Java Classes with CFObject? Would love to make a CFC wrapper that handles
all the basic functions within the API juts need a kick start getting the
API to work within Coldfusion.

[Anonymous]

I also love ColdFusion. There is no easier and intuitive scripting
language. The only problem is that less and less people are using it. In
the last two years, I have seen the demand for web GIS integration projects
using ColdFusion drop to zero. In my case, rather than telling the client
that they have to use ColdFusion, I allow the client to mandate what
programming language they want their development done in and it is always
.NET, PHP or Java. This decision is usually driven from the companys IT
folks who have standardized on one of the above. Also, the fact that CF
server costs money generally does not bode well these days.


--
Andy Morsell, P.E.
Spatial Integrators, Inc.
http://www.SpatialGIS.com


"Albert Kálmán "
<=?UTF-8?Q?Albert_K=C3=A1lm=C3=A1n_?=> wrote in
message news:5366886@discussion.autodesk.com...
I agree with you if somebody could offer more information about it ... we
love coldfusion 🙂
Kalmy

wrote in message news:5366218@discussion.autodesk.com...
Anyone had any luck prgramming the basic MG interface in Coldfusion using
Java Classes with CFObject? Would love to make a CFC wrapper that handles
all the basic functions within the API juts need a kick start getting the
API to work within Coldfusion.

[Anonymous]

Is there any documentation on the API usage with Coldfusion yet? I see that the marketing for MG states work with the language of your choice including Coldfusion so I am sure it was tested... right? I have yet seen the classes or DLL in use internally with Coldfusion.

OR

Do you just recommend the old ArcIMS solution of XML in and out to get things done?

Just need a little help here and it's like pulling teeth everywhere we go.

[Anonymous]

That is interesting that they specifically mention ColdFusion in the product
overview at:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=6546955. I
think that is a mistake. I honestly don't think that they have tested the
Java web extensions of MapGuide Enterprise or Open Source with ColdFusion.

My approach has been to simply stop developing on ColdFusion and instead use
PHP, .NET or Java. This has worked out fine and I have yet to have a client
demand a ColdFusion based solution on the new software. If that day comes,
I'll be in a similar boat as you looking for ways to make it work. Or, I'll
just tell the client that it doesn't work and to ask them to pick one of the
3 other platforms.

Andy


wrote in message news:5391011@discussion.autodesk.com...
Is there any documentation on the API usage with Coldfusion yet? I see that
the marketing for MG states work with the language of your choice including
Coldfusion so I am sure it was tested... right? I have yet seen the classes
or DLL in use internally with Coldfusion.

OR

Do you just recommend the old ArcIMS solution of XML in and out to get
things done?

Just need a little help here and it's like pulling teeth everywhere we go.

[Anonymous]

Drop to zero? Have you worked with Government? They will not use Microsoft security as the end all answer to public sites and I won't let them. So that leaves PHP and JSP. Well PHP is free and is needed for MapGuide right now but the only problem is we don't want to recode everything we have been doing and lose the extras that Coldfusion offers. Not to mention a Coldfusion code is easily a cross platform language.

So we have functionality, multiple levels of security and ease of use. I don't see customers complaining about spending $600-800 on average for a robust web engine. If they do what kind of price are you trying to get for your services?

Basically we have many ESRI customers and the most MG 6.5 sold to date from what I have learned and your telling me we have to start over. I am sure they won't mind waiting a year for a full product recode.

How hard would it be for a multi million\billion dollar company to download a trial of Coldfusion or use the Dev Edition Lic and write up a 4 page report with examples? Keep in mind a lot of us started using CF since MapGuide 4.x when it was included... anyone remember that.

[Anonymous]

To be clear, Chris, I don't tell the customer what platform I would like
them to use. They tell me what they want me to use. Based on that, I quite
honestly have not had ANY demand for ColdFusion based solutions in the last
couple of years. Perhaps your customer base is a bit different, I'm just
relaying my experiences. I agree that ColdFusion Server is relatively cheap
and most customers would not consider that a prohibitive cost, I'm just not
seeing IT departments mandating its use and instead people are choosing PHP,
.NET and Java.

MG6.5 to MapGuide Enterprise is going to require a complete recode
regardless of whether ColdFusion is supported or not, so I don't see where
there would be a cost differential there. There are still some ways to
preserve existing ColdFusion reports and searching and the like while
passing parameters back and forth to the MG API regardless of which MG
language you choose. Given the extreme API and architecture differences
between MG6.5 and MGE, yes, I believe that most people have to essentially
start over if they are migrating a customized MG6.5 site. That sort of
sucks, but that's just the reality of the situation.

