Is ColdFusion still relevant?

Over at Forta's site Ben discusses an article Andrew Binstock at InfoWorld has written on dynamic languages ... and which totally fails to mention our favorite language of choice.

Is it just an oversight? Or a warning of things to come?

ColdFusion has transitioned from Allaire to Macromedia to Adobe, and each time it's moved to a new company it's become less and less strategic to that company's goals, and a much smaller segment of that company's overall market. At Allaire ColdFusion was king. Macromedia, however, was seemingly more interested in selling copies of Dreamweaver and in ensuring the Flash became the ubiquitous RIA cross-browser cross-platform standard.

Adobe has similar designs for Flash, plus it's heavily involved in promoting Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Lightroom, and in general maintaining its lead as the platform of choice for designers, graphic artists, and photographers.

ColdFusion has also been caught in the triple crossfire between free and open-source solutions like PHP, Python, and sexy little languages like Ruby; Microsoft's .NET platform (also free); and high-end enterprise-class solutions like IBM's WebSphere and BEA's WebLogic.

Younger developers tend to lean towards open-source offerings because its philosophical underpinnings are more in line with their own, and because, quite frankly, they tend to be either broke, cheap, or both. Even if they used a free development version of CF, as their logic goes, they'd still need to pony up when it became time to deploy a CF-based solution, either by buying a full copy of CF or finding a CF-based hosting solution, which typically is both harder to find and more expensive than, say, a PHP-based one.

Older developers and management tends to see Microsoft's .NET platform as a "standard" and the safe choice, much like the old "You can't go wrong by buying IBM" mantra. Big corporations see full-scale Java/J2EE solutions as mandatory when designing large, complex, mission-critical systems and architechures.

Further, some F/OSS solutions are pursuing the same design strategies as ColdFusion. Witness JRuby, a implementation of the popular Ruby language aimed at putting it and Ruby-on-Rails on top of a Java base, with the same type of support for interacting with and defining java classes from within Ruby.

Binstock is not alone in missing ColdFusion as an option. What happens when survey after survey misses it or fails to mention it altogether?

Another potential tell-tail lies in the book market. Over the weekend, on a whim, I looked for ColdFusion books at a local Barnes and Noble store. Which had... none. There was a plethora of books on Java, PHP, C#, and other languages. About dozen titles each on Flash and Dreamweaver. But nothing on ColdFusion. The Border's store down the street did them one better, literally, in that it had one copy of Ben's ColdFusion Application Programming on the shelf, with pretty much the same distribution as B&N in relation to the other titles.

Not good. All in all, I see three possibilities going forward with ColdFusion:

1) Adobe, with the release of Scorpio, unleases a major advertising campaign promoting ColdFusion and its best-of-class benefits in an Apollo/Flash world. Likelyhood: 20%

2) Adobe open-sources ColdFusion, allowing it compete on an equal footing with the existing F/OSS and Microsoft solutions. Likelyhood: 10%

3) Like the elves, it diminishes, and eventually sails off into the west. Likelyhood: ... well, you do the math.

What do you think?

Comments

[Adam Fortuna]

For as little credit as ColdFusion gets from the rest of the world, from what I hear it's actually making Adobe money. Unlike other products they have to advertise the hell out of, people come asking for CF updates and new versions. Assuming those two things are true I see Adobe keeping the status quo as long as they can.

Now if they really want to change it, they could market it as aggressively as they do the others. They seemed to put a lot on the line with Flex, so it seems odd to me they don't do more with CF. But who knows, this is the first new CF revision since becomming Adobe, so perhaps there is a new marketing direction in store for it?

It seems like in the next 6 months we'll find out if it's going to stay the same, or if Adobe plans on growing it. I'm optimistic, so I'll put the likelihood around 40%. :)

[Justin Mclean]

Two words "Rapid Development", with ColdFusion you can generally develop web applications quicker than most other languages. It cost you far less in the long run.

ColdFusion is widely used eg if you do a google search for "page:.cfm" you get about 1.2 million pages, add to that all of the pages/sites that google can't see (eg intranet sites) and I can't see ColdFusion vanishing any time soon.

