Nobody uses ColdFusion anymore

[dutter]

Ok, I know that people do still develop with it. I'm just trying to find out why when so many viable free options for application development exist. Tell me why I'm wrong about ColdFusion.

More...

[CFMunster]

ColdFusion is more than just a language. It is a development platform that bundles database connectors, clustering, search, PDF creation, Flex integration, and asynchronous gateways including connectors for JMS and SMS. How many of these "free" languages offer so much functionality integrated into the core platform in such an easy-to-use package? CF also gives you the power to dive down into Java and do things that CF doesn't handle.

Let's look at the cost issue for a moment. From a developer's point of view, if you are working on a web-based app that is small enough to be hosted on a shared server, the cost of the server license is irrelevant- hosting providers pay those fees. If you are working on an app that is big enough to need dedicated hardware, a few thousand dollars for the enterprise license fee is going to be a tiny fraction of the cost of application development.

What about IDEs? You can buy Dreamweaver, or you can use CFEclipse, one of the highest-rated Eclipse plugins. Not only is CFE free, it allows you to build CF projects in the same Eclipse IDE as your Java projects. In short, the cost of CFMX- bother from a server and tools standpoint, is no barrier to entry for developers.

As to the CF job market, a quick search on Monster turned up over 900 current job posting for CF. New jobs, often several a day, pop up on the CF job boards. I know of several startups using CF as their primary development platform, though I would wager that most CF development is, like in years past, behind in the firewall in corporate environments.

Outsourcing CF jobs isn't really a great option, whereas Java and .NET jobs are being outsourced everyday. There seems to be a serious lack of CF skills in India, where everyone learns either Java or .NET. In fact, the lure of offshore development seems to be, in my anecdotal experience, the biggest reason companies are switching from CF to other technologies. Good for companies, but not necessarily good for developers in North America or Europe.

In terms of market competitiveness to Adobe, there are options for CFML development other than ColdFusion. New Atlanta makes a product called Blue Dragon that runs on Java and .NET and is very competitive with CFMX's feature set. There is a third platform for CFML development called Railo that comes in a free community edition if you don't need things like the bundled search. Railo comes in commercial flavors as well. Also, the primary CFML platform, ColdFusion, is a commercial product supported by Adobe, one of the biggest players in software today.

There is one area of Web development where CF is totally inappropriate today - bundled or embedded applications. Take home-office routers from DLink, Linksys, etc. That class of products always includes a Web-based admin tool. The licensing fee for most CFML platforms precludes CFML from being considered as an option, although I am guessing that a serious company might be able to make a deal with Railo or New Atlanta that would at least make CFML-based development an option.

Lastly, and most importantly for those of us who have been CF developers for a long time, CF is a fun language to work with. It boasts mature frameworks like Fusebox and Mach-II, up-and-coming frameworks like Model-Glue, and other free packages like Coldspring and Reactor that offer tremendous functionality for no fee. CFMX has attracted a whole new generation of developers who love the combination of ease of use and powerful features, and the developer community is more vibrant than ever.

All in all, it's good to be a CF developer.

Regards,

Rob

[meddlingwithfire]

In one sentence -- I do more in ColdFusion faster than my programming chums do with JSPs or PHP, and the code looks cleaner to boot.

As the above poster mentioned, there are oodles of features that come packed into ColdFusion. They make development faster, meaning I can spend more time fine-tuning my sites for my customers' specific needs.

Jeremy Geelan of CFDJ (http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/) wrote a solid article outlining far more eloquently than I the solid points of using ColdFusion. Gah, I wish I had a link to the article now -- I have the actual paper magazine at work (I'll see if I can dig it up tomorrow). The jist of it was that you'll make back all the money you spent on purchasing the server by cutting your development time.

CF is a RAD tool for Java web applications. It takes the best, most used functionality you'd want from your JSP and makes it easier for you to code. If CF doesn't have a tag for what you want, you can take advantage of the Java API at will. Build custom classes, custom tags, and whatever else you need to get the job done. In my experience as a CF programmer, I've never *had* to resort to such methods. ColdFusion out of the box does practically everything I need i to. Saves me time (not to mention headaches :)), and lets me spend more time tweaking the "web experience" aspect of the site rather than gritting my teeth debugging an app.

