BEA warms to ColdFusion users

BEA Systems hopes to lure users of ColdFusion applications to BEA's WebLogic Server platform by licensing New Atlanta's BlueDragon software.

BlueDragon, BEA WebLogic Edition, enables users of CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) to easily run their applications natively on WebLogic Server. Legacy code can be redeployed to WebLogic, according to BEA.

"You don't need to rewrite any software. You're simply redeploying on WebLogic Server," said Blake Connell, director of WebLogic Server product marketing at BEA. By using BEA's application server, ColdFusion users get new benefits such as clustering and fail-over, he said.

ColdFusion is Macromedia-developed technology for dynamic, Web-based interactive applications. It is now under the jurisdiction of Adobe Systems as the two vendors merged.

ColdFusion "has had a very long and storied history," said Jeff Whatcott, senior director of product marketing at Adobe, who previously worked at Macromedia. The technology began in 1995 as a way for building dynamic Web applications that connect to a database, Whatcott said.

Since 2002, ColdFusion applications have been able to run on top of J2EE servers such as WebLogic, Whatcott said. The New Atlanta technology has been seen as a more price-conscious way of running ColdFusion applications, but New Atlanta's software lacks functions such as PDF generation, Whatcott said.

"This is not a new capability," to run ColdFusion applications on J2EE, Whatcott said.

BEA, however, believes that the New Atlanta software offers a much more automated and user-friendly way of running CFML applications on WebLogic Server, said Lorenzo Cremona, BEA director of application infrastructure.

BlueDragon for BEA systems is available for US$3,000 per CPU.

BEA, meanwhile, also is reporting that it has had a 12 percent increase in year-over-year license revenues for WebLogic Server.

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