Coldfusion Marketshare

Good ColdFusion programmers, based on what I have seen, are more expensive per hour than net programmers. What this fails to acknowledge is that the increased speed of development results in a reduced number of billable hours. Therefore the total development cost of a project tends to be lower.  Mac Attorney jobs

It's mind boggling that devs who have little (at best) knowledge of a  competing platform think they can compare it to their platform of  choice. I see these types of threads all over the web about how  ColdFusion dominates ASP.Net. Some typical comments I hear are that  ASP.Net is not a RAD platform or that it costs a lot more to build apps  with .Net than ColdFusion and typically the ones doing the posting  have never written a single line of C# or VB.net in their life.

Don't you think it's a bit silly listening to someone try to compare  something he knows nothing about to something they are very biased to?  The most obvious thing I see here is a bunch of ColdFusion Fans stroking  each other.

Rather than sound ignorant one needs at least some experience working  with ASP.Net before they can compare it to ColdFusion.  Build an app or  two with ASP.Net then you will have the right to compare it to other  technologies.

I have been working with ColdFusion on a daily basis for 9 years. Almost  a year ago, due to the declining ColdFusion market share I started  working with the ASP.Net platform so that I would have more job  opportunities in the future. Currently I build web apps exclusively  using ASP.Net 4 MVC 3 & C# with Visual Studio 2010. I have 2 medium  sized CF 8 applications that I have to support and on occasion I have to  go in there an write code, and I can tell you that I absolutely hate  it! In my opinion CF is not even in the same class as the latest .Net  platform and tooling. You guys don't know what your missing. Working  with a strongly typed language like C# is a little more work but the  benefits are 10 fold when it comes to maintenance and coding. Having an  IDE like Visual Studio alone is worth switching to .Net.

ColdFusion's features and tooling are primitive compared to what  Microsoft has to offer these days. Like it or not Adobe is being left in  the technology dust by Microsoft in regards to server side application  development tools and platform and soon to be client side development as  well i.e Silverlight.

I have recently been investigating serious jRun Memory leaks.  I'm finding very little effective knowledge on how to truly trace the code in order to identify and alter/repair the actual problem. 

I have an 801 server in production and updating the security patches and hot fixes, and (failing to) tune jrun and identify its memory leaks has been an incredibly frustrating process. 

I don't know if the .nuts are having any better luck maintaining and debugging their servers, but having worked with CF 5 thru 8 I can say that if 9 is not a departure from the releases of Macromedia's days then I may be looking at other server technologies soon. 

Just 9 months ago CF and jRun were neck and neck to be the second worst security ridden / attacked applications out there, only just behind another Adobe product.  Thats a pretty serious risk to weigh when considering what server technology to use.

http://www.communities.hp.com/securitysoftware/blogs/spilabs/archive/2009/08/31/top-five-web-application-vulnerabilities-8-17-09-8-30-09.aspx

I need a product that installs like the Filezilla client and updates as easily.  Why should it be so hard to update this software correctly?  Every one else is doing it : -)

I don't know how insecure .Net is, and I'm not here to just bash CF because... I prefer it, after all, to the MS technologies.

We have a large investment in CF 8 code and to watch it die on the server inside of jRun without being able to fix or even adequately diagnose it is taking all the fun out of doing what I love most!  I had to write a scheduled batch script to kill jRun if it reaches 950 MB and log an event to the Applicaiton Event Log because it was taking too many man hours to monitor and kill jrun during high production use.

Has anyone got any suggestions?  Will anyone at Adobe take my suggestions above? 

I appologize if this sand bags your quest to keep CF but these are real concerns with CF, for me at least ...

Finally, over anything I've said so far, I love CFML/CFScript.  The cost effectiveness of anyone coding in it generally beats other proprietary solutions at least from the productivity standpoint of an engineer (not withstanding engineers who are massively productive in any language) , but the licensing costs and the overhead of the issues I've been facing may force me in another direction.

Thanks for reading,

D.

Let's face it:  there are plenty of practitioners out there who have a fairly limited breadth of experience.  They know (say...) "dot-Net and absolutely nothing else (yet)."  And, instead of being willing to embrace new ideas, new tools and techniques, they wave their hands and mumble something about "market share," as though "follow the Lemmings" was an appropriate way to make strategic technical decisions.

Every company is different.  Every company's technical situation is different.  On top of this, tools are constantly evolving and growing more powerful.  The desire to exploit these new capabilities is tempered by the realization that there is no silver bullet.  When you develop a new piece of software for internal use, the maintenance and upkeep of that tool will be the predominant cost; not the cost of its initial development.  (Furthermore, you can bet your bank on the assumption that, whenever a developer (especially a younger one...) gets a better offer, it's "buh-bye!!" to the next greener pasture and you've got two weeks (if you are lucky) to manage to do without him or her.)  Amidst all of this, "you've got a business to run."  Software, and IT in general, is a cost to you.

So...  when presented with a new technology option, wise companies do a thorough cost/benefit analysis -- and the outcome of such an analysis strongly favors "status quo."  It just works out that way.  (Almost) every time.

I would also make this observation about ColdFusion:  "it is a shrewdly designed tool."  At first blush, you might not see what all the fuss is about.  Then you start to look more closely at its very novel approach of "just-in-time compiling" against a deep base-language (Java), and its very cleverly chosen set of tags and built-in abilities, and then you start to see a sparkling glint where you previously saw only dirt.  There are unique powers in this architecture that do not immediately jump out at you and demand, "look at me!"  Because they don't need to.  You will find them...

Dot-Net is powerful:  no one will deny this.  And I am sure that almost everyone here is thoroughly versed in it as well as ColdFusion.  We are very likely responsible for simultaneously supporting both technologies.  (And probably less-than-pleased, but resigned to it.)

Define "objective".

Why should your company care if any other company in the world uses ColdFusion or not?  If it works for you it works.  If it doesn't work it doesn't.

It is important to note that conversion projects of any sort are complex, expensive and have high failure rates.

Developers should not be an issue becuase I have yet to find somebody who understands any type of programming not understand CFML.

P.S.  ColdFusion now integrates with .Net.

Blue Dragon offers a .Net CFML engine.

There are other CFML engines as well.

Adobe is planning for the next version of ColdFusion in about three years.

I think the bigger question to ask, is what benifits does your organization see in .NET.