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To Adobe,
I know you probably can't answer this but what are Adobe's plans for ColdFusion? I get mixed messages, particularly from sister products and your main www.adobe.com web site. Cases in point:
Dreamweaver dropped support for CF when it went CC. I still use CS5 because frankly CFBuilder sucks. DW states "Build the best sites for any browser or device. See how you can quickly create responsive sites, preview them on actual mobile devices, and even extract assets and styles from Adobe Photoshop comps directly into your projects." I also read somewhere where it claimed to be the #1 tool for developing websites but it has better support for PHP and .Net than CF. Is this a veiled statement of the future of CF or simply the DW team not playing well with the CF team?
These forums used to use a CF based forum application, now it's Jive which uses a JSP framework (which again sucks. but I regress). If Adobe does not use CF for their own customer facing portals, what does that say for CF?
Today I received a response for a CF bug I submitted months back, which is fine. When I went to click on the included link, the bug tracker site appears down or half functioning. I could make out a login link, click it and simply received a site error. In retrying while typing this post, now I receive a "no issue found" message. Login still does not work. This does not give a good impression but it leads to my next issue...
Upon going to www.adobe.com to search for the bug tracker location, I found the Feature Request/Bug Report Form. The only field on the first page is a product selection drop-down. If you try to select ColdFusion you'll be very disappointed as ColdFusion does not exist. Is this a veiled statement of the future of CF or simply the product and/or support teams not playing well with the CF team?
Session idea for your CF Summit (which I'm already preregistered), a sit down with various executives and product members (not just from the CF team) on their thoughts of the future for CF (and possibly why they don't get along). It's ok to hear CF team members say how great CF is and all the new and upcoming features, but I think thoughts for other upper Adobe non-CF executives would go a long way to calm the "Adobe hates CF" rumors and impressions.
Idea that I think would re-energize the CF faithful, dump CFBuilder and roll the functionality into Dreamweaver, either natively or as an add-on.
Steve,
Thank you for your post. I am Rakshith Naresh, Senior Product Manager for ColdFusion at Adobe. The purpose of my reply is to address the concerns that you expressed in your post.
To Adobe,
I know you probably can't answer this but what are Adobe's plans for ColdFusion?
Adobe will continue to invest in ColdFusion. We are currently working on the next major version of the product, code named Aether. With every version of the product we have seven years of support commit
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https://forums.adobe.com/people/Steve+Sommers wrote
Dreamweaver dropped support for CF when it went CC. I still use CS5 because frankly CFBuilder sucks.
YES!!!! Totally agreed!!!!
https://forums.adobe.com/people/Steve+Sommers wrote
These forums used to use a CF based forum application, now it's Jive which uses a JSP framework (which again sucks. but I regress). If Adobe does not use CF for their own customer facing portals, what does that say for CF?
I've been railing against JIVE almost since day one. But you highlight a strong point: If Adobe isn't using CF for the forum, that tells me that Adobe has no faith in CF.
https://forums.adobe.com/people/Steve+Sommers wrote
Idea that I think would re-energize the CF faithful, dump CFBuilder and roll the functionality into Dreamweaver, either natively or as an add-on.
I'm not so sure that this would work. I think the majority of people who move away from CF are doing so because of price. I've seen licensing (for a new install, not upgrade) go from low-but-still-not-that-affordable (if I remember correctly, about US$500) to the current obnoxious price of US$4000 (or is it more?) for standard. Enterprise being, of course, much more.
I have suspected for a long time that Adobe is secretly trying to kill CF, and damaging wallets is a very good way to do just that. Kind of a war of attrition.
But I do agree that CFBuilder needs to go away, especially when you can't really use it on systems that are isolated from the internet (can't fully activate it without an internet connection, and I understand that Adobe has no intention of providing an offline way of activating CFB3.)
And as far as DW no longer having CF support, I'm actually okay with that (even though I'm using CS5, too) since Brackets has CF add-ons that will provide CF support. Now, Brackets isn't as good as DW, but it's a thousand times better than CFBuilder, IMHO.
V/r,
^ _ ^
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Okay, I looked it up.. standard is US$1500 according to the current buying guide. But I swear I saw new licenses going for over US$3000 at one time. Maybe that was the Enterprise price, IDK. Still, even US$1500 is ludicrous when ASP, PHP, Lucee, and others are free.
