Lucee – A lightweight dynamic scripting language for the JVM | Hacker News Reader

Lucee – A lightweight dynamic scripting language for the JVM

lucee.io

58 pointssarabad202139 comments

Lucee is a fork of Railo, which was an open source alternative to ColdFusion (owned by Adobe, formerly Macromedia, formerly Allaire) which was written by JJ Allaire 20 years ago. I am sure most ColdFusion/CFML language docs would be pertinent to Lucee. ColdFusion was a rather prominent server side language in the late 90's and early 2000's. There are a bunch of companies that still use it today - I work for one. Overall though I would say it's widespread usage is on a significant decline. It can be very fast to get something up and running quickly but similar to PHP, can become a mess if one is not careful as you can freely mix data access, business logic and templating together.

I am also working for a company that uses ColdFusion. While it has been relatively trusty for years, there is now a huge push to move us to Java for a lot of reasons.

I think the vision behind ColdFusion is/was (it is still being sold) solid, I think the implementation is however flawed.

I am the developer of HiveMind (crudzilla.com), it shares the ColdFusion vision (ie simpler business application development), but the approach is quite different.

Over the years developers were building more advanced applications, and that vision has changed, as more "traditional" features have made it into the language (Hibernate, closures, etc) and once lauded features have more or less fallen to the way-side (for instance form and database tag abstractions like cfform and cfupdate, custom tags, etc)

I think the vision is not really about a specific technical approach or language or framework. It is about building or inventing new ways of delivering business applications that is business focused.

Traditional approaches (IDEs and Frameworks) cater to developer desires, which is often not aligned with business needs....this is a very big debate that I'd rather not start in an HN forum :)

I spent many years in the ColdFusion ecosystem, not just developing, but running a user group, speaking at conferences, etc. I moved to Rails for the most part (still support code on Railo and OpenBD however) mostly for a much richer ecosystem (like the many background jobs options, CodeClimate, Rails-specific PaaSes, etc)

While most docs are pertinent to both ColdFusion and Lucee, there are several things that aren't that will keep you from migrating to Lucee if you are on ColdFusion.

CFDocs [1] is a nice site to check out which functions differ from each version, etc. (No affiliation to CFDocs, just use them quite often for work and have been the best resource for CFML that I have found)

[1]: http://cfdocs.org/

It would be nice if they included examples on the main page or the "Learn More" page. I've spent a couple minutes bouncing around but I've failed in finding anything...

I know. I hate when someone comes to promote their new language, but then fail to actually showcase the language anywhere. The very first thing I want to see is what the language looks like, not testimonials about how great it is.

It took me at least 5 clicks from the home page to find the first snippet of code:

http://docs.lucee.org/guides/getting-started/first-steps.htm...

This is definitely not a new language...it's been around since 1995. The website does not make it particularly clear that this is a CFML engine though haha.

Lucee Server has not been around since 1995. It is a newer open source engine that implements a backwards compatible version of CFML but with many improvements and modern flourishes. Our lack of CFML mention is on purpose due to the negative stigma of legacy apps. It's fair to say that the majority of people are not familiar with the modern iterations of CFML. It's changed so much since the old days, it might as well be a new language!

Thank you for the correction!

I don't think much thought has been given to users that would be coming to it fresh, as opposed to existing ColdFusion/Railo developers.

Exactly. I wandered around, finally I headed for Docs (ugh), but even there I got releases and downloads thrown in my face, no code in sight

Don't even bother. This is Coldfusion. Irrelevant for a decade if not more.

This is not ColdFusion (a product owned by Adobe). This is a FOSS engine that implements a modern spin on one of the the web's most mature JVM languages. Lucee Server contains many additional features configuration options, and focuses on the ECMA-like scripting language that is nothing like the old templating syntax.

(ignoring distinction between ColdFusion the commercial product and CFML)

Invision's backend is ColdFusion. ColdFusion still has a ton of use in government, healthcare, etc. It's certainly declined in popularity, and is definitely losing the stickers-on-Macbooks metric, but there are definitely areas where it's still relevant.

I couldn't find code examples so I lost interest.

Google "CFML" - that should keep you busy for a while :)

Once you get Lucee up and running:

http://www.learncfinaweek.com/

Worth noting that site was built by those using the Adobe version (all smart developers, many of whom I consider friends from the season when I was going to many CF conferences) which has a few differences, mostly in setting it up, and it is 2 version behind.

It's just the open source version of ColdFusion (akin to whether you'd see code examples on jRuby's site)

I saw this and was instantly struck by it's resemblance to ColdFusion, which is a nightmare! Let that "language" die

What features are missing from the language? How long has it been since you've built an application in ColdFusion? It's certainly not very popular, but I haven't seen anything in say PHP or Rails that I couldn't do in CFML, and it has some neat features that set it apart (for example, built in SQL engine to query an in-memory recordset)

Sounds like it's been a LONG time since you looked at ColdFusion - I encourage you to re-visit. A lot has changed since the late 90's...it's a great language, not a nightmare at all.

I just did superficial Wikipedia research. Might you have an aversion to CFML, which is like a COBOL dialect built out of HTML tags? But CF code doesn't have to be written that way; there is also CFScript which superficially resembles JS. You can wrap it between <cfscript> tags:

  <cfscript>
  function Sum(a, b) {
      var sum = a + b;
      return sum;
  }
  </cfscript>

This seems all-right-ish at first glance (to say which, of course, I temporarily lock my Lisp programmer hat in my desk with keys, which I then throw across the office to retrieve later). Are the semantic problems with CFML/CFScript (say, along the lines of the famous issues with PHP?)

There are definitely some warts that have built up along the years (mostly inconsistent function names), it's much better than PHP in my opinion. As I understand it, many of the libs in PHP come from different sources, and you get differing schemes. While it's starting to deviate, in general all dialects of CFML came from the mothership of Adobe, so it's still pretty homogenous.

I've worked with Railo. It is buggy is not written with concurrency in mind. There were threading errors that were irresolvable without updates to a platform which was not written with threading in mind.

Do not use this.

I run a small package manager for CFML on Lucee and don't have any issues with it at all. While it doesn't get any traffic right now, load testing it has shown no issues. That's more than can be said for Adobe ColdFusion.

Thanks for the feedback, but can you clarify your claims with a ticket number or a forum reference. I use Lucee on a daily basis and have seen it implemented under very heavy load with no issues. For example, the NASA Mars Rover sites run Lucee Server. Is it possible that your code base had concurrency issues of its own?

I love Lucee, long live CFML!

Website is not very helpful in understanding what it is and why I'd want to use it. How about some examples of the code? That 'learn more' page is pretty damn thin.

Only in these comments did I understand it's a coldfusion variant for the JVM... would have been nice to make that more prime real-estate

Thank you for the feedback on our web site. This post is sort of bad timing since we're actually on the brink of rolling out a new site with much better content (and code samples on the home page). Click here to see what Lucee Server's scripting syntax looks like (very similar to JS or C) https://goo.gl/D3j4UZ Also, the lack of mention regarding CFML is on purpose. Lucee is a modernized platform that wishes not to be associated with the negative stigma of legacy CFML apps. We implement the language, but with improved performance, features, and as FOSS.

All these cute little names are getting old, why not just call it JavaScript?

Because it's completely unrelated to Javascript...

It is not completely unrelated to JavaScript. CFScript is (based upon/implementation of) ECMAScript, which is in turn closely related to JS.

Touchè! haha

It's an open source implementation of ColdFusion, which runs on the JVM.

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