Lucee: A dynamic, Java-based, tag and scripting language for web app development

Apologies, you're probably right about that.

I've got a lot of friends building new apps using it. I'm using it for the REST back end of my new startup. There's a strong vibrant community on Slack.

It may not be as popular as other languages but it has two advantages:

1. Rapid application development

2. A glue that ties other enterprise apps together

I got into a fight on Twitter over using CFML for new projects with a rather prominent fellow in the coding world. The year was 2008 and a lot of apps have been written in it since then;<).

I disagree.

If you want legacy support, simply use the older Adobe provided Linux CF engines.

Look at the Coldbox framework and you will be pleasantly surprised at the implemented best practices and ease-of-use, all running in Lucee.

> You wouldn't build apps with this.

Why not? The environment is feature rich, runtime performance is fantastic, developer productivity is exceptional, and integration is compelling because it runs in the JVM. Yes, the JVM. So even if Lucee doesn't do what you need, you can natively call upon countless Java features like javax.script or javax.crypto, or third-party Java libs like JSoup or Lucene with just a couple extra lines of code.

And yes, like any language, it doesn't stop you from writing incompetent and stupid shit. The one big knock against the ColdFusion-inherited language is that the templating syntax is often overused for writing code, when it also has a great C/Java/JS-style scripting syntax.

Hello World in Lucee would simply be:

    echo "Hello World" > hello.cfm

I think the thing that's missing here is the context on the history. For most people using this project, they've come from CF (Adobe). It was "Hey, using CF and having a hard time with Adobe's code quality? We've made an opensource alternative! It's identical, but without the bugs and with these extra features..." And I guess the story for starting with it from scratch hasn't been more carefully considered.

<cfdump var="Hello World!">

or

writeDump("Hello World!");

As @aidos and @abraham_lincoln pointed out, an "Hello World" example is simply putting that string in a file named hello.cfm on the root of the web application and calling it with your browser, e.g. http://localhost:8080/hello.cfm

Before you can do that though, you need to install the CFML engine. I recently published a tutorial that shows how to install Lucee in Tomcat very easily:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuugoG5c-7M

http://blog.rasia.io/blog/how-to-easily-setup-lucee-in-tomca...

To make your Hello World example a bit more interesting, you can add the tag `<cfoutput>` with some dynamic content, e.g.

    <cfoutput>
        Hello World on #dateTimeFormat(now(), "mm/dd/yyyy 'at' HH:nn:ss")#
    </cfoutput>

See example at https://trycf.com/gist/226c10cbe74d4083743a617b25398224/luce...

I guess... I mean that assumption could be basically accurate yet still a questionable decision.

Seems like an assumption one would make who doesn't intend for their project to survive or grow. Don't they want new users, or just a continuously decreasing set of current ones?

And it would seem like working on a project with those intentions would be a waste of time for all involved.

> "it's really just ColdFusion/CFML, cfdocs.org is the best resource"

This should be the first thing I see on the website with a link to cfdocs.org

That works, though I think most developers are drawn to the markup style <cfquery> (I've been building CFML apps since 1999, and I don't know if I've ever seen queryExecute in the wild)

> Sometimes things get simplified in tutorials

That’s putting it nicely. What’s happened is you’re showing users the wrong way to do something without it being explicitly clear to them. Then we wonder why people write crap code...

My view is NEVER simplify an example to the point it becomes a security or performance hazard.

What this tells me now is that this projects examples are not useable, their agenda is to make things appear easy when in fact concrete examples may not be.

Yes, but Adobe's product isn't open source or free, in case that's a requirement.

Other people's branching strategies are often a mystery to me. If master has 20 builds and the latest stable release branch has 1071 builds and there are 25 stable versions currently available for download but those only go back to version 4.5; then I think they're not using master as the stable release branch.

5.2 is the stable branch https://github.com/lucee/Lucee/tree/5.2

5.3 is the active development branch https://github.com/lucee/Lucee/tree/5.3

THIS.

I'll add that when Adobe CF introduced a "richer" script syntax, it wasn't complete and along the lines of too little, too late. This is where MACR stagnated. Had CF introduced a full blown scripting language in the early 2000's, CF would certainly have a little more staying power these days, especially with open source implementations like Lucee.

The biggest problem for ColdFusion is that there was a time (2008-ish) that the open source web development world innovated and evolved by leaps and bounds around it and CF stood still. One of CF's biggest selling points was that it wasn't open source and that it wasn't PHP. I'm not knocking PHP; the reality was that there were a ton of companies that would steer clear or open source projects back in the mid-2000s. If you were doing "enterprise" web development in 2003-2005, you were either doing Classic ASP, Java, or ColdFusion.