V/r,
^ _ ^
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PHP is free in the sense that Lucee is free. If you want a professionally supported PHP server you use Zend PHP.
I am only saying this argument supports the pricing model of Adobe ColdFusion.
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Steve,
Thank you for your post. I am Rakshith Naresh, Senior Product Manager for ColdFusion at Adobe. The purpose of my reply is to address the concerns that you expressed in your post.
To Adobe,
I know you probably can't answer this but what are Adobe's plans for ColdFusion?
Adobe will continue to invest in ColdFusion. We are currently working on the next major version of the product, code named Aether. With every version of the product we have seven years of support commitment. Five years if core support and two years of extended support. For instance, ColdFusion 2016 which was released last year has support till 2023. And ColdFusion Aether (to be released next year) will have support commitments till 2025. So just for the versions that we have and version being built we have support commitments till 2025. The key point that i want to highlight is, ColdFusion is not going anywhere!
ColdFusion is doing well and the business is growing. I do not know if you were a part of CFSummit 2016. in the keynote we stated that ColdFusion has had double digit growth launch over launch. Here is the link for the keynote slide deck.
Dreamweaver is run by a business unit different than ColdFusion business unit. The decisions made by DW product team is driven by the needs of their customers. Having said that, I do know that DW added some support for ColdFusion back into the product. Here is a documentation link that talks about this support. ColdFusion Builder is completely driven by ColdFusion business unit and we will continue to make it better. Can you tell me why you seem to hate builder? Have you tried using the most recent version? We have fixed the issues that were reported and improved the performance significantly. Give it a try and let us know your feedback.
The feature request form has been fixed. It now has ColdFusion in the drop down, Thanks for reporting. It was clearly an oversight.
CF Builder will continue to be supported and will not go away or rolled into DW. I just want to be very clear about that.
You will see adobe executives at CFSummit discussing about ColdFusion. I look forward to seeing you at the CFSummit.
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RE: Can you tell me why you seem to hate builder?
For me at this point, half or more of my development is client-side code with html5 and javascript. Hands down, CFBuilder cannot compare in this area to the capabilities of Dreamweaver - at least not the last time I used CFB. I did not know that DW added back in some support for CF; I'll give that a try when I get a chance to re-install the CC version of DW.
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Agree. CF users is professional and small business owner. We pay the $1000 instead of free ASP, PHP, etc. Adobe drops the customer service on CF will eventually kick CF faithful user to ASP, PHP, etc. It is painful but fact if Adobe keep hurt CF fan. We are business owner and can not suffer the risk. That is the price to love CF.
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raksh naresh, I decided to force myself to use CFBuilder more to be able to provide you with additional feedback. A few things I did not realize CFBuilder did I found I like, but I still have quite a few issues. In no particular order:
That's all I have off the top of my head for now. #1 & #8 above force me to use DW the most. Hope this helps.
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Hey Steve,
It is very pleasing to know about your interest in CF Builder. We take this very positively. I would like to answer your queries -
1. Regarding Search in a project, I am not sure about what is your expectation. In any editor that I have seen, search works in a similar fashion.
2. With #2 and #3, as far as I see, you are expecting some shortcuts to apply say comments or quotes around a block of code.
We do have a toolbar which allows you to do such things. However, a shortcut for the same can be considered for enhancement of user experience.
3. We have never heard of performance issues with indentation. If there are, we would be keen to address the issues at the earliest.
4. Regarding Dreamweaver, we would say that the very purpose of its existence is different and that's why it exists. CF Builder stands to solve very different and unique problems that CFML developers face. Be it Security Code Analyzer or RDS Query Viewer or Phone Gap or Line Debugger or anything else, all our features are unique to CF Builder and designed to solve the fundamental problems faced by CFML developers and make their lives easier.
Regards,
Nikhil
Adobe ColdFusion Team
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Hi Nikhil,
Thank you for responding. I just happened to be browsing the new-fangled discussion board when I saw your reply. Anyway, matching your bullets…
1. Global search: I just upgraded my PC which required a CFBuilder reinstall and this corrected a big portion of the issue I was experiencing. Prior to the reinstall my search result tab somehow got detached from the default panel making it a dialog window. Whenever I searched and drilled down to a hit, the search result panel would be hidden by the editor panel. This made it extremely difficult to go to the next hit – I was having to re-search to find the window which got complicated further because the object focus was now changed. As long as the tab is in the default location, global search is workable. The only issue currently is going from one module to another within the search results closes the previous module. I would rather they stay open so if I open 4 modules with hits, all 4 editor tabs are available.
