ColdFusion is NOT Dying
If you’ve been keeping up with recent ColdFusion news, ComputerWorlds recent article, The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills rated ColdFusion as the #5 dying skill. If you’re wanting a bit more unresearched comments, you can also read the Digg comments for this one.
Rebuttals have been made all around the blogosphere including responses by Ben Forta, Ray Camden and David Fekke amongst many others. It’s about time for my $.02 on the topic.
First off, ComputerWorld issued a response to the article titled Readers question ‘dead skills’ list after recent comments from the Cobol, ColdFusion and C communities. When I read this next line though, that’s when the laughter started:
One reader noted that “the first person interviewed [in the article] is head of the CS department at Bentley.edu. Their home page is www.bentley.edu/index.cfm, which is ColdFusion. Look in their employment page, they are looking for a ColdFusion developer. Is it just me, or is it amusing that the author interview[ed] someone whose institution is implementing a dying technology?”
Yes, that is quite amusing. It’s also amusing that David Foote, president of Foote Partners ranked Cold Fusion one of the hottest technologies to learn in the fourth quarter of 2006 (as noted by DK in a comment to Fortas post). Unfortunately that was 6 months ago — and it was Cold Fusion and not ColdFusion. There will always be people that don’t like a language with good reason, but this article was nothing more than an ignorant stab at a technology the author knew next to nothing about. She might read lots of articles about the other languages and assume that means there are less of the other; but researchers are supposed to, well, research — not just assume based on their sphere of news.
The main problem isn’t this article though, it’s that the author isn’t alone in their view. The “outside world” doesn’t hear much about ColdFusion. How often do you see things on Digg, Del.icious or the Technorati top 100 blogs that mention ColdFusion in a good light? Chances are it’s rare, or more likely next to never. The lack of publicity drives a product to obscurity! I wouldn’t be surprised if most peoples opinions about how “bad” CF is is based entirely on this obscurity (well, and bandwagon effect). It takes something that other people can actually use and benefit for a feature to break through and gain respect.
The main reason people state for this is bad marketing of the product, to which I agree with to an extent. But as Rails proved you don’t need a good marketing campaign to hook in developers, you need good development tools! For as long as I can remember ColdFusion has had absolutely great tools available through tags, but how many non-CF developers know about this? Or Model-Glue scaffolding? Or Reactor, Coldspring, Transfer or Coldbox? Most of CF’s obscurity has been because it’s hard to show these kinds of thing off. It’s the same reason you don’t see eye catching Java posts. CSS, JS and scaffolding are what draw people in now a days; or at least the new LAMP developers.
These might not all be the kind of developers a language wants (or in CF’s case they might not be able to afford it), but it helps to boost confidence in the product from the ground up. You can group the novices impressed with the flashy and new with the CIO impressed with the same. Most people look at CF’s price tag and think it’s so expensive they can’t justify the cost. The CF community always argues that you’ll make the money back in development costs. Proving something like this through some examples would also be a great step towards settling those questioning it.
Hopefully with CF8 coming us CF developers can pull out some great, eye catching, useful tools that will help us and draw some new respect and attention to CF — plus some tutorials for the new developers that are often forgotten. New developers take a new version as a chance to start fresh in language — why not grab as many new developers as we can?
“But as Rails proved you don’t need a good marketing campaign to hook in developers, you need good development tools!”
Actually, 37Signals marketed the hell out of Rails. They just did it via non traditional means.
@Ed
Very true. Worked out well whatever they did. I meant marketing budget more than marketing in general.
Do you think open vs. closed source has anything to do with this? Most open source platforms have low barriers to entry, thus many people can try it out, comment and reflect on it. One might argue that is why PHP has a larger following than CF.
IMHO, the success of technologies like PHP has very little to do with marketing, though word of mouth helps take it pretty far.
What ColdFusion would need is a server environment that hosts can easily, and cheaply, install configure and run, along with a vibrant community, and helpful documentation.
To be honest, I’ve never used CF, but I have seen it’s syntax, and from what I’ve seen, another barrier to entry, though small, is it’s syntax. PHP benefitted greatly because it borrowed from Perl, C++, and Java(script).
The code is easy to understand if you’ve any of those languages, and while CF has an HTML like syntax, it may make it a tad bit harder to get up on.
Of course, that’s easily overcome with the community and docs.
