Open BlueDragon Project
By: Sean Corfield
Vince Bonfanti hosted a Birds of a Feather session at cf.Objective(), he officially unveiled the Open BlueDragon project.
He walked the (fairly large) audience through downloading and running the binary distribution of OpenBD on both Tomcat and JBoss and noted that “ready-to-run” distributions will also be available (Jetty-based initially, with Amazon EC2 and VMWare images following soon).
This was followed by open Q&A for a while and then he showed the source code in Eclipse and demonstrated how to build and run OpenBD from source.
He ran into a bug - triggered by a bad environment setting - and used the step debugger to identify the problem in just a few minutes, then fixed the code and rebuilt and successfully ran the project. I think that was very persuasive for several folks in the audience.
A couple of things really stood out for me:
- The WAR distribution - the binary - was only 11Mb
- Getting this running on Tomcat was as simple as:
- Download openbluedragon.war (11Mb WAR)
- Download Tomcat (6.3Mb ZIP)
- Unzip Tomcat
- Put openbluedragon.war in Tomcat’s webapps folder
- Start Tomcat - bin/start.bat (Windows) or bin/start.sh (Mac OS X - you may need to make the scripts executable first: chmod +x bin/*.sh) - Tomcat unpacks the WAR into the webapps/openbluedragon/ directory for you
- Hit http://localhost:8080/openbluedragon/
- The source distribution is only 14Mb as a ZIP file
The small size was a real eye-opener after recently downloading the 456Mb ColdFusion 8.0.1 Linux 64-bit installer.
Vince used Fusebox 5.5.1 and the new Fusebox cat club sample apps as his demo code. He unzipped the openbluedragon.war, copied in the Fusebox core files and cat club folder, edited the bluedragon.xml file to add a data source, zipped the directory back up as demo.war and dropped it into Tomcat. Then he hit localhost:8080/demo/ in his browser and showed the Fusebox sample app running. In other words, he quickly created a custom J2EE web application containing the application code and deployed it as if it were Java code with just Windows Explorer’s ZIP file management and WordPad.
The walk through the source was very interesting. Each tag in OpenBD is implemented as a Java class and a CFML page is converted to a sequence of Java objects on which to call the render() method. He showed a couple of tag implementations, the core engine (which all the initialization and setup code) and the main page request handler.
Adding new tags looks to be pretty easy (if you know Java) and he also mentioned that a standard plugin extension point would make it very easy to add-on all sorts of sophisticated functionality as external classes / JAR files.