2. Shortcuts: No, I was not talking about shortcuts, instead the manual typing to change code.
Example, current line: variables.x=”<p>Hello World!</p>”;
Change to: variables.x=formatter.text(’<p><span class=”text-muted”>Hello World!</span></p>’);
3. Tag indent performance: I may be able to setup a Webex session or something similar if you PM me.
4. Dreamweaver: I understand that CF attempts to solve different problems and you gave good examples where Dreamweaver is less than optimal. The issue is that in most of your examples, and site development in general, JavaScript and CSS coding is a big portion of many projects and CFBuilder is much weaker than DW in this area. If you can bring JS and CSS capabilities close to DW, then it’s a one stop tool for CF development.
Again, thank you for taking time to address my issues.
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How about using Visual Studio Code?
It is fast, free, customisable and already supports ColdFusion 😉
And hey, which Platform do you need?
Mac, Linux, Windows? Let's go and give it a try!
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This is a year-old thread, but had to comment.
I followed your link to Visual Studio Code, and TBH it looks almost identical to Brackets (also free, from Adobe.)
But this is off-topic. The OP wanted to know the future of ACF and used CFB as kind of an example of the attitude Adobe has (real or perceived) regarding ACF, and it just kind of snowballed from there.
V/r,
^ _ ^
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WolfShade Yes, sorry. Thanks for the Feedback.
> This is a year-old thread, but had to comment.
Yes, i know. And Brackets as well?
> I followed your link to Visual Studio Code, and TBH it looks almost identical to Brackets (also free, from Adobe.)
Lack of Support?
> But this is off-topic.
Sorry for that!
> The OP wanted to know the future of ACF and used CFB as kind of an example of the attitude Adobe has
> (real or perceived) regarding ACF, and it just kind of snowballed from there.
Yes, you'r right. And thought that i could give an Idea of an Editor which i really up-to-date.
Because i still love ColdFusion and Lucee but not the Editor.
And a i mean it was also one of the "Problem"?
Anyway. Sorry, for opening an old thread
<cf_rjung />
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Tigermutze wrote
Anyway. Sorry, for opening an old thread
No worries, mate.
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yes, if we stay with CF, how to resolve the installation and version compatibility issue. We are focusing on run our business and can not afford many labor cost and risk. If we switch the platform, tons of CF code need to be rewritten. That is bad !
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From what I understand, most code written for Adobe ColdFusion (ACF) is compatible with Lucee. There are a few things that might need to be re-written. But unless your code was originally written for CF6MX, you shouldn't have to re-write ALL of your codebase.
V/r,
^ _ ^
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Great !. Most of our current code is coldfusion 10 based. The only concern
is the installation and running of lucee. Where I can find the related
package and installation instruction ?
On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 11:35 AM, WolfShade <forums_noreply@adobe.com>
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I provided the link in my first response to you. It's lucee.org and it has package download, documentation, link to a forum, etc.
It also has (GASP!) full paid support, should you want it.
HTH,
^ _ ^
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raksh naresh, Another update on CFBuilder...
By far, #1-3, and 5 on my prior list or issues with CFBuilder are my biggest peeves. With #1, global searching is basically useless in CFBuilder and I automatically open DreamWeaver CS5 for any searching. Assuming you can put focus on just the right objects to do a global search within a project, only being able to open a single hit at a time when making multiple edits is a real pain. Then re-searching but with completely different results (usually no results) because the object focus was not just right usually send me over the edge and my coworkers get a shower of colorful explicatives with Adobe as the focus point.
With #2 & 3, I find myself spending more time fighting with the editor than actually editing when updating existing code.
With #5, only the single level of tag auto-close seems to work. Example, typing: "<cfif ...><cflock ...>..</cflock></" - the </cflock> will automatically fill, but </cfif> will not. Then to make things really annoying, when <cflock> does close, it places the cursor just before the final > so if you are not watching the screen, this will be the result: "<cfif ...><cflock ...>..</cflock</cfif>>" or "<cfif ...><cflock ...>..</cflock</>>" if you thought auto-complete was going to help.
Please feel free to pass this along to your CFBuilder peeps. My recommendation if you are going to continue down the CFBuilder path, steal someone from the DW staff and incorporate his/her knowledge into the CFB editor usability design.
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I must admit I have changed my view recently.