Perhaps there would be a market if someone developed an MG6.5 to MGE API
translation engine? I know that Autodesk looked at potentially developing
something like this in the alpha stages of MGE about 2 years ago but dropped
it due the complexity.


--
Andy Morsell, P.E.
Spatial Integrators, Inc.
http://www.SpatialGIS.com



wrote in message news:5391233@discussion.autodesk.com...
Drop to zero? Have you worked with Government? They will not use Microsoft
security as the end all answer to public sites and I won't let them. So that
leaves PHP and JSP. Well PHP is free and is needed for MapGuide right now
but the only problem is we don't want to recode everything we have been
doing and lose the extras that Coldfusion offers. Not to mention a
Coldfusion code is easily a cross platform language.

So we have functionality, multiple levels of security and ease of use. I
don't see customers complaining about spending $600-800 on average for a
robust web engine. If they do what kind of price are you trying to get for
your services?

So basically we have many ESRI customers and the most MG 6.5 sold to date
from what I have learned and your telling me we have to start over. I am
sure they won't mind waiting a year for a full product recode.

[Anonymous]

The problem is we have a CMS type solution for creating GIS/FM and Land Development sites on mulitple map platforms all in one product. The back end (engine) and everything we have done up-to-date is Coldfusion. It's basically a wrapper and I would like the wrapper to talk to the API direclty vs. mixing in PHP. We don't come in and hard code web sites per client we sell beyond that aspect and give them a total Content Management System linking to ODBC (existing data) and the Maps. So you can see in our situation it's a bit tougher to recode the whole thing.

[Anonymous]

Yes, that is a tough situation. You have your RAD application that needs to
work with multi-platforms and be coded in one language whereas I, generally,
do one-off custom applications with the exact functionality the customer
asks for.

I really don't know what you could do at this point other than continue to
hound Autodesk. A better alternative would be to get involved in the Open
Source core now that it is starting to shift to the OSGeo community. This
would require some low-level coding to build the CF connection modules, but
it is all open so should be possible. If it becomes part of the open source
project, it would make its way into the MGE builds. Also, you could fund
this project and have other developers do this (or maybe even Autodesk would
do it).

Andy

wrote in message news:5391295@discussion.autodesk.com...
The problem is we have a CMS type solution for creating GIS/FM and Land
Development sites on mulitple map platforms all in one product. The back end
(engine) and everything we have done up-to-date is Coldfusion. It's
basically a wrapper and I would like the wrapper to talk to the API direclty
vs. mixing in PHP. We don't come in and hard code web sites per client we
sell beyond that aspect and give them a total Content Management System
linking to ODBC (existing data) and the Maps. So you can see in our
situation it's a bit tougher to recode the whole thing.

[Anonymous]

Just a single CFC file that instantiates the Java with CFOBJECT or something would be the Cats Meow

[Anonymous]

I'm not so sure about multi platforms, but we are playing about with bluedragon, cfml and .net combined. It seems to work ok

[Anonymous]

cgountanis wrote:
> The problem is we have a CMS type solution for creating GIS/FM and Land Development sites on mulitple map platforms all in one product. The back end (engine) and everything we have done up-to-date is Coldfusion. It's basically a wrapper and I would like the wrapper to talk to the API direclty vs. mixing in PHP. We don't come in and hard code web sites per client we sell beyond that aspect and give them a total Content Management System linking to ODBC (existing data) and the Maps. So you can see in our situation it's a bit tougher to recode the whole thing.


Perhaps. However, I would wager that you will see a higher adoption
rate if you move away from CF.

I, for one, am actively trying to move away from CF on my servers. It's
far to niche/legacy to actively support.

Jason

[Anonymous]

Yes... Coldfusion works and has installers for multiple platforms. For example Windows and Linux. Not as easy to admin on Linux but very nice and fast with the Apache combination. Bluedragon is very cool and we have been waiting for the next version that supports CFDocument before we move on that as a lower priced CFM engine. Thanks for the comments.

[Anonymous]

We are leaning towards PHP for the price, security, multi platform and open source features. Just a full recode is not really in our best interest at the molment. Now that Coldfusion is owned by Adobe it has the slickest reporting features and is far from Legacy. If Adobe Flash and Adobe PDF are Legacy then I would agree with that. The last thing I would use is ASP.NET since they change everything ever few years and the security can be broke by any eager 12 year old with an Internet connection.

[Anonymous]

cgountanis wrote:
> We are leaning towards PHP for the price, security, multi platform and open source features. Just a full recode is not really in our best interest at the molment. Now that Coldfusion is owned by Adobe it has the slickest reporting features and is far from Legacy. If Adobe Flash and Adobe PDF are Legacy then I would agree with that. The last thing I would use is ASP.NET since they change everything ever few years and the security can be broke by any eager 12 year old with an Internet connection.

