Has Adobe abandoned CF in Dreamweaver CC?

Report · Jun 18, 2013

Decided to try Dreamweaver CC today and it appears it does not support Coldfusion page? They have removed CF integration and Live view (even preview) appears to be broken for CF pages?

Can someone at Adobe explain if this is just a bug or is Dreameaver really not supporting design of CF pages?

Report · Jun 18, 2013

Yep, this is the bitter truth. Adobe has also removed support for CF includes if you still happen to open a CFM file and keyboard shortcuts are very buggy – half of those don’t work. I dare say the new CSS panel is barely a decent replacement for the bellowed CF support. Hopefully, we’ll see a ColdFusion10_Tags_for_DW.mxp and more for DW CC soon.

Report · Jun 18, 2013

I seriously can't believe this. Talked with support over chat and phone, confirmed that they have completley removed support. As they say "I understand your concern, but i would like to tell you that, this feature is a deprecated feature in Dreamweaver CC".

Not sure what Adobe's message is here other than to screw over it's own community. And as I see it, there are no other ways to create and work with ColdFusion files in any Creative Cloud program. The only one now is CFBuilder.

What is Dreamweaver good for now that it has been stripped of the two major coding lauguages (they also dropped .Net - odd they kept PHP). With the Edge tools, you can basically do most of what DW is good for. I guess some extra CSS support and an FTP manager...

Seems like one minor step forward with a whole hand full of steps backward. Adobe screwed up on this one. It's their own dang product. Just baffled.

Report · Jun 18, 2013

WOW. As a CF person from the Macromedia days I am shocked Adobe has removed CF support in DW CC. That is just plain stupid. I just begrudgingly moved to CC because it felt like I had no other option since everything is going CC and now you remove CF support (your own language) from your main development product? I don't want to have to buy a seperate product to work with CF and use DW CC to do my layout work. If support for CF doesn't get put back into then I will be dropping CC all together and moving to alternative options such as Gimp and Eclipse. VERY disappointed long time customer!

Report · Jun 18, 2013

Hello,

The Support for ColdFusion is removed in Dreamweaver CC and later. Please refer to http://help.adobe.com/en_US/dreamweaver/cs/using/WScbb6b82af5544594822510a94ae8d65-7874a.html for documentation.

Regards,

Anit Kumar

Report · Jun 18, 2013

Yeah we all get that. The point we're all making is that the decision is a mistake. The single line on that page "

Note: Support for ColdFusion is removed in Dreamweaver CC and later." does nothing to help us who use DW to do development with ColdFusion (Again... ADOBE's own language).

No reason is given for the removal. No alternative is available. You say oh you can buy CFBuilder. Oh really? I can pay $300 more for another specific IDE that doesn't do eveything I need and then I need to create a new workflow.

And CF Builder doesn't support any of the new stuff from responsive design with the proper code completes or hinting etc.

Just saying it is depreciated doesn't help use users and developers at all.

Report · Jun 18, 2013

Unreal. As the owner of a medium sized coldfusion shop, this will be the end of our work with Adobe. 17 subscriptions to be cancelled, simply because you want to alienate the core of your development customers. CF Builder is not usable in our company, and not part of good workflow. Goodbye.

S.

Report · Jun 18, 2013

The point is that it should not have been removed and if so, should have been a huge topic of discussion before today. To be blunt, this response is completely unacceptable from Adobe.

Will Adobe consider, at the very least, allowing CS 6 customers to permanently download and use Dreamweaver 6 as an alternative to CC?

I think many of us will seriously consider the future of Coldfusion given this latest debacle. It just suggest Adobe is either planning for CF's end or is so completely out of touch that we can not rely on Adobe for our livelihood.

Report · Jun 23, 2013

To understand why Adobe is moving away from CF and focusing on PHP take a look at these stats from http://w3techs.com/

Do the math: Who would you develop for 80% of the market or <1%?

Report · Jun 24, 2013

Then be honest with your customers about your plans and create an end-of-life plan for CF. But don't say you are actively developing the next 2 versions while quietly deprecating support. Either Adobe is outright lying to the CF community about continuing to develop the platform, or is completely incompetent. Neither is a great business model.

If indeed they are still developing new versions of CF, why not try to reverse the dismal adoption rate? Coldfusion really is great - so why won't Adobe put the resources into marketing it properly? Imagine Adobe fully integrating CF across it's CC applications, especially Dreamweaver and Acrobat. That would be powerful. (that plus greatly reducing the cost of CF, which is probably the biggest obstacle to greater adoption).

Report · Jun 25, 2013

The only suprise here is that anybody is suprised.

