This is the season to celebrate and the intent of this post is to share a series of positive news and initiatives from Adobe that we are excited to share with the community.
ColdFusion 10 feedback and ColdFusion Business
We have received positive feedback for ColdFusion 10, and this is also reflected in the way business for ColdFusion has turned up. The business is doing better now than any point in the last few years. This quarter has been ColdFusion’s best since 2008.
This is very encouraging to Adobe and we will continue to make efforts to grow the product. Thanks to you for supporting the product.
Roadmap discussions
We have initiated new roadmap discussions where Senior leadership from Adobe participate in engaging discussions with customers. In these discussions we have received excellent feedback on ColdFusion 10, and our customers also like the future directions that we are taking and look forward to the upcoming versions of ColdFusion.
Cloud Release
As you may be aware, the promised cloud release of ColdFusion on Amazon EC2 has been delayed due to issues with agreements between Adobe and Amazon. We have resolved these issues and we are slated to offer an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for ColdFusion 10 with flexible hourly pricing.
Shorter Release Cycles
We are looking to reduce the release cycles for ColdFusion to create more impact through new features and functionalities and also make use of the window of opportunity that lies with ever changing space of new and upcoming technologies.
Education Initiatives
During the next year, one of our major efforts designed to grow the size of the community is promoting ColdFusion at various community colleges. Adobe will come up with a detailed semester-long curriculum for server side programming concepts demonstrated through ColdFusion. Instructor guides, quizzes, exams, and software required to teach will all be provided; along with access to a community expert that the instructors or students can interact with. If you have any contacts at colleges near you, please let us know. If you have any other ideas to promote ColdFusion in education, share that with us as well.
ColdFusion Conference from Adobe
Due to MAX’s focus on Creative Cloud tools and services, we are considering a full-fledged ColdFusion conference to be organized by the ColdFusion Business Unit at Adobe. While Adobe will be the primary organizers, we want to maximize community involvement in various aspects such as content selection.
Recharging CF User Groups
We are looking to actively engage with the ColdFusion user groups during the next year. ColdFusion 10 events are already in the works with interested user groups, and more is on the way.
Future Directions
We are also excited about our future releases – Splendor and Dazzle. A high level overview of each is available on our public facing roadmap available here. If you have questioned Adobe’s commitment to the platform, I encourage you to take a look at the roadmap. All of the customers with whom we have discussed the roadmap responded positively and gave promising feedback. Customers are also excited about the directions that we are taking, addressing key technological challenges in upcoming versions. If your organization is keen on participating in a roadmap discussion with the senior leadership from Adobe, let us know!
We look forward to exciting times for ColdFusion.
I will leave you with some of the photographs of the party that the Product Team had to celebrate the quarterly result and the success of ColdFusion 10. Here is the link.
Leave your thoughts and inputs as comments on this post.
Happy holidays everyone and come back for a great 2013 for ColdFusion!
Staff
109 posts
@Gyan: There are a few issues related to download that will be fixed shortly. I just tried downloading and was able to download it. Can you check again and report back?
Hi Rakshit,
I tried to download Coldfusion installer for windows 8 support. And click on the link http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=coldfusion. But this goin to error page. Could you please let me know from where can i download the same.
Regards,
Gyan
@Andrew: We have and we will aggressively look at fixing existing bugs going forward. That should address your concern.
@Austin: We are working towards getting the AMI as soon as we can. There is no date that I can explicitly call out at this point. You will see an announcement going out when we are ready.
Hi Rakshith – Any word on when the ColdFusion AMI will be available in the AWS Marketplace? Really looking forward to it.
Thanks!
That’s ok Rakshith…
But I hope that Adobe seriously go back through the bug base and fix things like these that have plagued us for over 5 years.
I can understand them being deferred with not enough time, but we have had 3 versions and how many updates and they still have never been fixed.
Adobe should be actively caring about these type of bugs, the longer they take to get fixed means the more people are likely to move away from the language. Maybe not.
But there is no excuse to revisit of a release and begin fixing these type of bugs, and this is just from a small list as there are hundreds if not thousands of bugs like this.
