Hi Lucee team,
First, I am a huge fan and love what you do.
For me, Lucee is a productivity tool that helps me build apps quickly.
Despite what features might be available on CF, and now BoxLang, Lucee provides everything I need.
The reason I am reaching out is to know what plans you have for the future. There has not been much in the way of blog posts or announcements.
Can you please share your insights and thoughts?
I’m sure I’m not the only one who loves Lucee 
Cheers
A thought: click on the link to lucee-6 (to the left). You will be taken to a page discussing the latest developments. There is also the Lucee blog.
Thanks for that BK_BK.
Please understand that the last post on the Lucee blog was back in 2023. The latest developments were back in July discussing Java 21.
I’m curious about Lucee’s direction in light of what is going on with ACH, and Ortus. One thought is maybe the team is trying to keep a low profile.
Lucee is a great product. Although it is not an easy task, my hope is Lucee continues supporting legacy apps built with Lucee, but can somehow further break away from ACH. The .lucee dialect was an interesting thought, but did not see the light of day, but there could be other ideas.
Lucee can’t be everything to everybody, nor should it be. I think a sensible path for Lucee is to continue building a simple platform that is fast, reliable, and allows you to easily build solid backend services.
With more competition, the team may have to share more on what makes Lucee the best choice for specific solutions. It would be great to hear what Michael and the team have to say.
Cheers
I am also interesting in the state of things at Lucee. I have used, followed and occasionally contributed to Lucee over the years. I have reviewed what I could find today.
The dev Team does a great job but they have limited resources. According to the website it is:
@micstriit
@Igal
@Pothys
Most of the communications has been from @Zackster but he stopped answering post back in 2023.
As I’ve already posted here Lucee is community driven. This beautiful software is open source, so you can see their work on a daily basis at github and Jira. You can also subscribe to their github repos and you’ll be notified whenever they merge something. Also, have you been with the cfml community on slack?
I know they haven’t been posting much here, but their resources are very limited. That doesn’t mean they haven’t been working on Lucee.
Roadmaps and such go along way in helping other companies make decisions. Yes, I reviewed the repo. Lucee is alive and being worked on daily.
That being said the BoxLang.io seems to come out of no where. I assume there will be some impact on Lucee to that decision. I wish both project great success.
I for one would love to be able to support Lucee more.
That being said the BoxLang.io seems to come out of no where. I assume there will be some impact on Lucee to that decision. I wish both project great success.
I took a look at the BoxLang website. The media stories about it are marked “sponsored”, it’s not free and I don’t want to bother learning yet another language when free Lucee CFML does all I need and I have 25 years of experience using it. Plus, I have never used anything made by Ortus, so even if they drop their support for CFML/Lucee entirely in favor of this new BoxLang stuff, I have zero reason to care at all; it won’t impact me at all.
I’ll just keep using plain old Lucee as I always have.
Hey @ToroMaduro, Awesome, that’s what I want to see, way to go
And to you @andreas, I think @apenhorwood and I are on the same page on this.
The question isn’t about a concern, bug, or lack of commits, we love Lucee. It is a question on marketing.
If you want a new team to onboard Lucee, time is better spent on sales, no matter how limited your resources are.
Sponsored or not, another platform is eating your lunch.
I’ve thrown the team a softball, hopefully someone finally steps up to the plate, and slams it out of the park
Tell everyone why Lucee is great, and why teams should use it for the next 5+ years.
Hi everyone,
This is indeed a very important topic and as mentioned above we have
There have been some exciting new features lately, and I’m sure that @micstriit will communicate about those soon
Personally, I am planning to make enhancements, and am on the lookout for such things.
For example, right now I am when it comes to Base64 - we have outdated implementation as many times nowadays we want to use URL-safe Base64 encoding for a variety of protocols, so I plan to add functions Base64Encode() and Base64Decode() and deprecate the old toBase64() and the weird decode way.
If there are other enhancements that Lucee users want then please bring them up in JIRA or start a discussion here.
I have limited time to contribute to the project, usually on weekends, and even that is split with contributing to the Tomcat project.
@Igal - Thanks for the update much appreciated. I also asked Adobe about their plans since the current roadmap of Adobe CF only covered the next few years.
Adobe CF2025 will be discussed at CF Summit happening in Vegas on Sept 30. That is next week. It is a good time to be a CF developer.
If you want a new team to onboard Lucee, time is better spent on sales, no matter how limited your resources are.
Sponsored or not, another platform is eating your lunch.
Eating Lucee’s lunch on marketing and publicity, maybe. Eating Lucee’s lunch on adoption, no way, at least not now and likely not for a long time to come.
But your point on sales/marketing is correct. But, Ortus charges money for much of their stuff, which means they HAVE money for sales/marketing. Lucee almost certainly has less money for that.
So the challenge is how to raise awareness for free or almost no money. A great way is for all of us to tell lots of people we use Lucee, especially on forums usually dominated by the trendy and popular languages “the cool kids” are using.
It’s ZERO cost, and it can be highly effective to do this. Just one post like that gets people thinking, “Huh? What’s this ‘Lucee’ thing, and why is this guy so happy with it?” and they start doing some searches, which can lead to them downloading the Express version and trying it, which necessitates Googling some more to learn the CFML and cfscript languages, plus they may find articles about how quick and easy it is to build really powerful systems with it, which very possibly creates a new convert!