Thinking to web 2.0. How does PHP connect to a Flash Application? Most of the examples I see from the PHP world involve creating XML files, and passing them into the Flash application. How does ColdFusion do it? I just have Flash make a call to a function in my CFC that I've already written for my non-flash version. I don't even have to deal with converting my Query object to an Array. ColdFusion does that for me. Want to use Flex 2 with ColdFusion? No problem -- Works the same way. This is THE reason I love Adobe these days -- Everything works together seamlessly. I don't need to waste time searching online for solutions because Adobe's already built them and packaged them into the API.

It's well worth shelling out some dollars to streamline your development process and build better experiences for the customer. Especially if you are thinking of leveraging Adobe's near-monopoly on visually interesting content (Flash & Flex).

[jtracking]

My sites have mostly been written in html/xml with php integration where needed but recently started working for a company that uses cf for their corporate site and having to pick up the language was quite fun, interesting and easy to learn.

It really seems easy to do quite a bit that php would take a tad longer to acheive.

All and all I must say that I'm enjoying coldfusion development a lot more than I expected.

[Shift4SMS]

I have to agree with all the previous posts. The license fee is the drawback but for most projects, and especially larger projects, the development and maintenence savings should more than cover the license costs.

BTW, I'm surprised no one has blasted CF yet taunting to use free this or free that - when they do (it's just a matter of time based on hundreds of threads on this same topic!), factor in the development costs and time to market and you'll see the real advantage of CF.

[Dinghus]

Having used many languages, I have found CF the easiest and most powerful of all the languages for web development.

It is also NOT for standalone application development like C or VB. Just as VB should never have been used to do web development.

PHP seems to be a VB-lite version for the web.

[Orion]

CF is fairly easy and looks clean and it's definitely powerful.

however...

over and above the server licencing fees.. development fees for a project in cf average about 3x that of development fees for the same functionality in php or asp .net

I've seen many issues with sites coded in cf in regards to seo.

There are not a lot of cold fusion developers out there (relatively) and so another huge issue can be that when your site developer moves on you may not be able to replace them. I know a few cf developers that won't work for less than 120k per year. those I've met that will work for $60k a year simply can't do many of the things our clients have required.

It is a great language, don't get me wrong, but it's geared more for the high end market I think.

[SEOforGoogle]

It is a great language, don't get me wrong, but it's geared more for the high end market I think.

As much as I love CF, and use it as much as I can for all of my sites, I would still use .NET for a very "high-end" site.

My only issue with CF is that it's easy to get the Server hung up and unless you have the hardware to crunch the processing, it can sometimes be a deterrent.

Otherwise, I'll take CF over any other language everytime!

[cfrandy]

Originally Posted by Orion

I've seen many issues with sites coded in cf in regards to seo.

Orion,

I would really like to know what the issues are regarding SEO and Coldfusion. You are not the first person to mention this. I know someone else who has been doing SEO since the birth of the internet, and they said the same thing. I asked them to show me examples or even give me a theoretical example and they could not. Remember we are talking about present day CF not CF 1.0 days.

Thanks!

Randy

[Loathe]

To be honest I'm surprised to hear this question coming from someone that has obviously done some minimal research.

You mention several of our communities biggest and most well known advocates, you see the money that is being made off of publication of ColdFusion resources, now let’s touch on just a bit of what CF can actually offer you.

One of the biggest complaints that I hear about CF is the cost of the license. Now, I am a government developer. This means of course that we can usually get reduced pricing as Macromedia, and now Adobe, really has seen the largest growth of CF in the government sector, and I think they would like to continue that growth.

The licensing is greatly offset by the ease and speed of development and the built in integration with many cutting edge technologies such as Web Services, Flash, Flex, Ajax and the new gateways and listeners opening the possibilities into a further expansion of the technologies that CF will easily interact with.

SEO complaints are unfair. If you are a good developer and know what you are doing you can easily optimize any site or application for search engine crawling. Any language can be badly written. That is dependent on the developer at hand. The fact that CF seems to have a higher number of non-traditional programmers, ones that maybe didn't go to college or didn't intended to become developers, seems to have created a glut of bad applications. This isn't the fault of either the language or the application server. You can see very close similarity in some of the PHP projects that are out there that are horribly written.

Something else that I think is important to point out. The majority of development done in CF is for web based applications, not web sites. The audience for CF is working on closed systems for government and industry intranet applications primarily.

Additional attention I think needs to be paid to the government angle. A lot of the developers I know work in defense, law enforcement and intelligence. We cannot talk about a lot of the applications we work on. They are classified. However if you go to the Adobe site you can see the depth and breadth of the agencies that are using CF for internal software development.