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040277
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040278
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040298
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040508
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3041043
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040941
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3041278
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3129821
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3133547
@Andrew: Sorry about that. One of the engineers on the product team would be best positioned to answer that.
@Rakshith – When I mentioned dropping the ball, you took that out of context, the dropping the ball is reference to why IIS has to have CGI installed, when ColdFUsion doesn’t require it.
@James: I agree with you that one of the advantages of a dynamic language is its ability to not require types to be associated at the time of writing the code. But that said, if there are issues that needs to be fixed to make it better, we will surely evaluate it.
@Tom: As I pointed to James, if there are ways where you think we could fix issues, yet maintain compatibility without having introduce complexity in programming, we will happy to consider baking that in. But that needs some good amount of discussion. And pre-release would be a great place to have that discussion. I would encourage you be a part of the pre-release for the next version as well just as you have in the past.
@Andrew: If we had said no support for Win 2012 or Win 8, then yes, it is a classic example of “dropping the ball”. We have already committed to supporting the new platform and it will be available sooner than later.
@Mary: Backward compatibility is at the top of the list for most of our customers when they upgrade to a newer version. That said, it is not true that we maintain 100% compatibility. We have made the choices to break compatibility if it is the right thing to be implemented in the language.
@Henry: I understand the frustration. We have not gone past the 3-5 months guideline that we initially gave. As an Adobe policy we cannot announce our support date for the new installer, but only provide guidance. All I can tell you is we understand the importance and we are doing everything possible to make sure our customers get access to the new installers as soon as possible. The engineers confirmed that there are no specific workarounds that can be pointed here and it is better to provide full support than any stop-gap solution that is not fully tested. Security issues do crop up in the best of products. Questioning the why issue came up and associating that with the quality of the dev team is nothing more than being imprudent. A comprehensive fix is now out that will prevent the vulnerability. Thank you for your patience and we wouldn’t want you to make the move away when we are just about to release the new installer. The captcha is now fixed 🙂
@Adam: There is no workaround that is completely foolproof. We would rather focus on the full support than any intermediate solution that is not fully tested under all scenarios.
Heh… @Mary Jo is referring to some stuff I mentioned on my blog, I think. This:
http://adamcameroncoldfusion.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/according-to-06-60-and-both-are.html
and this:
http://adamcameroncoldfusion.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-holy-grail.html
If those weren’t the specific sources of what she said, then it’s the same thing, anyhow.
@James there’s some argument for *allowing* strict typing already. CFPARAM, CFARGUMENT, CFFUNCTION etc. There are plenty of situations in which I’d *love* to be able to declare a variable as an int, and to get at least a runtime error if for any reason some code tries to make it a string. I have use cases for this all the time. I’d not want CF to compulsorily go strong-typed though. But then again that’s a strawman: no one has suggested this.
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Adam
@James Carberry I don’t think Mary Jo wanted to change CFs typing model, and I certainly like it how it is; I was just advocating ways in which Adobe could have their cake (of backwards compatibility) and eat is (fix the most glaring bugs they wont at the mo because of compatibility).
@Tom – there is a distinct difference between fixing inoperable issues and changing the paradigm of CF to strict case / strongly typed (neither of which are particularly productive as the zealots of those forms evangelize).
While I believe bug fixes are necessary and should be implemented, a “strict” mode is a slippery slope to losing the facets of CF that attracted the majority of its following in the first place.
@James Carberry – please don’t think just because we want Adobe to fix serious issues (don’t get me started on how broken isEmail() is) we want your code to break.
It could be as simple as saying ‘application.strictLanguage=true/false’ to opt in/out of ‘compatible’ mode for instance, or having CF choose to use an older version of the compiler with ‘[server|application].cfVersion=6’.
There are many ways to fix things with out breaking code, or at least providing an easy way to unbreak them.
@Mary Jo – entirely DISAGREE – one of primary the reasons ColdFusion is so popular is that you don’t have to worry about types and casing. @Adobe – please do NOT think any suggestion to the contrary represents the whole (or even a majority) of the CF populace.
