A

Anonymous

Question

Coldfusion is a dying technology?

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
March 27, 2010
14 replies
11785 views

Not my words. I've been told this by someone else.

Detecting more than a hint of bull, I figured I'd ask here. How true (or false) is this statement? If it is dying, what's replacing it? Random thoughts on the state of CF's popularity welcome.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Show previous replies

I

iSaid

Known Participant

That a look at this link - http://www.iscoldfusiondead.com/ (it will give you your answer).

Have a read of this too - http://ria.dzone.com/videos/adam-lehman-coldfusion?mz=13077-coldfusion - (just something I can across one day - although there are probably a lot more out there too).

As Ian mentioned above too, there are other CFML engines out there too (free or paid) - Railo, OpenBD, BlueDragon... I don't think these companies and people would be investing their time and money into a dying technology.

I think you will find that a lot of the stuff you google where people make comments have either never used Coldfusion or if they did, they used way back in the 90's. A dead giveaway (I feel anyway) is them referring to it as "Cold Fusion" (2 words) which went out with version 3.1 (around 1998). Since version 4 it's been know as "ColdFusion" (one word no space). Typo on their part???? I don't think so.

Another thing you will find in googling - is the other people that compare CF to PHP, ASP.NET, ASP etc... They all seem to compare CF4/5 to the latest version of asp.net or php. Their not really comparing apples with apples. It would be just like me trying to compare the latest version of CF (v9) to php3.

Anyway, I've finished.

ilssac

Inspiring

As the others of said this is an old, and rather silly argument that many of us just don't care to bother with.

But just to make two quick point about this dying technology, Adobe apparently sells more new CF licenses every quarter and there are now at least four CFML engines for this dying technology.

A

Anonymous

But just to make two quick point about this dying technology, Adobe apparently sells more new CF licenses every quarter and there are now at least four CFML engines for this dying technology.

Ahh, something concrete I can throw out there, this is good. Hard facts is what I need for this, real stats!

I found out what the individual who made this statement based it on. It's easy enough to shoot down the "saw/tried it many years ago", but his primary reasoning was an unscientific observation of the number (and type) of job offers being made by companies. He has perceived a slow decline in ColdFusion on the job market (but agrees this can't be taken a hard evidence of anything).

I got him to backtrack a little into saying that he'd favor simply creating standard Java libraries, project templates, or otherwise "standard" tools to do the work CF does for you. My counter was basically - why do all that when you have a well designed, mature, commercial tool out there which gives you these things for free?

He keeps going back to this "market share" argument where of course Java (meaning, Java w/o CF) rules, .NET takes second, and most everything else isn't worth serious consideration. Very frustrating.

I'm in the J2EE(/Flex) world myself but I feel like I'm much more open to trying something to speed up slow and fragile J2EE development. Basically a way to do "rapid application development" in Java is what I need to make Flex/Java development in my office competitive with a rather primitive (but very efficient) RAD tool being pushed hard by management. I've yet to dive into CF deeply, but I feel like CF is exactly what I'm looking for, especially with it's Flex integration.

In the end it doesn't matter (since I have the decision making power) if I can convince this coworker whether CF is worth considering (that's all I'm really saying, since I've yet to do more than some basic CF tutorials). But still, you want your team to agree on such things if at all possible. I've a lot of work to do!

ilssac

Inspiring

Ansury wrote:
He keeps going back to this "market share" argument where of course Java (meaning, Java w/o CF) rules, .NET takes second, and most everything else isn't worth serious consideration. Very frustrating.

Just to add a couple more cents to this topic. I can say from presonal experience that we do not advertise for "ColdFusion" developers to fill our ColdFusion job openings. We find we get better canidates by being language agnostic on our job postings. I suspect there is more of this then one who just watches job boards may realize.

D

Dan_Bracuk

Inspiring

My suggestion is to ask the person who made the claim, "Based on what?".

A

Adam Cameron.

Inspiring

Rather than re-hash the same old argument again, how about you google "coldfusion dying" and read the previous incarnations of this thread.

--

Adam

A

Anonymous

A Cameron wrote:
Rather than re-hash the same old argument again, how about you google "coldfusion dying" and read the previous incarnations of this thread.
--
Adam

Why ask here? Because I want to hear up to date opinions from real users of the technology. Not possibly far-outdated old Internet posts or threads which may not even be written by people that have used CF. (As in the case of the person who told me "it's a dying technology".)

And that is a good question to ask--I'm sure I asked him why he said that, but I like "Based on what observations?" better. My problem here is, since I'm not familiar with CF and it's current popularity, I can't come to it's defense at all. I have no counter arguments (yet).

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded