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. 

[MarkTakata]

Charlie's reply is excellent, but allow me to add a few things from inside (being the CF evangelist and all).
1) We just completed a huge revamp of the internal technical licensing system to align with Adobe's subscription based sales modeling process. It was a massive undertaking to move the product from perpetual to subscription. There's zero chance we'd do this if we didn't have a deep commitment to continuing the product well into the future. It was, in short, an investment into the long-term health of the product.
2) We are roadmapping not just for the next update, not just for the next point release (with subs, we are able to offer feature updates between point releases now), but for years and years into the future. Obviously those plans change as tech in the industry shifts, but anyone thinking or saying that the product is dead or even in a maintanence mode is sorely mistaken. We are pushing hard to innovate, improve, and grow the product and the community.
3) Internally we continue to grow the team, with additions to developers and sales associates in the very recent past. Again, that doesn't happen in a product where Adobe doesn't believe in future growth.
4) Not only did we just host the ColdFusion Summit East 2025 conference in Reston, VA (as Charlie mentioned), myself and the Senior Product Manager just completed a 10 day road show series with stops in San Jose CA, Seattle WA, Raleigh NC, and Atlanta GA.

I am happy to speak directly to any investors who have questions about our future plans, and even set up a meeting talking about current capabilities and some road-map items with myself and the PM. Feel free to shoot me an email at takata@adobe.com.