Adobe has never marketed CF in a positive light since the acquisition of Macromedia. Criminy, you can't even find it on the Adobe home page. So, after all these years, what on earth makes you think they are going to start now?

As for the deprication of CF features in Dreamweaver, I think many are making the false assumption that the DW team even realizes that Adobe makes CF. Do you see any evidence that the two teams even talk to each other? Do you have reason to believe that they even speak the same language since the deportation of the CF product team overseas? Did you really expect more from a company with the track record or Adobe?

As for cost being the biggest obstacle to adoption, if Adobe has not realized that by now, they are never going to. They are simply not that smart. They fail to realize that cutting the entry cost in half would likely raise the adoption rate by four-fold. Other complanies have proven this theory consistently for years. Not Adobe.There are "free" platforms that emulate CF, yet Adobe thinks they can keep selling CF at crazy prices with no marketing effort whatsoever.

Did you really put a whole lot of faith into the rumor that Adobe is already working on the next couple versions of CF? What would you ever expect them to say? Heck, here at work I am "working" on the next couple versions of every project I am on. Every time a customer mentions a feature they would like to see it goes into a list of considerations. Therefore I am "working" on the next couple versions.

Is CF a great technology? Yep. Has it earned me a living for close to two decades? Yep. Do I have an ounce of faith that Adobe is going to turn this ship around? I think you know the answer.

After a while you need to be more suprised at your high expectations and less suprised at the recurrent Adobe ineptitude. Take some personal responsibility and go learn another platform. Relying on Adobe as your career safety net is ignorant, and the time to learn something new is BEFORE you need it, not after.

Report · Jun 25, 2013

I wouldn't say I rely on Adobe for my career safety net, but like it or not for the moment they are a big part of the workflow. Clearly, that will have to change but it doesn't happen overnight.

Report · Jun 25, 2013

No, it does not happen overnight. But it happened for a great number of people about two versions ago and, as evidenced by the statistics, more and more people aer facing up to reality every day.

And by the way, I am not so naive as to take the statistics mentioned a few posts ago at face value. CF still has a marketshare both within government and behind corporate firewalls that is surely not reflected in the stated numbers. However, that same observation could be made with regard to the other technologies, too.PHP and ASP combine for 99% of the chart. I don't know of too many bean counters that are going to look at the stats (educated about the topic or otherwise) and at least ask the obvious question of why a developer would spend thousands of upfront dollars to implement a technology with less than one percent of the market. That sends up red flags for managers who need to take into consideration the possibility that a developer might actually get hit by the proverbial bus, or win the lottery, or simply drop off the face of the earth.

There was a time when I did my best to defend the implementation and adoption of CF. However, there comes a time when you realize that your efforts are being completely undermined by the very company that manufactures your chosen tool. Rewarding that company while sabotaging my future job opportunities is suicidal. Face it. Over the last few years (decade) other tehnologies have caught up with or sped past CF, yet the commitment from Adobe has waned, the price has not reacted to market value or competition, and practically everything that originally made CF attractive has been trumped or at least equalled by companies with more commitment, better support, and a larger following.

Hang in there if you want to, but it is never wise to be more committed to a product than the manufacturer is.

Report · Jun 25, 2013

What’s the supported tool then – now that DreamWeaver is not the WYSIWYG for ColdFusion? CF Builder?

Thanks!

Report · Jun 26, 2013

Please read this posting on House of Fusion. CF editing support is still in Dreamweaver CC, it just needs to be enabled. Doesn't seem to have all of the more recent tags, but I don't think that the latest desktop Dreamweaver did either. I am able to edit/code in CF with Dreamweaver CC after following the steps in the posting:

http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/thread.cfm/threadid:64695

hth

-reed

Report · Jun 27, 2013

This isn't the first time Adobe has treated like the proverbial "red headed stepchild" so I guess we should not be too shocked. If you are standing on the tracks and hear the whistle blowing, getting closer and closer, then it should not come as a surprise when the train hits you! It's true that CF development continues, but Adobe's focus is more and more laserred in on the enterprise and government levels. CF 10 introduced many new very powerful features, but it also became even more difficult for a shared host environment. If this is their intent then I can see why they remove it from Dreamweaver - Enterprise application developers don't develop WYSISYG - they just don't.

All of this is why, when we were developing version 4 of Cartweaver we did a couple of key moves -

#1 we made absolutely sure it supported Railo!

#2 we pulled any dependency we may have had on Server Behaviors or Dreamweaver's support for dynamic development. Cartweaver still has a Dreamweaver Extension and works fine in Dreamweaver CC, but all it does is pretty much drop in all the files and set/write the Data Source information to a global variables .cfm file... that's it. Everything else is handled by the app itself or in the web based admin, and other features the user may want to add can be dragged in from the Snippets panel, which Dreamweaver continues to support. This way the Dreamweaver integration is not even needed, it's actually just as quick, if not quicker to manually copy the files over, open the global file and enter a few variables, save it, and move on. Dreamweaver not required.