Anyway, I have to be honest; I think your original article was both uninformed and offensive to me as a CF developer. I just did a search for ColdFusion jobs on monster.com and came up with hundreds of jobs. These jobs are not low level and low pay positions with some piker web dev shed; these are senior level positions in corporate and government circles.

I am happy with CF, even though I have and continue to write other languages, it is my preference for doing browser based applications. I make a good living, and I am able to continue to expand my skill set and my abilities.

Finally, I'm Tim/Loathe, from over at House of Fusion. No one over there is hiding from you; honestly we were just discussing what seemed to be your obvious distaste for the language, coupled with your obvious lack of knowledge about CF, as a language, an application server or a community of developers.

[Loathe]

Originally Posted by meddlingwithfire

In one sentence -- I do more in ColdFusion faster than my programming chums do with JSPs or PHP, and the code looks cleaner to boot.

As the above poster mentioned, there are oodles of features that come packed into ColdFusion. They make development faster, meaning I can spend more time fine-tuning my sites for my customers' specific needs.

Jeremy Geelan of CFDJ (http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/) wrote a solid article outlining far more eloquently than I the solid points of using ColdFusion. Gah, I wish I had a link to the article now -- I have the actual paper magazine at work (I'll see if I can dig it up tomorrow). The jist of it was that you'll make back all the money you spent on purchasing the server by cutting your development time.

CF is a RAD tool for Java web applications. It takes the best, most used functionality you'd want from your JSP and makes it easier for you to code. If CF doesn't have a tag for what you want, you can take advantage of the Java API at will. Build custom classes, custom tags, and whatever else you need to get the job done. In my experience as a CF programmer, I've never *had* to resort to such methods. ColdFusion out of the box does practically everything I need i to. Saves me time (not to mention headaches :)), and lets me spend more time tweaking the "web experience" aspect of the site rather than gritting my teeth debugging an app.

Thinking to web 2.0. How does PHP connect to a Flash Application? Most of the examples I see from the PHP world involve creating XML files, and passing them into the Flash application. How does ColdFusion do it? I just have Flash make a call to a function in my CFC that I've already written for my non-flash version. I don't even have to deal with converting my Query object to an Array. ColdFusion does that for me. Want to use Flex 2 with ColdFusion? No problem -- Works the same way. This is THE reason I love Adobe these days -- Everything works together seamlessly. I don't need to waste time searching online for solutions because Adobe's already built them and packaged them into the API.

It's well worth shelling out some dollars to streamline your development process and build better experiences for the customer. Especially if you are thinking of leveraging Adobe's near-monopoly on visually interesting content (Flash & Flex).

Excellent post. The RAD abilities of CF are often overlooked, as are the savings in development costs that this allows for.

[WebErika]

Originally Posted by dutter

(To those critics on HoF safely nestled behind their anonymous posts - you've got nothing on the Linux/Mac/anti-Microsoft crowd when it comes to attacking the messenger. Please try to do better.)

I've been a member here for a while now, lurking in the shadows, it's a great site. Props to WebProWorld.

I'm also a member of HOF and have been for over 5 years now. I started with CF back in 1998 and adore it. It was quick and easy to get a handle on and I've written some great apps in it.

I don't do too much programming these days as my business has grown large enough to outsource most of it, I just wanted to login here and just clear up a small misconception or what seems like a misconception to me.

On the CF-Community HOF list, we aren't hiding.

In fact, if you join the mailing list, and choose to receive emails, you'll see all our names. Michael Dinowitz, Creator of the HOF, made it so the web version of the Community list was a bit more anonymous.

The Community list is your equivalent to a "water cooler gathering" where we all let our hair down and have a bit of fun. Discussing politics, movies, current events, programming languages, jobs etc is the norm for this particular list. So some of our "chatter" was perhaps a bit revealing and for professional reasons, we didn't want Google to get a hold of EVERYTHING we talk about especially matters of politics and rants about jobs.

We're actually a pretty good group and many of us have been around since the beginning.

As for CF, lately I notice it being used in more and more places, INCLUDING my online bank accounts. Two separate banks using CF that I know of. One of them: Bank of America. Now what they use between the login and the actual data, I haven't bothered to discover, but the mere fact they use CF at all was pretty cool.

I'm a lover of all languages. I don't ordinarily care what an app is written in, as long as it's written right, tight and works.