Personally, I think Adobe would be better off open sourcing CF, and selling support services around the product, rather than expecting people to adopt a whole new technology.
Of course, that’s just me
I have seen the new ColdFusion demo by Forta. It’s amazing that they have some new features that will enhance the application and shorten the development time. However, I also have seen the Yahoo YUI footprint in the new ColdFusion. Why will I use the mutated YUI while I can integrate it and customize it by myself.
I have been with ColdFusion since 1997, I love ColdFusion’s easy and simply. However, the web hosting for ColdFusion is just too much more than PHP web hosting. If Adobe can make ColdFusion an easier platform for hosting, and drop the price, I believe more people will adopt ColdFusion.
I will be interested in learning Ruby. Sounds easier than ColdFusion.
coldFusion is closed source, more expensive to host, too specific (even php can be used for scripting non-html things) and different from other leading languages on the bunch (syntatically and in terms of IDE). If it’s not dying, I think it really should be…
@Chris
Good question. If CF was open source from the start I really wonder where it would have gone. There probably wouldn’t be a handful of alternate engines out there if everyone could collaborate on one — but then again if you build a better mousetrap you can always sell it. ColdFusion has free version developer version though, and it installs MUCH easier than PHP on IIS and Apache from my experience, but that has done little to drive the free players. I think hosting has shaped it more than anything to be honest. I know when I was in college I chose PHP for my site because it was cheap and abundant — practically every host supports it. Looking for a CF host even now — 7 years later — is troublesome. If there was a free version for webhosts that was supported on a variety of linux platforms then it’d be amazing how many hosts would suddenly start offering it. If only they could give it away to them!
@Nate Cavanaugh
I think my terminology was wrong, but I agree with you. No marketing budget exactly, but marketing through word of mouth, and showing off how easy things are is so much more useful. I’d definitely agree on the hosting part though as I mentioned above.
What’s odd for adobe is that this is a server rather than a platform. I mean think about Adobe for a minute and how many of their products are servers? Only ones that come to mind are Flex Data Services (which i think is free unless you get the enterprise version) and Breeze (I think there’s a breeze server?). I’d love it if CF went the route of Flex and developed a kick-ass IDE and sold THAT, then gave away CF standard and sold CF Enterprise. I know I’d buy the IDE myself, and use the standard version and on the off chance a site took off I’d upgrade to enterprise. This would see standard deployed for free on linux hosts too I imagine.
@Terence Chang
Hosting seems to be the repeating issue. Hopefully things will be looking up in CF8 for that. I share the concerns about the JS features as well. I can certainly see some cases when they’d be useful, but maybe not each and every feature.
Those are pretty much my sentiments Adam. I particularly agree about the “outside world” and the bandwagon effect… I’ve written my own followup blog post here:
http://www.madfellas.com/blog/index.cfm/2007/5/29/ColdFusion-is-born-again-IMO
I don’t really think open source an issue (though that might be nice), I think it’s more likely just the almighty dollar sign attached to the product. It doesn’t have to be open source to be free, does it?
If CF8 standard was free, it would be huge news. Massive news. People wouldn’t be able to download it quick enough. And if there were some smoking hot CF8 demos that really showed off the power and beauty of the language, Adobe would have a real winner on their hands. More customers using the free product means more customers who could potentially upgrade to the enterprise product. I’d be surprised if Adobe haven’t contemplated this a hundred times over already, particularly in light of the recent open source surprises
We are a small shop, and started out with CF 3.5 however, when it came time to expand (more web sites and services) we went with open source LAMP boxes.
It was that or sit around on hour thumbs as there was no funding for semi-anual licenses.
I have since found the LAMP environment just as powerfull and in some ways better than CF in that it is way easyer to configure than the Win/CF set up.
[...] http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=514&tag=rbxccnbtr1 Url: http://www.adamfortuna.com/2007/05/28/coldfusion-is-not-dying/ Url: [...]
I have been a web designer for past 10 years and I have not seen anything so convoluted and more primitive than coldfusion.
It is good toy for kids to put up a web site.
All I have heard is people complaining that ColdFusion is not free or open sources. Programming language are like cars some are cheaper than other for example Porsche and VW are owned by the same company if you want to ride in a sports car you have to spend the bucks to buy a Porsche if you want a economical car by VW.
Every language will not accomplish every task but, some them will work better with other languages than others.