
Lucee – A lightweight dynamic scripting language for the JVM - sarabad2021
http://lucee.io
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wmblaettler
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.

~~~
allemagne
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.

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Edmond
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.

~~~
bdcravens
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)

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Edmond
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 :)

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berdon
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...

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ythl
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...](http://docs.lucee.org/guides/getting-started/first-steps.html)

~~~
aepearson
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.

~~~
bdw429s
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!

~~~
aepearson
Thank you for the correction!

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

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allemagne
Once you get Lucee up and running:

[http://www.learncfinaweek.com/](http://www.learncfinaweek.com/)

~~~
bdcravens
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.

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

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kazinator
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?)

~~~
bdcravens
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.

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voodootrucker
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.

~~~
bdw429s
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?

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aepearson
I love Lucee, long live CFML!

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azinman2
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

~~~
bdw429s
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](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.

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

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aepearson
Because it's completely unrelated to Javascript...

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

~~~
aepearson
Touchè! haha

