A

Anonymous

Question

Some quick thoughts and concerns

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
September 14, 2010
5 replies
3417 views

First let me say I LOVE Coldfusion and love working with it as much as possible. With that said, I see, hear, and read alot of negative comments and just general all out bashing of coldfusion in other forums and settings. Obviously, this forum might be slightly biased, but I dont understand why CF is not more widely accepted and used today. I can see how people are completely turned off from CF simply by finding out the price of the software. The other free alternatives, while not as easy to learn, are much more overlooked for their faults and learning curve simply because it's free. One of my concerns for the future of CF is how much longer can Adobe justify the price of CF when already there are open source alternatives available like blue dragon or railo. Again, I'm not here bashing CF, I love it! and want to continue using it, but with very little support by the countless hosting providers, and with industry support moving further away from CF, I would love to see a solution.

I guess I still dont understand why CF and many Adobe products, in particular Dreamweaver, hasn't procurred a more substanial share of the industry market. Kinda makes me sad! lol

Any thoughts or ideas on this subject welcomed.

This topic has been closed for replies.

ecobb

Inspiring

I've been in the CF world for over a decade, and I've seen this endless debate pop up many times. And, I have to say, I agree with Adam (Lehman). He made a couple of really good points. I know I'm coming in late to the party on this one, but here's my $0.02.

It seems to me the main reason that people want CF to be as popular as PHP/Ruby/.NET is for job security. Plain and simple, when they decide to (or have to) get another job, they want to be able have multiple choices readily available instead of having to hunt for a CF job, or take a job using another language. I know the feeling, I switched jobs almost a year ago. And, truth be told, when I was looking for a new job there were only a small handfull of CF jobs avaialable in my area. But, they were good, solid jobs with excellent pay and employers eager to bring on new talent. The time span between first interveiw and job offer was about a week. They knew what they wanted, had the money, and were ready to move.

There's a company here in Nashville that's a pretty big CF shop. They've got 30+ ColdFusion developers, and are hiring more all of the time. They advertise for PHP, Java, Ruby, .Net, etc..., programmers and just teach them CF once they're hired. They usually have them up to speed (and certified) within the first 90 days. I think what a lot people fail to realize is, that if every business was using CF and every programmer knew CF, then the market would be overrun and us CF guys would be a dime a dozen and working off of Craigs List for $10 per hour like the PHP guys are.

When it comes to open source software, my boss at my first IT job told me something that I will never forget. He said, "open source software is free...if your time is worthless." What he meant by that was, it may not have a purchase price, but you'll have to dedicate your time to setting it up, configuring, troubleshooting, scouring the Interwebs for answers, more troubleshooting, etc...You have to weigh the purchase price of the product (or lack thereof) with the amount of your time (or your employees time) in setting it up and getting everything working correctly. Have any of you ever tried to install and configure Hibernate? It's a monster. The fact that it comes installed, configured, and ready to go with a CF "click, click, done" installer is worth the purchase price of ColdFusion. Not to mention all of the incredibly complex other stuff CF comes bundled with ready to go.

Back to my quote about open source software. It's already been mentioned that there are some open source CFML engines out there, and I'll admin I'm a big fan of Railo. I use it a lot. I consider it my "CF-lite". I use it for the non-profit work I do, and the small mom-n-pop "sell grandma's jelly online" sites that I do, and my little play projects and experiment code. And, for me personally, I've about decided that it's almost not worth it for me to fool with it. Nothing against Railo, it's a fabulous product that works really well, but I don't have to the time to get involved in the java underbelly of it like I need to be able to do the stuff I want to with it. And, judging from some of the recent rants raging on the Railo mailing list, a lot of other people are starting to feel that way. I wish I did have the time, I'd really love to learn more about that side of the world, but I can't justify spending the time to learn it. Now I'm faced with actually having to pay experts to come in and install/configure/setup some of the things I want to do, because my time is not worthless and neither is theirs.

I agree with Adam that ColdFusion is a premium web development platform, and for what it offers it is well worth the price. Do I wish that CF was a little more popluar? Yep. Do I wish I didn't get the funny looks when I tell people (especially the "web-hippies" right out school) that's what I use? Abosuletly. Do I want CF to be as mainstream as the other languages? Heck no! I'm a full time CF developer at my day job, and I do a considerable amount of side work for companies all over the country. I like my services being in demand.

Now, where do I sign up for that free Mustang?

J

JaneUK

Known Participant

One other factor to consider may be the cost of the editor needed to produce code. I prefer Dreamweaver for my CF coding, but I've spent the last two months using Notepad++ (free), and I'm producing perfectly good code.