So be vocal, folks. Don’t get preachy, but just mention that you use Lucee and it’s very powerful and yet very simple and easy and fast. And, be unapologetic about it. No tone of “Well, I know it’s unusual and few people use it, but…” Nope. Speak about it in the same tone you would as if it were one of the highly-popular trendy languages. Just be matter-of-fact about it, to imply that it’s a serious language (which it is) and that may get the reader thinking that hey, this appears to be pretty legit and powerful if this guy’s talking so openly about it without reservations or caveats.
This can be very powerful. And like I said, FREE! I’ve turned on a number of people to Lucee by doing this.
Hey @Igal, thank you for chiming in, very much appreciated. I love your work by the way. You are a Tomcat monster
And to ToroMaduro, yes I agree 100%. It gives me some ideas.
Yes. I agree. I try to get everywhere I work to switch to Lucee. I am a Senior ColdFusion Dev going back to the CF 4.5 days. Yes that pre-dates CF on Java. It has been a hard sell when it comes to corporate America. Now days corporate America is switching from CF to .Net. The main reason is really badly written CF code by people who should never be allowed to touch a keyboard and the lack of CF devs. They tell me the last part. I have learned the first part.
Back to Lucee. Here are a few ideas
Here are some “hard facts” about coldfusion in general.
Some of the largest most actively attempted to be breached websites, such as the US Senate, Run ColdFusion and Mura CMS.
The ROI on coldfusion is approximately 800+ percent over Java & .NET in that
ColdFusion is able to run either or both, and more if needed
ColdFusion development is well over 900+ percent faster on any project compared to Java.
ColdFusion does not require refactoring every time java makes a minor update
ColdFusion adoption is low and called a “Dead language” by Java developers and Python Developers, as ColdFusion does eat their lunch.
ColdFusion is not pushed by SAAS companies in general as those companies make a fortune constantly spending time refactoring their code base as the language constantly shifts, where as ColdFusion written in a book in 2000, with few exceptions to formatting tags, will run as expected. You can not say the same for python, .net, php, ectra.
ColdFusion is used extensively in the Enterprise section, fortune 1000s, and over 80 percent of the Fortune 100.
ColdFusion is “trusted” enough for active development inside various parts of the U.S. Government, (NASA, DOD, DOJ, US SENATE, US HOUSE, FAA, GSA to name a few) as well as various state governments.
Several of the largest stock brokerages on wall street run ColdFusion, and to them uptime and performance is everything.
Personal observation
Lucee is the best CFML engine. I have worked on CF projects for the past 25+ years. Adobe CF at my day job and Lucee / Railo at night. Anything Adobe CF can do Lucee just does better.
The more the industry says CF is dead the more companies pay me to develop in CF.
I like these ideas, but for the success stories, we need to be told by users. Since lucee doesn’t sell licenses we dont have a direct connection with people using it. Maybe a “Send us your success story” form might help? (and related marketing efforts)
The “Runs on Lucee” or “Lucee inside!” type badges might be good but not sure people expose that on their sites?
There are a couple of audiences methinks: CTO’s and Developers, so new shiny features are great to add to the language.
Hey Mark,
Thanks for chiming in, I’m happy to see this thread get some traction.
The whole point is to push marketing, the technical aspects of Lucee are really good.
It’s safe to say that DistroKid runs Lucee somewhere, but I had no idea about the US Senate using Mura as mentioned by Terry.
In our world of JavaScript everything, I’m sure you agree there are solid reasons to have Lucee as your backend. That is what I think needs to be emphasized.
Yeah, we all love shiny new objects (I’m guilty as charged). But as a suggestion, maybe think in terms of what headaches Lucee can solve, and less in terms of features. Yes, Lucee is free, but it goes way beyond that.
Cheers
Maybe have side-by-side screenshots of a code editor.
Left side - shows how doing a certain task in Lucee takes 1-3 lines of super-clear, super-simple tags that are so intuitive that a random guy chosen off the street could probably look at it and figure out what it does, plus it’s trivially easy to maintain or change.
Right side - shows how doing the same task in (pick language here, for example Java) takes 50+ lines of needlesly-complex boilerplate code that’s complicated as heck and not easily understandable at all and very difficult to maintain or change.
Maybe make a meme image with two to four of these side-by-sides, each labelled with the task being performed (“Sending an email”, “Making a chart”, “Making a PDF file”, etc.).
It’d speak for itself. The left side would be a few clear lines plus lots and lots of empty space, while the right side would be a dense, complicated mass of code.
You could even size-reduce the images to where the code is barely readable (or not readable at all), because the sheer visual difference in the AMOUNT of code would be visually striking.
That’s what I love about Lucee and CFML the most - no B.S. Everything is SHORT and CLEAR, with none of the complex spammy crap that other languages require. Easy to write, VERY easy to maintain.
I’m a Java/Spring dev who is looking into Lucee as a rapid dev tool for internal projects. For what it’s worth - from my perspective the thing that would spike adoption is to tie into the Spring ecosystem. I don’t really see Lucee the server fitting in our environment because our apps are mainly spring boot based - but I would love to choose cfscript as the dynamic language and cfml as the template engine for a spring boot app.
Well if you are a “java / springboot” developer" and would like to see that, nothing says “do it” more than forking the current version of lucee and making it happen.