Comments on: ColdFusion is Dead, or is It?

By: Sean Corfield

Sean Corfield — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:33:10 +0000

@Gary, Evans Data are independent of Adobe so they are not basing that on download numbers. Evans Data survey companies and developers worldwide to get their numbers for all sorts of technologies.

By: Gary Fenton

Gary Fenton — Fri, 01 May 2009 10:54:38 +0000

@Sean, how could their arrive at that figure? It would be unrealistic if it was counting the number of downloads from Adobe.com. If someone downloads CF for free it doesn’t mean they have now become a CF developer. I downloaded Flex stuff but I didn’t get into it so I’m absolutely not a Flex dev. I doubt those are actual sales figures (would be amazing if it were).

Can we organise on a blog boycott for the next person to use the words “c0ldfusi0n is dead” in a blog post. ;-) Google has picked up 863 pages that say that and virtually all are written by CF bloggers. Don’t make it a self-fulfilling prophesy.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:15:23 +0000

That is an interesting statistic, thanks for sharing Sean!

By: Sean Corfield

Sean Corfield — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:11:01 +0000

According to Evans Data (I think it’s them), CF developer numbers continue to grow – I saw a claim that 385k new devs had picked up CF since Adobe bought Macr. That would put the total near 750k these days.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:21:54 +0000

I recognize your point Aral and do agree with it to some extent.

Summarizing your post as saying “ColdFusion is dead” doesn’t really do it justice I admit but having a picture of a gravestone reading “ColdFusion RIP – 1995-2009″ does create the impression that that is the message you’re trying to bring across ;)

With regards to relevancy, it depends on context — if you’re teaching Flash Platform technologies I think its at least worth to look at CFML as a candidate, like you said Railo is an interesting open source solution there.

As for Adobe offering free training on their technology, I’d think that is quite an obvious thing for them to do. Even if you don’t like their commercial offering you can still walk away from it and go for an open source CFML engine.

By: Aral Balkan

Aral Balkan — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 09:20:06 +0000

Peter, just to clarify, I didn’t declare that CF was dead. To say so would be to trivialize the point that I was trying to make, which is whether or not it is doing new graduates and new developers entering the field a service to teach them ColdFusion or whether their limited time should be spent learning more relevant technologies and languages like Python, Ruby, Scala, EC2, Hadoop, Java, Objective C, etc. The context of my original comments were around Adobe offering free Coldfusion training courses.

More generally, my comments were regarding *any* commercial application server technology in a day and age where application servers have become commoditized.

As I conclude in my article, ColdFusion is not dead but it isn’t growing either. There is definitely a lot of legacy ColdFusion in enterprises and that will keep people gainfully employed for years to come. And the open source release of Railo is a move I applaud (and one which counters the commercial argument) and I look forward to seeing where Mark takes that.

To summarize, please don’t trivialize what I was saying by stating that I declared ColdFusion dead. I didn’t. The points I made concern commoditization and education.

(Looking forward to hopefully catching your talk, btw!) :)

By: Johnny

Johnny — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 04:36:22 +0000

ColdFusion is far from dead! In fact there is a good community surrounding ColdFusion as well. I agree with retrogamer4ever when he states that just because it is no the most popular does not mean it is dead.

I have been using ColdFusion for about 5 years, and I stick with it, because I love it, and with the large community around it, seems like I am not alone.

Are you planning to recorded these talks, I would love to watch the video. I live in Hawaii, and could not make it to any of the meetings.