[Michael Long]

@Justin, I suspect that the PHP, Python, and especially the Ruby/RoR guys would have something to say about their lack of development speed. (grin)

Seriously, I think the PHP and CF types have a lot in common, in that in the beginning both develop a lot of bad habits in the name of rapid development (sql and logic mixed with code, no cfcs/objects, etc.).

As to the number of pages on the web, Google is estimated to index about 25 billion web pages. 1.2M equates to 0.0048%...

[Adrock]

The biggest issue ColdFusion has is not a technical one. Over the last 10 years of it's life, neither Allaire nor Macromedia marketed the product to CIOs and executives. Marketing and engineering shared the same philosophy of 'focus on the developer'. So while 3rd party analysts estimate over a half-million ColdFusion developers worldwide (the largest the community has ever been), CIOs and executives are still clueless about the product.

Unfortunately, one of the previous commenter's is right. ColdFusion has been a very profitable product and continues to be. It's success is a double-edged sword. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The book sales aspect is a very poor way to gauge the languages popularity. The community got screwed over by book publishers when CFMX was launched. If you look back you'll see there were tons of CFMX books from a myriad of publishers. Unfortunately those publishers over crowded the market and there wasn't enough profit to go around. So now the publishers are weary of the CF market thinking there is no room to compete with the CFWACK (ColdFusion aside, the CFWACK is still one of the best web development books around).

So, let's talk about product futures. Scorpio, the 8th major release, is looking to be the best ever. It's fast, stable, enterprise-ready, and it's packed with seemingly more new features than any previous release. It's the first release of ColdFusion from Adobe and I think everyone will see how key ColdFusion is with Adobe's Flex/Apollo strategy. ColdFusion is, and will continue to be the fastest way to develop service oriented back ends for Rich Internet Applications.

Regardless of how often the media forgets about it, ColdFusion is growing. Anyone who subscribes to cf-jobs can tell you there are more opportunities for CF developers now, then ever before. Personally, I'm seeing new ColdFusion developers/customers coming from two new places. Companies moving towards Flex/Apollo choose ColdFusion as the logical middle-ware and enterprise Java shops who are just now coming to terms that enterprise Java development isn't the best fit for departmental smaller applications.

So here's the thing. There is no multi-national software giant marketing RoR. Although it's core philosophies are nearly identical to ColdFusion, it's twice as popular based solely on how vocal it's community is. We have one of the strongest developer communities in existence (and don't think Adobe doesn't recognize that) but it's a very private one. If we want to take ColdFusion to the next level and raise awareness, our community needs to expand into non-ColdFusion areas. We need to participate in non-CF industry events like Java One, AJAX World and even the WWDC. All we have to do is kindly remind media outlets like InfoWorld that CF is alive and well. From my experience when people actually look at the features and benefits of CF they are blown away. The key is just getting them to take a look and remind those who remember our past that Cold Fusion 4.5 shares only CFML in common with ColdFusion MX.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Adobe as the ColdFusion Specialist. Although I have certain insights into the product, these comments are based on my own opinions from the field.

[Justin Mclean]

Rapid development dosn't equate to badly written code in my books. If you take shortcuts it will cost you more to maintain and fix the code at a later date.

Here's some more googles searches:
inurl:cfm - 320 million pages
inurl:asp -1800 million pages
inurl:aspx - 580 million pages
inurl:php -1000 million pages
inurl:py - 11 million pages
inurl:jsp - 200 million pages
inurl:rthml - < 1 million pages

As you can see from this CF is way head of Python and Ruby (and ahead of JSP). And while it's true ASP and PHP have a bigger market share that's not to say things are dire for CF.

Of course these numbers only give a very rough indication of a language use.

Just imagine what the numbers above would be if CF had the buzz that Ruby currently has or the marketing budget of Microsoft.

[SoJa]

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=coldfusion%2C+php%2C+ruby%2C+asp.net%2C+jsp&l=
http://www.google.com/trends?q=coldfusion%2C+php%2C+ruby%2C+asp.net%2C+jsp

[RF]

Outside of ASP, Coldfusion in the governments largest Web platform.