I had a year in my last job using VB.Net. We used Visual Studio (definitely not free). Admittedly I have far less experience with VB than with CF, but I would not have wanted to do that using Notepad: can it even be compiled using a free product?

A

Anonymous

I like using DW as well, although thats frowned upon in some circles much like CF is, but I know plenty of people using notepad++, or html kit tools, or jEdit that yes you can write any code in. I think its the application server thats doing to compiling which is of course turned back into html.

tclaremont

Inspiring

You can use whatever editor you like, from notepad to the fanciest of products. The difference is that some editors allow for auto code completion, hints, color coding, etc.

The editor conversation is completely separate from the ColdFusion conversation because, to its credit, CF allows you to use whatever editor you choose. Tying you to any one editor would be a detriment to the product, in my opinion.

A

Anonymous

Just curious which you all prefer, OBD or Railo?

A

Adam Cameron.

Inspiring

Just curious which you all prefer, OBD or Railo?

I haven't used Railo other than for testing, so don't have an opinion there.

But out of OBD, BD.NET and CF, I prefer CF. This is tainted slightly by the fact the code I write is primarily written for CF and I'm having to make it work on the two BD flavours, and their shortcomings and incompatibilities are quite annoying at times. Nothing show-stopping, but it's annoying have to defactor perfectly operation CF code to accommodate the vagaries of the other two. OBD is a closer fit than BD.NET though: the latter seems stuck back at CFMX7-compat level, which is too out-of-date now for me to really have patience for (all my code is CF8-centric).

I've no need for this stuff to run on Railo but I tried it once, and got a different set of incompats again, although it seemed closer than OBD did. But I didn't follow up any further because it's not (yet) part of my remit.

--

Adam

tclaremont

Inspiring

I think there is definately some perception that CF programmers are considered less skilled than many other web programmers. The simple fact of the matter is that CF programmers don't need to fathom the level of detail that some other programmers are required to understand. This is because CF automates so much of the client/server transaction that minute instructions from the programmer are not nearly as necessary. This is also why CF is faster to develop in.

My stance might be biased because I am not a programmer by definition. I use CF to accomplish the things that my customers want because it is easier on ME, not because anyone dictates that I use CF. My customers could not care less if I program in CF or Turbo Pascal or Crayola, and would not have the technical savvy to debate the decision either way.

So, what we have is a situation where EMPLOYERS want big name languages. Objective developers who take the time to evaluate the various languages and who want to get the job done quickly and easily want ColdFusion. And since the employers pay the salaries, which do you think is going to prevail?

Make the acquisition/hosting cost of CF more competitive and demand for the language will start to come from the employers just as much as from the developers.

The simple fact that Adobe does not understand this is actually kinda scary, if you think about it.

T

thnguyen-AohJo6

Known Participant

comparing to other web languages, CF is very flexible and easy to use. Of course there are others that are free such as PHP, .Net ect... So a lot of people are using them because it's free. I still prefer CF over others but that's me. Maybe in 5 years, things will change. Who knows. Hope Adobe can keep up with it.

A

Adam Cameron.

Inspiring

I think Adobe target the "enterprise" space more than small operators. And the upfront cost isn't such a consideration there compared to the total cost of ownership.

Whether or not that's reasonable, I won't say, but I'm pretty sure that's how they see it.

--

Adam

A

Anonymous

I may very well agree on that point Adam, but free is free. Large or small companies in today's market would almost always opt for something free. I hope it doesn't come to that, but I could see that eventually being the deciding factor for server applications.

Also, you would think then there would be more hosting providers willing th purchase the CF enterprise server so that CF developers would have more choices.

tclaremont

Inspiring

The following is just my opinion....

.NET is free, therefore hosting is cheap.

The result is a lot of developers in that language, which translates to a large pool of developers, and lots of training opportunities.

A large pool of developers translates into lower wages due to the large amount of competition for jobs.

CF Server is expensive (by comparison). That means hosting is more expensive.

The result is fewer developers pick up the language, which translates into a smaller pool of developers and reduced demand for training opportunities..

A small pool of developers translates into higher wages due to the comparatively large amount of competition for developers.

The hurdle has everything to do with cost (big suprise). This has nothing to do with which product is better. This has to do with marketing. Adobe has apparently decided that a low number of users at a high price per license is better than a huge number of developers at a very low price per license. That logic is lost on the vast majority of people, but Adobe does not see it that way.

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