Is ColdFusion dead, six feet under,  pushing up daisies?

Does the fact that the next major release (ColdFusion 11) is currently in public beta testing phase, and that Adobe have at least one more version after that (ColdFusion 12) on their public road map help answer that?  Also that the Adobe-developed ColdFusion IDE (ColdFusion Builder) is also in public beta for version 3.0, and that another version to pair with ColdFusion 12 is also on the roadmap?

I wouldn't expect a technical support analyst to be able to answer a question that should really be targeted to Adobe marketing or product management groups.  You can hit up the product manager for ColdFusion on Twitter: @rakshithn or the ColdFusion evangelist: @elishdvorak.

-Carl V.

Hi TonightWeDineInHELL,

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. ColdFusion is not going anywhere, and has a roadmap ahead (http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/product-roadmap-for-coldfusion). We just announced beta release of ColdFusion 11 (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion/)

You can contact us at cfinstal@adobe.com, in case you are not able to get relevant responses. We will try to respond as soon as possible.

Regards,

Anit Kumar

Oops Carl. I posted before you, but it showed your response first .

Yes, Carl and I are pointing to the same contents.

Regards,

Anit Kumar

There are many US Gov't agencies that still use CF; I'm currently on contract with one.  On the flip side, the US Federal Reserve Bank is (last I checked) in the process of porting their CF apps over to .Net.

I believe that AT&T is still using CF.  I still run across CF websites.

I don't think it's going to "push daisies" anytime soon.

^_^

Can you pm your contact details, so that, I can arrange some more information for you.

Regards,

Anit Kumar

You can respond to the one, I sent.

Regards,

Anit Kumar

Yes AT&T is still using ColdFusion in fact I got several calls from recruiters about two positions with them last week or week before last. Also UPS has recruiters making the rounds about every 6 to 9 months looking for CF Devs. Always hear about various positions with the State Dept, Dept of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration looking for CF Devlopers. It's been a few years but NASA was heavy in CF Dev jobs for a while as well. So yeah I don't think CF is dead in the least.

I would be very much interested in the same infomation if it's not under NDA. Can you send me a PM on it as well please and thank you. I am looking to put together a small talk for our User Group on this very topic to help them work through some of the negative feed back froming from their managers.

Thanks in advance.

BrettDavis wrote:

 

I would be very much interested in the same infomation if it's not under NDA. Can you send me a PM on it as well please and thank you. I am looking to put together a small talk for our User Group on this very topic to help them work through some of the negative feed back froming from their managers.

 

Thanks in advance.

I was thinking of asking the same thing, myself.  Just professional curiosity.

Thanks,

^_^

TonightWeDineInHELL wrote:

 

The security team here at the University seems to think ColdFusion is dead.

Which university would that be? Since when did we listen to the guards at Fort Knox to know about the state of the economy?

I'm getting tired of trying to defend it. Do you have any resources to help? List of Companies perhaps?

Companies? Nah, too easy. Since you're talking University, with a capital U, let's talk University.

I'll let you in on a little secret. I bet it is unknown even to Adobe's ColdFusion folk, and you are hearing it here for the first time.

Type in the Google search bar: university filetype:cfm

You will get 178 000 000 search results. Among them are universities and university affiliations from all over the world, having ColdFusion pages on the web:

Georgetown University

University of Guelph, Canada

Liberty University Christian College Education

University of San Diego

Penn State

Clemson University

Massey University, New Zealand

Pace University

Stetson University

Purdue University

University of Groningen, Netherlands

University of Liverpool, UK

University of Namibia

American Association of University Women

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Fisk University

Southwestern University

California State University, Long Beach

University of Colorado

Harvard University Press

State University of New York

University of Basel, Switzerland

etc.

Remember that those who publish with ColdFusion on the web are likely to have ColdFusion intranet, too.

To steal and hack a famous phrase: Reports of ColdFusion's death have been greatly exagerated.

Google "death of ColdFusion" and you'll probably find posts dated back to 1996 or earlier, yet ColdFusion still exists and is constantly being updated and improved. I'm not aware of too many corpses actively being updated or improved. My gues is that your security team just does not want to deal with "yet more stuff to keep track of."

Steve Sommers wrote:

 

To steal and hack a famous phrase: Reports of ColdFusion's death have been greatly exagerated.

 

Google "death of ColdFusion" and you'll probably find posts dated back to 1996 or earlier, yet ColdFusion still exists and is constantly being updated and improved. I'm not aware of too many corpses actively being updated or improved. My gues is that your security team just does not want to deal with "yet more stuff to keep track of."

It's curious you should reply to me! I posted that quote in similar threads on April 13, 2010 and January 5, 2011!