I’d like to give a thumbs up to Jim’s comment that Adobe needs to stop worrying so much about backwards compatibility when it comes to things that don’t work in any kind of logical way to programmers. It’s one of the things that I have seen for myself turns people trying the product off COMPLETELY. They come from the java world (for instance) where everything is strongly typed and the coding very logical, and then here’s CF that does some really wonky things, and it is a total turnoff, when you have to spend time trying to figure out why code isn’t working, and then trying to code around an issue that shouldn’t be there in the first place! I remember not long ago posting a bug report about something along these lines (isValid(‘integer’) I believe which passes stuff that isn’t at all a strict integer) and was specifically told that it couldn’t be fixed because people might have coded to expect the (broken) implementation. That’s just wrong thinking and is allowing far too many things to continue from version to version that make CF seem like a quirky, harder to learn language than it should be.
@andrew – thanks – have sent you a message via your blog. that’s much appreciated.
@Henry, if you want to contact me off list and give me some more details as what problems your having at what stage then I will be glad to see if I can sort you out.
The only problem is that the connectors need to be setup manually, and you will not be able to update to updater 7 or uninstall at this stage.
However I was able to manually patch ColdFusion 10 with updater 7, I am not confident at this stage it is 100% done. The patch or hotfix is correct but the version hasn’t changed.
I am guessing that the version is being updated as part of the installer from the update.
And while Adobe are at it, can the explain why the CGI module / addin for IIS is a requirement?
Once installed you can switch this off and have no impact on ColdFusion, the only thing that requires it is the Web Configuration tool, and too be honest who ever decided it was needed for a non classic application pool has some answers.
I don’t mind them coming out and say it is because of this, but I can write a tool to do the same job as the Web configuration tool tht does the same job and it doesn’t require the CGI part of IIS.
If anyone wants to talk about dropping the ball, then this is a classic example.
Sigh. “suggestion” not “suggested” 😉
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Adam
> Can I suggest this… In the meantime, could one of the members of the adobe dev team do us a walkthrough of a workaround that works. We all appreciate it’s a stop-gap – but at least it would be recognition of all of us who are getting hugely frustrated.
This is a very good suggested, and a very good middle ground that Adobe could taek, by way of amelioration for really droppping the ball on this one.
@RakshithN? What do you think?
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Adam
sorry… @andy, not @adam… ragarding your walkthroughs etc. no ability to edit posts it seems – for a dev blog… ugh
@rick, @sean, @andy…
I’ve been patiently waiting for 2012 support for a while now. Most of my new server hardware has arrived, the rest comes next week, and then we want to crack on with setup and moving clients over – but we can’t – because there is no installer that works – not the software itself really, but the installer. A relatively small and simple piece of software that simply does not take that long to put together.
A couple of weeks back I see on this blog it’ll work in 2 months. We can’t wait 2 months. We’ve already waited longer than the 3-5 months you said originally – I’d second whoever made the point that: can you imagine a scenario where Photoshop wouldn’t install on the latest version of Windows… no, neither can I?!
I would like you to, here on this blog, commit to a firm calendar date – Feb 16th perhaps – in 4 weeks time – by which time you promise to have a new working installer for us? I’d never get away with giving my clients timelines like ‘oh a couple of months’ – so why should you?
@adam – like many others I’ve been following your blog posts and updates on workaround – I’ve tried a couple, but have had little success. Can I suggest this… In the meantime, could one of the members of the adobe dev team do us a walkthrough of a workaround that works. We all appreciate it’s a stop-gap – but at least it would be recognition of all of us who are getting hugely frustrated.
We’re all CF fans here – It’s a great language, with many benefits over it’s competitors in my opinion – I really try to push the platform where I can – but it’s embarrassing.
Whilst I’m on the subject – shouting about yet another security patch doesn’t make me think – ‘ah they’re a great dev team looking after their customers, making sure things are properly secured’ – it makes me think ‘why on earth did they release it with that mistake in it that they’ve now had to go back and fix’.
Sorry to say I’m a couple of weeks away from turning my back on Adobe – and I’m sure I’m not alone.
