Do you have any statistics on how many people are using BoxLang. Or what kind of uptake, BoxLang is getting?
I have been a Coldfusion Dev for over 20 years now and I know the CFML Community is quite extensive.
I would like to explore BoxLang, but it will only be worthwhile, if the community develops accordingly.
I get the fact that this is a bit of a “chicken & egg” situation, but it would be nice to know, how much outreach, BoxLang is getting?
Finding Coldfusion Devs is hard enough, in the UK, but I should think finding BoxLang Devs, is even more challenging?
As a free and open source language, it’s always hard to track actual number of users. I can say that just looking at the CommandBox CF engine usage on ForgeBox which more/less tracks number of server start cfengine=boxlang commands run, there has been steady and increasing usage. We’re over 55,000 server starts, with 1,000+ new ones every week.
The community has been active, especially on Slack. Both the #box-products channel of the CFML Slack team and the #boxlang channel of the Box Team slack.
At Ortus, we also have many migration projects underway, with new ones starting every month, but coming from Lucee and ACF servers. We’re building greenfield apps in BoxLang for NASA right now, as well as a complete migration of all CF properties for the entire US Government’s Small Business Administration to BoxLang (over a million lines of code). The level of compatibility has gotten quite high to the point where many apps run with little to no code changes at this point.
We’ve also sponsored and presented at two of the biggest Java conferences in the world for the last 2 years – Devnexus (Atlanta) and JFokus (Stockholm).
finding BoxLang Devs
I think that’s the wrong approach. Just find good devs in general who understand scripting languages, MVC frameworks, testing, source control, etc. Picking up the syntax of CF or BL will be the easy part. The last two companies I’ve worked at used this strategy to find fresh CF devs to great success. I’ve found that if you have a good work environment and a modern application that’s fun to work on, you won’t have issues finding devs.