I’m not dismissing CF because it’s not open source, I’m merely stating that application servers have become a commodity, and, as such, _any_ application server that isn’t open source will not achieve any sort of ubiquity outside of the enterprise/government/possibly educational arenas. These should be enough to keep it going as a profitable product but it cannot be a PHP, Python, Tomcat, Ruby on Rails or hope to compete with them in the larger market.

Honestly, CF doesn’t excite me at all. Personally, I don’t see why I would extend any effort to learn to use a proprietary, closed system, when there are so many wonderful open alternatives.

So, yes, I was happy when the CF bit was over and we could see the cool new Flash stuff. And yes, the Flash Platform isn’t completely open either but (a) It’s far _more_ open than CF is, and (b) There aren’t any good open alternatives.

Client, server, open source, closed source, who cares if it gets the job done? I think CF is a great product and it was my way into serverside coding because it’s very easy to pick up. I think it deserves a bit more credit than ‘yay the CF bit is over’.