PS. agree on the captcha WTF!
@Sean: Yes, I have been on the team for more than six years now. Adobe staff in Bangalore and Noida combined is less than the rest of the world though. Number of employees in the US continues to be the highest. You present a pretty accurate description of how the team in India evolved. Much of the development team has been around for quite a few years and has a very deep understanding of the product. Though my role has changed over the last year or so, I still feel special to associate myself with the amazing set of engineers we have.
@Damien: Thanks! It would be great to have to the beta program for the future releases of ColdFusion!
I’m late to the party but one thing I’ve noticed is that the blog post and the comments here in are two different things. This is with many other blogs too. Anyway I don’t want to say anything about Adobe vs Railo vs some other engine, I will only congratulate the team on their achievements and wish them luck with the next version of CF. I will wait for the beta release. Good job guys.
@David, I’ll leave Rakshith to answer your specific question but I’ll provide some background because it seems many CFers don’t realize how Adobe / Macromedia operate, in regards to India.
Macromedia opened a facility in Bangalore many, many years ago and initially used it primarily for QA so we could have 24×7 dev cycles: dev in the US during the day, QA in India overnight. It was a great system and I interacted with the Bangalore team a lot when I was senior architect on the Web Team. Over time, Macromedia increased the staffing levels in Bangalore and increased the teams’ responsibilities, moving a lot of product maintenance to that facility, which increased the US facilities’ ability to focus on new product development.
Macromedia began to shift ColdFusion engineering duties to Bangalore in the CFMX7 timeframe if I recall correctly. By the time of CF8, most ColdFusion development work was being done by the strong team that had emerged in India. I remember interacting with Ram and others during that release cycle, and getting onMissingMethod() implemented “under the radar” since Tom and a few of the original Allaire team were still the senior engineering gatekeepers in the US 🙂
With CF9, everything except product management and marketing moved to Bangalore. The US-based engineers moved on to other products (or other companies). Then product management and marketing also transitioned to India. I think that was really when most CFers realized how involved India was in ColdFusion 🙂
Adobe took a similar approach with its facility in Noida. When Adobe acquired Macromedia, that meant the combined company had a substantial engineering body in India. Adobe already had several product lines being maintained entirely in India, right up thru product management and marketing. It was a natural step to consolidate divisions to reduce the communication and timezone overhead so that entire org charts within the company could operate locally and autonomously.
I don’t know what the numbers are these days – I left Adobe almost five years ago (wow, that’s flown past!) – but I wouldn’t be surprised if Adobe has more staff in Bangalore and Noida together now than the rest of the world combined…
The ColdFusion team in Bangalore seems to have been pretty consistent – quite a few of the engineers have been around since the CFMX 7 days, I think?
@Rakshith, you’ve been with the team a long time, right? Hope you don’t feel I’ve mischaracterized anything here… Like I say, in my time with Macromedia / Adobe (about seven years), I always had great interactions with the Bangalore team (bummed that I never got to visit them – my manager, Robin, and the head of Web Team QA, Svetlana, got over there quite a bit!).
Just out of sheer curiosity, is the entire CF team of Indian origin? Or is the team located overseas? I couldn’t help but notice from the party pictures you posted via Flickr, again just curious! 🙂 It’s always neat to see the inside view. Thanks for your dedication to CF!
@Rick : I have passed your contact information to Adobe Support. Someone from the team will get in touch with you.
@Rakshith: Am I still facing an installation issue? Yep, ColdFusion 10 does not work on ANY of my Win2008r2 servers from a fresh install using the 30-day evaluation downloaded from the website. Feel free to contact me whenever.
@Rick: Are you still facing an installation issue with Win2008R2? Adobe Support will be quickly able to help you with this. Let me know.
@Sean/Andrew: We realize that this is important and are working on it in addition to ensuring that a comprehensive testing happens on the new platform
@Ty Whalin: Thanks! Do you have any contacts at some of the communty colleges? If so, I would want to get in touch with you. I agree with you that the releases should not be so frequent that catching up with a new releases becomes a challenge.
