I Thought ColdFusion was Dead?
Every time a ColdFusion topic hits Digg, there are without fail more comments on the ColdFusion topic than those around it. The uneducated masses start off by attacking the post by throwing their 2 hours of experience they gained by looking at an application another beginner programmer wrote as a first test of the language. Ok, so some people have more experience than that; but with how bad the comments are I wouldn’t want to overestimate them.
So what do you say to the many reactions criticizing ColdFusion? I can’t help but run to the defense, although it’s a lost cause on most the cases, since it’s just flamebait. But some people are genuinely uninformed smart people. These are the responses that deserve a response, but what do you say?
There are a host of features that do no good to mention, and if someone wanted a technology for rapid development that are many that make it much easier than ColdFusion. ColdFusion makes enterprise development fastest. That’s it’s niche, and the recent pricing points to that. That always make me think though, what are the top sites out there actually using ColdFusion?
GotCFM.com was off to a great start but started to die down recently. The number of sites listed shot up to 800 in a matter of days, then topped off from there. I have a feeling it’s due to the huge amount of spam that probably comes through that Rey has to deal with. I think it would be amazing for a service such as Reys to use that data to analyze the sites a little more. Imagine having those sites sorted by Alexa rating, or PageRank or even Technorati rating? Being able to say “look at these top sites that use ColdFusion in the Alexa top 500!”. I ran into a list of the Top 100 Rails sites by Alexa Rating as well as a very cool article on Ranking Ruby/Rails Blogs with scRUBYt! Using Alexa and Technorati. All things that sound like fun to do in ColdFusion if someone hasn’t tried already. Ideally this would be using the data already on gotcfm, to which I’m sure Rey could get some help (I sent an email offering, we’ll see :).
Curiosity still got the better of me. Damon Coopers internal memo mentioned some big users of ColdFusion, which got me wondering more which sites use CF? Makes me want to start remixing the data and see; but that’ll have to wait until next week after the Adogo presentation I still need to prepare for.
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Comments
I was programing CF since version 5 then i had to stop against my will. Why ? Because companies other than those who work with Fortune 500 cannot afford those prices.
Small companies also need enterprise software, but this does not mean that the developers would be able to charge them to cover the costs of CF server.
So in a word, its a pity that such a great piece of technology does not target the masses.
I do not get it what is in your heads when you speak so much about “niche”, only if already are a millionaire bye working with tools like this for large F500 companies.
All of you you speak this way are just people who are afraid that if more developers come to CF then their salaries would decrease.
What happens with CF now is what happened to Central, Flex 1 and Remoting (good that for this we have viable, better alternatives - yes i know about BlueDragon, does not apply here)
Hey Iogion, I’d absolutely love to see CF’s price lowered to the point that an entire userbase of lower priced enterprise development companies could rise to compete with the open source ones. More CF developers isn’t a bad thing, and I didn’t mean to suggest I liked the new price point for CF. It’s not within our control however, but sounds like you’d agree that it prices many developers out of the language that aren’t working for larger companies (or found a formula that works with their smaller one). I’d like to say CF wasn’t a niche, and I do think it offers so many innovative approaches that work for the web better than any other language, but at it’s price it’s hard not to.
I’ll have to agree with you completely on the last point — to an extent at least. Although CF8 was a huge step for CF, and those working with will (hopefully) upgrade and love the new features, I see less newcomers approaching the language with the increased price. Hopefully it doesn’t get to the point of the technologies you mentioned though, which CF as a software has much wider appeal.
I have to say, I think the “price” argument is a crock of sh**. The truth is, a small company can start with hosted solutions for quite cheap (as cheap as PHP solutions), and move on to CF Standard when they are ready. You really only need Enterprise if you pass the “2 million hits” a day mark.
So, let’s draw a distinction between “price” and “cost”. Is there an initial upfront cost to deploying CF? But let’s put this in perspective, if you have a full time developer costing you 65k (after tax, benefits, etc, thats still pretty cheap), and your initial outlay is, we’ll say 3xstandard licenses=$4500. That’s 6% of your developer (not total IT) costs, which will last you 3 years.
For that you get the productivity gains that you just cannot get on any other web development language, and great features, to boot. That’s long term productivity, that will lower your total cost of ownership.
Is it niche? Sure. What’s wrong with that? Those of us that invest in CF have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. Many of the companies that use CF use it for intranet / extranet sites, so you’ll never see them (I know many large companies that use CF - not sure if I’m allowed publicize them, so I won’t if you don’t mind).
And so they should, Intranets amd internal apps are a perfect place for CF to live - lots of user interaction and dynamic content.
I think this is a great step forward for CF. It was just what the product needed - the AJAX features alone are its selling point. This is going to give those that use CF a SERIOUS competitive advantage in the marketplace. Roll on!
Cheers,
Davo
Unfortunately that last Digg comment on the page you linked to was much too true in my case.
It took only about an hour for my nearly 1.5 GB of available RAM to be swallowed up. Needless to say, we quickly reverted back to version 7.
Hopefully Adobe (or myself) can track down the problem soon. I’m quite eager to begin using the new features of CF8.
As someone that “criticizes” ColdFusion, its mostly because I’ve always considered it an amateur technology for people that never quite wanted to graduate past markup languages. That combined with some high profile CF websites, the main one being MySpace, being pretty much the pinnacle of poor software design only serves to support my opinion. That said, I haven’t tried CF since back when it was owned by Allaire so it might be different now. .NET integration would be pretty useful though (C# = amazing).
