advice to ditch CF

Hi,

Here's a discussion about this topic on another site.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers?viewQuestion=&questionID=336952&askerID=24899557

There's an interesting link around the end of the page, with some information about "CF Evangelism".

cheers,
fober

Art_vager wrote:
I was advised by our development team, and subsequently by a
number of training centers, that coldfusion has been superseded...

Yes, version 7 was superseded by version 8 and version 9 will supersede version 8. That's all you need to know. The rest simply wastes your time.

The rumored death of CF is propogated out of naivete. The vast majority of the time it is initiated by those with a vested interest in their own language of choice.

I am lost on the assumption that a language must be "mainstream" in order to be worthy of consideration. Anyone who holds this stance is demonstrating ignorance.

People who are hired as ASP, PHP or NET developers use ASP, PHP or NET. People who are hired "to get things done" use CF.

Let's get this straight.

CF is not dead. Infact, it is more popular now than it has ever been before. However, what CF developers will agree with is that it isn't the most popular web language, these are typically PHP and ASP.

CF is different. That's why some people choose to use it. Not only in its obvious language syntax, but also in its way of thinking and strategy.

If you are deciding what to program in, why limit yourself. Learn as much as you can from any language and tune this to your own individual needs and preferences. I use CF for many reasons, but others prefer PHP. This is partly dictated by their company, but also because they just prefer it.

The main argument you will hear as to why CF is not as popular is that it "costs a lot of money". Let's get this straight too. CF is does NOT have to cost you a single penny. Coldfusion is the language, the Adobe Coldfusion server is what costs you the money. If you want, there are many free and open source Coldfusion engines alternative to the Adobe - it just so happens Adobe is the main leader in this field and is therefore setting the standard, but this doesn't have to be. Some of these are Railo, Blue Dragon and the Smith Project.

Good luck.

> Anyway, starting out a a developer, should I make coldfusion my first
> programming language or is it correct to say that coldfusion is mostly for
> older developments and not for creating new applications? A poster in one
> other
> forums I posted to suggested that "even the coldfusion folks will agree
> that
> coldfusion is not a mainstream language"

The ole "coldfusion is dead" message comes from time to time.
It's not dead and it's not for older developments. Many of us
are well and alive as is CF. CF8 made a huge jump in the speed
of CF