boomsocket Alpha One Month Later

The alpha for boomsocket has been running for just over a month now and the response has been awesome! We've gotten great feedback from alpha testers as well as clients who have been put onto the system. The alpha testers have also been fortunate enough to receive fairly regular updates as well as real time bug fixes (for big stuff) via our mailing list and direct contact with all the developers.

The development team has been hard at work polishing the code base, fixing bugs, writing documentation and even coming up with a few new features to boot! Most people seem to be concerned with the platforms which will be supported once boomsocket comes out of testing. At this time we don't have anything 100% firm (we like to be a bit more pliable then most companies) but I can tell you this is what we are thinking.

ColdFusion Version: 7 or later
Operating System: Windows 2000 or later
Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or later

Now this is just the way things are right now. We'd love to have the system running on *nix as well (and lets face it, it would not be that hard to make it work) but we currently lack the "talent" and time to really test it out, and make it work. The same can be said for getting the system to run on MySQL (which will be a larger undertaking to say the least!) But these are two very real goals we've set for ourselves by the time it goes gold.

So if you are someone who loves to work on *nix variants or dreams in MySQL code we'd love to have you as an alpha tester. Especially if you want to get your hands dirty and give us a hand during this transition. Otherwise it would be great just to have you on board for your opinions and advice.

Another thing which might rub a few of you the wrong way is the ColdFusion version we've chosen as our base. We debated this one round and round for awhile and to us it just makes more sense to support the "new" and "cool" stuff now. While we aren't actively doing a lot of specialized stuff with ColdFusion 7 we are very happy with Application.cfc and don't see any need to turn back to the Application.cfm days. This doesn't mean that with a little work someone on ColdFusion 6 couldn't get boomsocket to work, but right now we aren't going to support it or make efforts to ensure the code is backwards compatible with ColdFusion 6.

Ok as usual the comments are open so let us know what you think and if you really want to get involved head over and sign up for the alpha.