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Comment by replwoacause | Hacker News Reader

Is there a modern version of CFML today or something currently maintained? It sounds really nice and stands in contrast to the convoluted options we have today.

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I built the first part of my career in CFML. I then moved onto Rails, which I feel has much of the same ethos.

That said, Lucee is a well-maintained, open-source variant of CFML that you can use today. I still maintain a significant production app that uses it.

https://www.lucee.org/

Same, I run a large-ish website with it. Lucee is insanely stable and reliable, and is VERY actively maintained. It just works, and it keeps on just working.

The only thing going against it is prejudice, IMHO.

CFML was the easiest way to get into dynamic, server-side rendered pages back in the day. It was insanely productive and easy for a person cutting their teeth on programming as it was such a small leap from HTML.

I don't know of anything that still ticks those boxes but if you're just looking for (1) easy-ish, (2) interspersing HTML tags and code, and (3) server-side rendered simplicity, then PHP is still a very viable successor.

I'd say that PHP is actually a fairly good alternative to CF. It's probably why CF fell out of favor (CF was also a commercial product).

Early PHP was almost always embedded in HTML, like CF. It's been many moons, since I've worked that way, but many developers still do.

And indeed decades ago when i used CF, some developers would move to files that had all CF logic and no HTML, for an MVC-kind of setup where only the V was HTML with embeds. Similar to the trend in PHP.

(I stopped using it nearly 20 years ago and don't know what has happened since).

I would agree that PHP and CF (at least CF of 20 years ago) are pretty similar conceptually.

Yes, there is Lucee; I never used it, but when I was briefly asked to take on some Coldfusion work almost two jobs ago, I remember that I found it looked to be a vibrant and actively developed community, far different than what we were seeing of CF upstream that appeared to be on life support. I did not get into it, I'm afraid my manager thought I might like it too much and I was asked to work on something else about when it started heating up :( too bad for me.

I also remember coming across something called Railo that appears to have come before Lucee.

Lucee was forked from Railo (Railo, like Lucee, was well-maintained until the company that owned it and hired the developers mismanaged it. The developers left and went on to start Lucee)

Oh looks like adobe sells one. But I’m not a fan of their software so I wonder if there are any other comparable options?

Yes, there's an open source variant

https://www.lucee.org/

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