Smith 1.25, a freeware ColdFusion engine written entirely in Java, has been released. After inital release in Novembar, the community gave very positive feedback and showed high interest for the future development of Smith. This version brings several new features and bug fixes. First of all, Smith now supports ColdFusion components which were characterized as a critical issue for the most ColdFusion developers. Some new functions and tags are introduced in this version as well.

For years Cold Fusion has been by far the easiest development platform for web applications. IMHO the main reason PHP beat Cold Fusion is the fact that you had to play a license to get all this development ease. In this day and age a non-typed language seems a bit outdated and everything is about Java, .NET en AJAX, but if you ask me what I would use if I have to develop a web application in no time flat, the answer would still be Cold Fusion. So I applaud this effort. I would suggest open sourcing it as soon as possible. Otherwise, it may die a silent death. Cheers, Marc

I have built many web applications using many different frameworks and platforms and I have to agree that developing with Cold Fusion has to be up there as one of the easiest languages to use for web applications. It does have its limitations however I think that it should have see more success than it currently does. Cheers, Andrew

Coldfusion was the best experience in my career till date.The documentation, ease of use & those drill downs/select wizards of the CF studio are some of those compelling reasons ! I would go ahead and say it was a platform ahead of time..but with grief..I see it dying today.... a gradual and disturbing death.. Vijay JEE Professional.

what a waste of energy, especially implementing components. at best ColdFusion today could serve as an alternate view technologies for Java web apps: somebody needs to develop a *minimal* ColdFusion for just that purpose.

I think your missing it. This product serves an important purpose, transition. It allows CF developers to implement on a Java platform. This gives them the ability to use CF and JSP-JSF code in the same platform. As such it provides a migration path from CF. Also, I don't know about this product, but Blue Dragon CF/Java was said to provide a 3X+ increase in performance over native CF. Thats also huge!