If we all spent more time on doing the best we can with our work instead of nit picking what others choose to use in their work, perhaps we'd all have more time to be friends?

:)

[CFMunster]

Originally Posted by Orion

over and above the server licencing fees.. development fees for a project in cf average about 3x that of development fees for the same functionality in php or asp .net

I've seen many issues with sites coded in cf in regards to seo.

There are not a lot of cold fusion developers out there (relatively)

I have never seen anything to indicate that development times or fees would be far greater in CF than PHP/ASP.NET. I would love to hear more detail about that thought.

In terms of SEO issues, check out this thread from Ray Camden's blog:

working with SES URLs in CF

Regarding the cost of developers, it really depends on what you want. If you need to build a small-ish web site, any developer with a little experience can get it done in CF. If you want to build a large-scale business application, you'll need someone with relevant experience, knowledge of design patterns, best practice techniques- in short, you'll need a software engineer. Sure, that will cost you, just like it would cost you to hire an engineer that knows J2EE or C# business app development.

Lastly, the developer community isn't as big as Java, .NET, or PHP, but it is a big and growing community. What's more, Java developers can jump right in and learn CF with ease and still leverage all of their Java skills whenever they need to do something that CF doesn't do out of the box. .NET developers can use BlueDragon.NET and still leverage their .NET skills.

[CFMunster]

David,

Thanks for noting my response in your follow-up column. I did sign up in order to respond, but I didn't intend to remain semi-anonymous, I'm just lazy when it comes to filling out online registrations. I got that way after about the 800th registration form that I filled out during the dotcom boom. I have added more info to my profile.

I think your conclusions about CF are well thought-out but do not tell the whole story about the future. There are software-as-a-service providers out there using CF- Vurv www.vurv.com (formerly Recruitmax) is the biggest one I know of. That market will attract some CF development, but Java and .NET will dominate. Commercial Web services development will be similar. Embedded device software and packaged application development will be done in something other than CF.

CF will continue to have a strong following in the business application development market in corporate and government settings. It will attract a share of web site development, but it will continue to be a second choice to free tools like Ruby and PHP. And for my upset special of the week - CF will be very strong in the Rich Internet Application market because of its tight integration with Flex (and Flash generally).

Lastly, I appreciate your thoughts in the column. The Internet is a huge space now and there is room and need for a variety of tools and platforms from C++ to Zope and everything in between. I have done work in a variety of languages and can appreciate the strengths of all of them. (OK, I might have to medicate myself if I ever had to program in Perl again).

[king_nacho]

I like CF, i'v been using it sense 1997, it is a good language for a number of things.

However, given the cost of the app server it became an expensive thing to keep up with. At $6k per server, it was very difficult to convince clients to purchase the server and learn something new they had to maintain.

Most of them already had Windows servers that we could run ASP.NET on. I don't care for PHP, I'd rather have a product with commercial support behind it.

Of course my argument is based on one segment of the web app world. We were doing projects that we did not host. They were hosted by the client. Many of these projects involed multiple server configurations. The cost of the server software was a big deal, and the cost to maintain the servers was a big deal.

For developers that host the applications for their client, CF is a great way to go. Expects in CF are very good at maintaining the servers, and the code.

[cfrandy]

Originally Posted by CFMunster

In terms of SEO issues, check out this thread from Ray Camden's blog:
working with SES URLs in CF

I do not think the post from Ray really shows any SEO issues. Ray shows a way that you can make SEO friendly URLs (which can be done in any language) if you do not have access to the web server Mod Rewite capabilities. I have always said you show me a php page/pages, I could create the same thing and and you could not tell a difference when the page is shown in the browser. If a programmer creates the page with plenty of url variables of course the search engines are going to have a problem with it, as with any language.

I have never seen any hardcore proof where it was Coldfusion causing the SEO issue, and not the programmers fault.

-Randy

[meddlingwithfire]

Originally Posted by meddlingwithfire

Jeremy Geelan of CFDJ (http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/) wrote a solid article outlining far more eloquently than I the solid points of using ColdFusion. Gah, I wish I had a link to the article now -- I have the actual paper magazine at work (I'll see if I can dig it up tomorrow). The jist of it was that you'll make back all the money you spent on purchasing the server by cutting your development time.

I was mistaken about the author. It was actually Simon Horwith (of the same magazine). And here's a link to the article!

http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/172573.htm

Another good read by the same author:

http://cfdj.sys-con.com/read/230497.htm