I think CF is a fantastic platform to be involved in & Actually while I hated CF builder to start with I have come to learn just how powerful it is, a lot of the hatred come from my own mid understandings & ignorance.
I think the lack of the design view put a lot of folks off, me too but really that was just a crutch. With coding I have learned 100 times faster and write better code.. the built in debugger is just brilliant.
I am choosing CF today for all my new applications. I think it has it all!
Though I think its best for server side stuff and use javascript / Jquery on the front end for all UI stuff and AJAX etc.
cfscript full unity is now just excellent.
I run my own agency and I learned after 20 years that a lot of the publicity on the internet about this and that etc. is just dribble and really only an illusion. Its easy for us developers to get caught up in this and I have seen me changing platform in the past because I felt pressure from online communities. Then I realised... CF does absolutely everything I need! why change?
Do what works best for you, technologies come and go but CF have stood the test of time.
Look at Microsoft:
asp is what you should be doing.
no don't use asp, use asp.net and web forms.
no don't use webforms any more, just maintain them, use MVC.
entity framework.
now umm mvc, asp.net core, web api, razor..
OMG.... the list is endless...
I see a bright future and I think the product is now fantastic.
the only caveat is for seeking employment, then you may have to learn different things. but you know.. when you write cfscript and use OOP principles.... you are only a little bit different from C# on the server, almost identical to javascript..
you are building the right patters in any case..
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Since no one closed this thread, I'm adding my question to it.
ColdFusion in 2019 is very much in Gartner's 4th quadrant.
Is anyone at Adobe going to do something to push ColdFusion BACK into Gartner's 1st quadrant?
Because that's the kinda simplistic tool that non-technical decision makers use to decide what tech to use or not use.
I suppose Adobe needs to get developers to pick this technology up again as new and fresh... but they aren't going to do it unless decision makers want it.
+++++
How about Adobe's marketing department comparing it with Microsoft ASP.NET Razor pages?
Because ASP.NET, which has gone thru almost as many incarnations as Dr. Who, now, 19 years later, has picked up the same technology design that ColdFusion had back in version 5.0 !!! Razor is "ColdFusion" for ASP.NET.
ColdFusion had many approachable MVC frameworks, years before ASP.NET got its 1st.
+++++
Frankly I'd like to keep using ColdFusion (or Lucee)... but I can't build things for people if they can't find someone to support and modify it after I am gone.
+++++
Oh... here's an idea... start using it as the backend for Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign.
The "printing" industry HEAVILY depends on those 3 Adobe tools, and that industry intends to stay in business.
Help them with their business needs using ColdFusion (reasonably priced) on the backend of Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign.
The Video and Graphic Arts industries also rely on Adobe tools.
Maybe Adobe needs to recognize IT IS a VITAL provider of tools for multiple other industries and needs to stay in business supporting and securing its tools LONG TERM.
Maybe it needs to align its software thus.
+++++
And MAYBE Adobe needs to START PUSHING BACK...
...tell Gartner to add a 5th quadrant 😉 !!!
...bring back FLASH technology as BETTER than HTML.
...WORK with someone and build a BROWSER that is based on FLASH, and NOT HTML.
(Cut Actionscript 2.0 support, and secure the Actionscript 3.0 tools.)
The whole "build an App" (old-)revolution in the mobile device market shows that we don't need HTML, except as a basic starting point to launch APPS built with other technologies.
HTML (with any scripting on the client side) was OBVIOUSLY NOT the way to go... as far back as 3.2, and no different by 5.0.
+++++
Oh well... back to the "Upside-Down" world of web-app-development... it all went to the Mind-Flayer, when Adobe didn't defend its own technology back in 2011, and push back.
(HOW many labor hours of work has been paid for trying to rebuild working FLASH technology using HTML/CSS/JavaScript? And it STILL has-NOT caught up to where FLASH WAS!)
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You had my full support until you mentioned FLASH - and I still back you 100% on everything else you stated. IMHO Flash was one of the biggest vulnerabilities on the internet. It constantly had zero-days.
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Flash was dying long before anyone officially announced that their product would soon stop support (except Apple, of course).
Flash is bad. When Adobe first started implementing Flash forms as a selection of CFFORM, it was kind of a good idea, but quickly stopped being a good idea thanks to Micro$oft.
I agree with Steve in that you're right about everything else, but the whole Flash idea.. just, no.
V/r,
^ _ ^