I saw this post on Mike Henke’s blog… ColdFusion is dead (yet again) and of course I had to go read it. Mike’s take was it was just another “CF is dead” rant. But I clicked through and read the original post The State Of ColdFusion and have to agree with many of the author’s points.
Some of the arguments: price, job market, etc., have been hashed over many times and I don’t think it’s worth beating that horse anymore. However he does ask some really hard questions which I thought were really good:
Now on the flip side when did you last hear about:
- In fact anyone standing up talking about Coldfusion outside of a ColdFusion User Group. Doing this would at least make people aware of Coldfusion.
- Any promotion of Coldfusion outside of the Coldfusion User Groups.
- Coldfusion servers and educational package being rolled out free to universities so they can teach Coldfusion.
- A graduate who knows what Coldfusion is.
- A new book on Coldfusion in a bookstore online or otherwise.
These are some great questions! I don’t keep up with all the conferences but get the occasional mailer for things and I’ve never seen CF mentioned outside of Adobe/CF conferences (and maybe lately Flex stuff). It would be nice to compile a list of conferences we could possibly attend to spread the word.
We’ve hashed over the CF in education thing lately - this could be a big inroad possibly for Open Blue Dragon? In school? Walk in with OpenBD and CFEclipse on a CD…
And books. There is the WACK but I’d argue that’s not a ‘new’ book. Doing a quick search at Amazon I get 3 pages of results and the WACK series is the only new book I see listed.
I’m really hoping the Open Blue Dragon announcement can spark some excitement about CFML outside our community. Lots of potential here… Push OpenBD in the educational channels! Who’s going to write the first OpenBD book?? Can we get OpenBD into other web development conferences??
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I recanted my “don’t read”. People should read the article along with Jim’s other post and try to help improve any valid negative points.
To your point, I’ve been going through the Flex tutorials at learn.adobe.com recently. I was struck phrases such as this one:
“Flex Data Wizards can help you get started quickly with a PHP/.NET/Java database by automatically generating code you can use on your server.”
Now, granted, this is a wiki and the folks adding content may or may not have it thoroughly vetted. Still, to have a sentence like this not mention CF at all, let alone have it at the front of the list, is a bit discouraging.
Re “Flex Data Wizards can help you get started quickly with a PHP/.NET/Java database by automatically generating code you can use on your server.”
Not only is CF not mentioned, but there is no such thing as a “PHP database”, a “.NET database”, or a “Java database”, which this remark implies. Someone obviously doesn’t have facts straight.
Well… this month you should see my new ColdFusion book listed.
This will be from Packt Publishing and should help in that regard.
John - that is great news!!! I really like the jQuery book published by Packt.
I was just at a college tonight for a recruiting event and I nabbed the College of business MIS Director for about 5 minutes and told them about a new alternative to PHP, which is what a lot of internal applications are built in. I even offered some free consulting time to help them get up and running on the system.
I always mention ColdFusion as a part of what I’m doing when I give presentations at places like ooPSLA, Code Generation, the Domain Specific Modeling Forum and the Software Practice Advancement group conferences.
I’ll admit that there aren’t usually too many people in the room who’ve used ColdFusion - it’s either the enterprisey (Java/C# or even C++), the cool (Ruby) or the esoteric (Erland, Scheme, Scala), but at least it’s shining a little light onto ColdFusion in places that might not otherwise hear much about it.
And great news John about the book!
Closed state? Dead? Dying?
Who knows, but consider the following 12 reasons (in no particular order) why the community (and Adobe) should take these kind of concernes actively and seriously:
1) ColdFusion isn’t talked about frequently in trade magazines or enterprise application server related communities other than CF centered sources (when it is, it is usually the same tone as the post linked to here)
2) The number of CF employement opportunities pale in comparison with Java(J2EE), C#(ASP.NET), or VB(ASP.NET).
3) There is not a productivity enhancing integrated development environment on the level of Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans or Zend Studio for CF.
4) To add to a point presented by someone else, There are a plethora of missed opportunities within the Adobe family of products to cross-market CF with Air, Flex, etc. http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/faq/ “For a more productive, higher performing approach to connecting Flex applications to back-end services, you can use BlazeDS, a free, open source Java™ solution.” I didn’t notice any mention of ColdFusion’s value-add to Flex (is there still one?).
5) To follow up on 4, Adobe is actively and heavily marketing Flex and Air to the ColdFusion community and has been doing so for years (for Flex), however I don’t see evidence that Adobe is marketing ColdFusion to the Flex and Air communities with similar verve.
6) There is not a vibrant commercial 3rd party ecosystem surrounding ColdFusion like there is for the .NET and Java communities. I’m talking about vendors like Dundas, Infragistics, etc. Of course the Java based solutions can be used with ColdFusion, but the point is that the 3rd party vendors are a form of unconscious validation of the respective platform. (not to mention every time it’s necessary to delve into the Java world from CF to solve a solution, it lessens the importance of the CF ‘productivity’ layer - productivity severely limited by point 3).
7) Additionally, the open source community surrounding ColdFusion is fairly weak compared to other communities such as Java, PHP, etc. For that matter, even .NET. As a blaring example of this deficiency, Adobe’s own Labs wiki is in PHP, ostensibly because there just isn’t one in CFML that can replace it: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.
References:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu.....T-2.0.aspx
http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a.....ch-Roster/
http://www.jobkabob.com/job/ai.....20355773_0
http://www.devbistro.com/jobs/70492
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?v.....bId=508675
9) CFML language skills aren’t necessarily mutable to other platforms as the tag based syntax and the language’s natural tendency towards procedural flow leaves many developers in unfamiliar territory when it comes to the C descended languages (of which there are many). Not to mention functional, object oriented and other language styles. This dissonance also precludes mutability towards non-web based development.
10) As alluded to earlier, the amount of educational material (books, courses, etc.) is quite limited compared to almost any other platform, language or even framework, such as Ruby (on Rails), C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, Java, J2EE, ActionScript, JavaScript, Struts, Spring, and so forth. From a perception perspective, this lack doesn’t communicate strength in CFML’s staying power.
11) User groups for CF don’t appear to be nearly as vibrant and active as user groups for other development communites (Python, .NET, Java, etc.).
12) Every 6 months or so there’s a new post or article regarding the death of CF that gets propagated around the CF community. The community response is starting to feel like Monty Python’s Black Knight in it’s earnestness;
BLACK KNIGHT: ‘Tis but a scratch.
ARTHUR: A scratch? Your arm’s off!
BLACK KNIGHT: No, it isn’t.
ARTHUR: Well, what’s that, then?
BLACK KNIGHT: I’ve had worse.
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[...] Talk moved at one point to things that we as developers should be doing to ensure the longevity of our platform of choice. Gary Barber posted some thoughts and then followed up with a blog post on the state of ColdFusion with some ideas and a bit of a dig at the ColdFusion community for being too closed. Gary’s post spurred some strong reactions - Mike Henke posted ColdFusion is dead (yet again) and claims it was a carbon copy of other “CF is dead” articles. Really though, Gary was trying to spur people into action, which Jim Priest recognised in his post The Closed State of the ColdFusion Community. [...]