BKBK wrote:

 

It's curious you should reply to me! I posted that quote in similar threads on April 13, 2010 and January 5, 2011!

I got this one covered. You get the next one. ;-)

TonightWeDineInHELL,

In thinking about this more, I think you may be making the wrong argument. Here at my work we don't give a rat's behind about who's using what. We've never been on the Trendy 500. Heck, I imagine there are companies on the Fortune 500 still using COBOL. Instead, a better argument: Is it the right tool for the job? If your site is a simple marketing site with a contact form or two, ColdFusion is probably overkill and not the right tool. We do online payment processing with many forms, AJAX, web services calls, etc., and for us, I can't imagine a better tool for the job. Sure we could have used PHP or .Net, but then we would have had to write more code or rely on third party libraries to do stuff that CF does right out of the box. I recommend analyzing your application and you decide if it's the right tool. If it is the right tool, maybe your security team needs to do the same analysis of their department.

ColdFusion isn't dead, but neither is Cobol.  That doesn't mean it has a bright future.  Adobe doesn't even list it on their home page.

I've been a CFML developer since Allaire when the competing technologies were classic ASP and Perl.  I have one last application written in CF and I hope to have it rewritten in the next year.  I learned it because I came from the HTML world and wanted to learn something that would connect a client's database to the web.  It was fun, easy to use.  Even as I learned other languages like classic asp and vb.net I was still pretty faithful.  PHP rose to prominence and I found it annoying and it felt pieced together.

As easy as it was to get CF up and going, it presented no advantages in maintaining and organizing code.  Years of maintaining apps proved to me that RAD wasn't the best long term value position.  As I became a better actual programmer I found the tags annoying and it took way too long to do be able to do  everything in cfscript that you could with tags. 

When MVC frameworks came on the scene I was quickly taken with them.  Not only was application development rapid and fun the code was much more managable.  They totally leveled the playing field.  The right framework makes PHP much more livable.  Mysql made heavy progress against SQL Server.  For the apps I was writing CF lost all the advantages it had.  It is so easy to just rent a VPS with LAMP and even Cpanel and it costs as much what we used to charge for hosting one domain back in the day.  Need a LAMP dev box, just download a virtualbox with everything preinstalled.

I thought maybe Railo and OpenBD would make a difference because they are free but there just isn't a compelling reason for hosts to install or support them.  

I'd echo what others say, pick the right tool for the job, but in my world CF hasn't been the right tool for the job in a long time.  I feel sad about because I spent so much time using it but I think the world has moved on.

Lot's of colleges and universities use Coldfusion.  To add to what BKBK said:  Type in the Google search bar: college filetype:cfm and you will see many, many more results of sites utilizing Coldfusion.  It is far from dead.

Those making the decisions don't care how much easier Coldfusion may be to develop on or whether you are more productive with it.  They figure all development is the same.  Additionally, your server admins have to like it and want to support it.  Unfortunately, mine doesn't like it and reluctantly supports our current installation.  For them, why bother trying to get Coldfusion/Railo up and running when there are many canned flavors of LAMP stacks that are easily installed and can be developed upon. (Have you ever tried getting Railo up and running on say MAMP? MAMP takes 5 minutes. In my experience it takes days of trouble-shooting a Railo install. It's a pain and a tough sell for a server admin.)

Ironically, the recent version of Coldfusion is one of Adobe's best offerings right now.

Visitor interrupts doctor rushing along the corridor,

"Doctor, doctor, is Mr. Seeyeff dead, six feet under, pushing up daisies?"

"How so? You want him to be?". The doctor hurries along.

There are Railo hosts out there. There are also VMs that you can download for development e.g. Railux.

And no Cf is not dead. They make it. They host it. They support it. They use it. The customer doesn't care which app server or language the developer uses as long it meets the requirements. If the requirements favor CF, sometimes they do sometimes they don't, then CF gets picked. For small shops, like me, CF is the only choice  since 1. It's faster to develop in, 2. Almost all CF servers are almost identical which reduces configuration issues, and 3. It does everything out of the box. CF will be around as long as server based web app development is around. There has to be a significant and dramatic paradigm shift in the way the web is built for CF to be obsolete - which would make other languages/servers obsolete as well.

In the end, it all depends on the requirements and for many situations, CF is the best choice. I pick products based on functionality, not popularity. What's popular today is out tomorrow, e.g. BlackBerry which was never that awesome before and is not that crappy now. Perception is not reality. The reality here is, ColdFusion isn't dead as long as one guy is still using it. I'll be that guy.

Yes, ColdFusion is dead. Just like Cobol is dead.