Andy,
Give it a second look - I think you’ll find a massive difference. Plus, please don’t blame bad programming / architecture processes on the language (i.e., paint us all with the same brush). I’m sure there are plenty of poorly written .Net sites out there too!
Davo
@David
Very true point about the developer salary vs CF licensing cost. If you have the budget to pay for in house developers that would be a great place for a CF shop. In addition to having a lot of the problems of web dev solved for your team already, it offers great support, fast development and official support.
For other situations where there is no in house staff the lines are a little more blurred. If I’m a development company and developing sites for clients coming in off the streets, the price would be a larger concern. If the price of a project is $15 for instance, and they want to be able to take the cost and leave (find their own host) then you have a reason to question if CF is the right tool for the job. That’s not a simple answer, because it depends on which “core” CF functionality makes it worth doing in CF rather than doing it in PHP or Rails. There
are certainly cases for both.
@Kris
Using up all the memory? Ouch that sucks. Hope it’s resolved sooner than later.
@Andy
Myspace.com certainly seems like a posterchild of poor design, but I think of it the other way. Instead of mentioning how their site started to fail when it was well in the Alexa 300, using a 4+ year old version of CF, I think it’s amazing it scaled that high in the first place! They were using a framework (fusebox 3) which didn’t add too much overhead, but it was behind the fastest version (FB4/5), which shows how much the two of them can scale without redesigning the application or switching the application server. Unfortunately I don’t know the depth of caching or database optimization they used, but I do know they were using ColdFusion 5.
There are an awful lot of developers in CF who didn’t get past markup languages though. I’d say it’s probably on par with the PHP community (perhaps less) who also didn’t get objects until PHP 5 (around the same time CF6 introduced objects).
.NET integration does seem slick though! With the Java integration already in there it’s really becoming a great middleware language as well.
Re the price argument: my company is not what I’d consider “enterprise”, yet we can easily afford our dedicated CF7/Linux/MySql setup at around $450/month. It came with a CF Standard license. We get around 2 million page views a month, and our setup is quite easily handling the traffic, with the application and database servers on the same box (I know that setup is frowned upon, but it’s working fine for us so far.) If we do need to scale we will buy another server for the database. If you can’t afford the dedicated setup, a shared host such as HostMySite will work fine for a smaller company.
Hey Adam, I’m open to adding that type of functionality into GotCFM.com if you guys have some time to help out. If you have the code, I can do the DB tie in. Email me and we’ll get it rolling.
@Dmitry: I think you already have some of this built so contact me to add it into GotCFM
@Adam
“(perhaps less) who also didn’t get objects until PHP 5 (around the same time CF6 introduced objects).”
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. php has had classes and objects since version 3. It wasn’t terribly useful until version 4, but it existed and was used in tons of libraries. Check out http://pear.php.net/
php5 changed the object model to be more java-esque, and added things like access control and better pass by reference behavior, and of course php5 had methods for dynamically setting properties and calling methods, destructors and all kinds of things that don’t exist in CF or weren’t added until CF8 (onMethodMissing) too…
Not trying to start a flame war here, and I’m really not a php dan, just presenting the facts. 
@Elliott Sprehn
Good to know! I wonder what I was thinking of when I wrote that actually; I had a site in PHP 4 that used objects. Probably just so long ago I’d forgotten what version I was running. Thanks for the correction.
Coldfusion is the Cobol of the web programming languages. It might not be “dead” but it most certainly isn’t being used by anyone with a clue.
@Daniel
I’d agree that it WILL be the Cobol of web programming languages, but I wouldn’t say it’s there yet. Right now Adobe is actively supporting it, with new versions coming out still with up to date features (although not in the style that I use). Surprisingly enough though, CF has been going up on the Tiobe Index, and is one spot away from the top 20.
That being said, I’m not using ColdFusion for any personal projects.
Coldfusion is dead or dying. If I owned a company and was running a Coldfusion server, I would not hire Coldfusion developers, but rather Java developers and would move away from Coldfusion in new development and port the old apps to Java. The newest Coldfusion server from Adobe is a J2EE (Java) server that simply has an interpreter for their oldschool proprietary CFM script integrated into it along with some flash and PDF functionality. There is also an open source Coldfusion servlet that can be deployed on any J2EE server, but it lacks the flash and PDF functionality at present. To make a long story short, Coldfusion needs to give way to Java. If anyone says, “no but Coldfusion is more powerful than Java,” then please go take a cold shower, then read up on the fact that Coldfusion is simply a scripting language being interpreted by a Java server–Java is doing all the work. What Adobe ought to do is just sell JAR files that give Java developers flash and PDF functionality, because that’s all we need. We don’t need that old antiquated and bloated scripting language. Java is the way to go. And you can program in Java on Adobe’s Coldfusion server, and CFM and JSP files share the same session. You can have a form submit to a CFM file and it can save a session variable, then later a JSP file can access that session. This was a wise move for Adobe, but it could potentially be the death knell for Coldfusion developers if stupid recruiters and IT managers would ever wise up and realize it, but alas they’re all morons, so you oldschool Coldfusion developers are safe….for now.
“Coldfusion is the Cobol of the web programming languages. It might not be ‘dead’ but it most certainly isn’t being used by anyone with a clue.” (Daniel)
Very true. And if anyone with a clue is stuck at a company the uses a Coldfusion server, they’re doing their development in Java on that server (since, for the clueless, CF is a Java Server now).
For the record, as of 4/08 ColdFusion is #20 on the Tiobe Index, up from #31 this time last year. I guess the “corpse” is still twitching after all…
I really like your description of CF’s niche =)