Future of ColdFusion

[paul_8809]

Is Adobe going to continue supporting ColdFusion? I have a potential investor/collaborator who is concerned that we may end up having to rebuild the site in DotNet or something because without Adobe's continued support of the product, security of ColdFusion websites would ultimately suffer. He's read somewhere that Adobe won't continue to support ColdFusion. He might have been reading about ColdFusion Builder. I don't know. What is the latest?

[Charlie Arehart]

First, yes, your person could easily have mistaken the demise of CF Builder (the old Eclipse-based IDE, replaced in recent years with the free VSCode-based extension of the same name). 

As for CF itself, the "latest" is that cf2025 came out a month ago. And today is the Adobe Coldfusion Summit East conference, while the main Cf Summit event is in a few months. And work on the next release is underway, with a stated intent to come out with even more frequent releases

These seem clear enough signs of "Adobe's continued support of the product".

Is thatt guaranteed? Well, no. Adobe's a publicly held company, one of the largest software companies in the world: they can make economic decisions regarding any one of their several dozen products, based on factors we can't fathom.

And can it feel like CF is the red-headed stepchild of the family? Sure. But we've experienced that for 25 years, since the Allaire acquisition. And are there things people can complain about or wish were done differently? Sure. Yet CF keeps rolling on, even with many declaring its pending demise pretty much ever since then.

CF continues to evolve, continues to be made more secure, and continues to be used by thousands of orgs across a huge range of industries, sizes, and kinds. You'll ALWAYS be facing someone in IT questioning the choice to stay or not. There's no clear path for everyone. But those who've stuck with it haven't seen it go away yet.

Also, each release has 5 years of support, so it would be 2030 before Adobe is due to stop providing updates to CF2025. That's a long runway to see what's coming, should they ever decide that some release is the last.

Finally even in that scenario, you'll not be up a creek without a paddle. There's the open source Lucee project which has offered broad cfml compatibility (and even unique innovation) for more than 15 years. Then there's Boxlang, from Ortus, which has cfml compatibility as a first-class focus and is about to be released after a year of development and previews.

Some could instead conclude, "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades." It's all a matter of perspective. Surely you could hear as well from others seeing through a glass darkly.