At one point, web application developers could dictate technology,
primarily because the market was not mature and IT departments had not
standardised on particular platforms for web development. These days,
if you are not supporting ASP.Net or Java, you've entirely written off a
large portion of your potential market. Others will come in and fill
the hole you are leaving. PHP is a good technology choice, but it can
be a hard sell in larger organisations (don't even mention it at the
City of Vancouver).

Cold Fusion, though it has a reasonable feature set and is easy to use,
is suffering from a diminishing market share, and does not seem to have
advanced much in recent years. It also has not transitioned away from
being a tag-based scripting language as ASP and PHP have. And when it
was moved to a Java platform, it broke (in my mind) one of its core
differentiators: real-time debugging. This is why I think of it as a
legacy system. These factors, combined with severe problems with our
6.x to 7.x upgrade and the requirement to recode for MapGuide, mean that
we intend to go from seven installs down to two installs in the coming
year. We are only keeping those two to support an application that
we're stuck with because the vendor doesn't want to do a complete
rewrite. 🙂

I can't imagine that Adobe sees much of a competitive advantage in Cold
Fusion. It's not giving them many new sales or open doors, the major
competition is "free", and it's eating up developer resources they could
be spending elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised to see CF abandoned
while Adobe concentrates on promoting a Flash-only web.

OK, that's enough "holy war" stuff for now 🙂

Jason

[Anonymous]

I totally agree with that assesment of the market and the potential demise
of ColdFusion (unless Adobe goes open source with it, which may not be a bad
move). I also agree that a good commercial, off-the-shelf application will
support all of the common web server-side language out there. Autodesk took
a good approach using SWIG (www.swig.org) so that the core of MapGuide
Enterprise and Open Source is written once in C++ and then the web
interfaces and API hooks are output to PHP, Java and .NET for the customer
to choose their web extension flavor choice. They are not writing three
different versions from scratch.

Andy


"Jason Birch" wrote in message
news:5393047@discussion.autodesk.com...
cgountanis wrote:
> We are leaning towards PHP for the price, security, multi platform and
> open source features. Just a full recode is not really in our best
> interest at the molment. Now that Coldfusion is owned by Adobe it has the
> slickest reporting features and is far from Legacy. If Adobe Flash and
> Adobe PDF are Legacy then I would agree with that. The last thing I would
> use is ASP.NET since they change everything ever few years and the
> security can be broke by any eager 12 year old with an Internet
> connection.

At one point, web application developers could dictate technology,
primarily because the market was not mature and IT departments had not
standardised on particular platforms for web development. These days,
if you are not supporting ASP.Net or Java, you've entirely written off a
large portion of your potential market. Others will come in and fill
the hole you are leaving. PHP is a good technology choice, but it can
be a hard sell in larger organisations (don't even mention it at the
City of Vancouver).

Cold Fusion, though it has a reasonable feature set and is easy to use,
is suffering from a diminishing market share, and does not seem to have
advanced much in recent years. It also has not transitioned away from
being a tag-based scripting language as ASP and PHP have. And when it
was moved to a Java platform, it broke (in my mind) one of its core
differentiators: real-time debugging. This is why I think of it as a
legacy system. These factors, combined with severe problems with our
6.x to 7.x upgrade and the requirement to recode for MapGuide, mean that
we intend to go from seven installs down to two installs in the coming
year. We are only keeping those two to support an application that
we're stuck with because the vendor doesn't want to do a complete
rewrite. 🙂

I can't imagine that Adobe sees much of a competitive advantage in Cold
Fusion. It's not giving them many new sales or open doors, the major
competition is "free", and it's eating up developer resources they could
be spending elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised to see CF abandoned
while Adobe concentrates on promoting a Flash-only web.

OK, that's enough "holy war" stuff for now 🙂

Jason

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the valuable and more importantly helpful input. I am glad asking for help brings the old IRC Linux is better than Windows convo but it's tired. If we could recode the whole system by next release date we would. It has been planed for the future releases. I agree on Coldfusion not being the big dog for single job programmers and hard code specialists. Keep in mind we build the system from the ground up. From server to internal implementation. Most people don't have an issue at that point. Many of the companies that use Autodesk software don't have a huge IT team standing by. The others get on a hosted solution. So again doesn't really matter what language it's on.


Good news is we got things moving on Coldfusion using CFObject... finally. It was just a matter of file placement and basic understanding of how Coldfusion works. Remember Coldfusion is basically a Tomcat or ServletExec and a web language all-in-one. We even have cases where IMS is running off it. Neat concept for the money I would say.