I saw this coming a long time ago, although even I am pretty aghast at how far they went and how fast. They are even removing a lot of the essential ingredients for PHP support - I'm scratching my head over this one!

With the Edge products, the direction that Dreamweaver is going, and the whole Business Catalyst thing, I'm betting that for all but the most advanced enterprise application development Adobe sees the web and web development going the same way PostScript did. That some day, soon in their eyes, designers will be "printing" out web sites without ANY contact with or idea of what the code looks like, much less caring about it. That's been tried before. But who knows... Live, watch, learn, and adapt.

--
Lawrence Cramer - *Adobe Community Professional*
http://www.Cartweaver.com
PHP & ColdFusion Shopping Cart for Adobe Dreamweaver

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Report · Jun 29, 2013

Well this is both annoying and exciting. Annoying because my office (a large federal government agency) is a CF shop, and we have a home-brewed CMS built in CF. My office's portion of the agency's webite is 60,000+ pages, and that's just a small portion of the total site. If CF eventually goes away, we'll obviously have to switch platforms, which means hiring some people who know whatever other language we change to, because all of our current people are CF people.

I guess it's job security though, because that's a LOT of coding.

But it's exciting too, because it'll be the opportunity for us to basically purge anything and everything Adobe. That includes all the copies of CS that our many developers use, along with the CF platform. Since my agency already has an instance of ASP.NET running on another machine, that'll probably be the direction we go, so I guess I should start reading up on ASP programming! It'll also make it a lot easier to find coders, because there are probably a lot more ASP developers than there are CF developers.

Fun times!

Report · Jun 29, 2013

BreakawayPaul, - Couple of points I'd like to make here... One, CF is not going away. But Adobe's support and view of it are apparently changing more to the enterprise side of things and less to the small to medium applications and self-hosted or shred host environments. Which brings me to my second point.

ColdFusion si a CFML server, not CFML. CFML is now more than ever an open source web development language. Railo and Open Blue Dragon (I prefer the first) are both very capable open source CFML servers! So there is no need to switch to .NET - Stick with the very effective and powerful language that is CFML, but move to a more open environment. Running CFML on Railo may take a few tweaks because of the way Railo enforces a little more strict coding policies, but any ColdFusion based CFML app can be made to run on Railo. So it's not an either - or proposition. CFML is still awesome, and with an ever growing open source movement will continue to be so.

--
Lawrence Cramer - *Adobe Community Professional*
http://www.Cartweaver.com
PHP & ColdFusion Shopping Cart for Adobe Dreamweaver

Stay updated:
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Report · Jun 30, 2013

While that's helpful Lawrence, the fact is that my agency has what I call "Open Source Phobia". They refuse to consider anything that they consider "free" or "open source". I wasn't even able to talk them into switching from MS Access to MSSQL Express because the Express version was "free, and thus not secure" (I wish I was making this up). Getting them to adope Railo or BD will be ummm, a challenge to say the least.

But who knows? Times may change and they may see a platform switch as being a bit too large of a bite to take than they're ready for. I suppose we'll see!

Report · Jul 05, 2013

ColdFusion is not going anywhere. The next version is actively being built and the pre-release for ColdFusion Splendor is open now. We also have a two version roadmap that is published on the product home page: http://blogs.coldfusion.com/assets/content/roadmap/ColdFusion%20RoadMap.pdf

I will also reach out to you directly over email to understand how we can enage better by communicating our vision for the product and also by showcasing some of the features coming up in the next version.

Report · Nov 15, 2013

Good to hear that Adobe is not giving up on a product that has a large legacy following, however the question still remains: Why remove it from Dreamweaver? Why take something away from your customers that use more than one of your products together? To force us to purchase CFBuilder, which does not have the UI tools needed, or version control support?

Perhaps the Adobe team thinks that only programmers write Coldfusion and UI developers write html/css? Those of use that do it all prefer to stay in one program for the entire workflow. I have been loyal to Adobe a couple decades, but my loyalty only goes as far as your willingness to enable a productive workflow. Continued hinderance of the workflow we have built around your products has our entire organization looking for alternatives, and by the sounds of it, many others as well. With being said, is the cost of Not putting CF support into DW worth the community impact? And if you are trying to force us over to CFBuilder..... add it to the creative cloud we all ready pay for.

If the Dreamweaver team is focused on catering to the future of programming and removes CF support what message does that send? And if this is the case I would expect to see much more support for the .js frameworks that are making strides on all top server-side languages.