@James: We are working on the support already. So please go ahead with your plan your upgrade. The support will be available in under two months from now.
@Rakshith Naresh – Any target date on the Windows Server 2012 compatible release / installer? We are building the infrastructure now and would like to be able to make this move to reduce obsolescence. Also, will this support “core mode” for Server 2012?
The conferences and providing courses in colleges is a great thing to provide. I would most definitely like to take college classes for CF and attend any type of convention for it.
Although there is one area I strongly believe there should be concern for, is the more frequent releases. Just because no one likes having to sift through bug reports to determine why their applications do not work.
As with any programming language, interface or just about whatever, making sure it all works well before adding new features is something that should be wrapped up first before continuing to add new improvements.
I know this is not always possible because of complexity, but I am a strong believer with regards to a better product. Which in turn leads to happier customers. This is great news for the CF community.
If it is any consolation, well maybe not for us developers. I am seeing an increase to my step by step guide how too, of around %30 each month of searches from google analytics and my other stats from my hosting.
If I am getting a 30% increase in searches over the previous month every month, that has got to say Adobe pull that finger out and do your job.
The observation is that Adobe is governed by where they can place their efforts, but to think that deployment by business uptake is not now is wrong, as developers we are already trying to work on this solution.
But I said it once before, and I will say it again, how badly has this effected their sales, because I know plenty who have said screw it and moved over to railo or have gone with something else they use in house.
That means another few applications are not being written in ColdFusion, all because Adobe can’t see past their noses.
@Rick…I could not agree more. I’ve got a client with a brand new server (or at least it used to be) with Windows 2012, SQL 2012, etc. just waiting for Adobe to figure out a way for me to install CF10 on it so I can migrate from an older server. Client keeps asking me why we can’t just make the switch…pointing them to blog after blog article on the nightmare workarounds to get it to go doesn’t exactly exude confidence in the product…at least on my client’s part.
With all of the betas of Win2012 that were available prior to its August RTM (and to Technet, which I’m sure Adobe has access to), I find it hard to believe that they are still working on this. It is for these reasons I still wonder how much of a priority ColdFusion really is, no matter what the marketing speak is. Can you imagine them taking this long if Photoshop would not install on Windows 8?
I guess I’m late to the party, but I find it entertaining to hear work commencing on a Windows 8/2012 installer when the current installer doesn’t work on Win2008r2. Not at least without some serious time on your hands or knowing how to tweak everything to get the install to work beforehand. The forums are littered with people having problems, myself included: http://forums.adobe.com/community/coldfusion/coldfusion_general and http://trendecide.com/entry/coldfusion-10-disaster. I’ve to be able to even install the product to see if I even want to upgrade, let alone recommend it to the myriad of others I influence to upgrade their products. If sales are better, I can’t imagine how awesome they’d be with a product that actually works on Win2008, because it currently does not, at least not right out of the box.
@Rakshith, Thank you very much and you’re welcome 🙂
@Hemant, First, thank you for your reply! I -am- thankful for the CF team’s continued focus/efforts on improving the tracker (including ‘testing the waters’ w/ Bugbase). I’m sure much planning and time has been invested over the years. I’ll note that the “Tracker”-related tickets *appear* to be mostly ignored by the bug tracker team. They posted some comments on tickets back in June of 2011, but I haven’t seen any comments from them since. And most Tracker-related tickets are still “Unverified”. Of course, ticket comments are currently not a very effective means of communication (since we don’t get emails when comments are added). Maybe the bug tracker could have its own Prerelease 🙂
Thanks!,
-Aaron
@John: Well, it is only this much that I can do to convince or rather let you know that the business has been robust. If it were a marketing spin, I wouldn’t be writing this on a blog post. But would save that effort in reaching out to the decision makers, who end up paying for the product, with my marketer hat on.
Yes, absolutely. All the numbers and highs that we are seeing right now is because of ColdFusion 10.
@Rakshith Well I hope it’s a true upswing in sales and not some marketing spin. Granted CF10 came out last year, so there should be some level of sales increase. That being said, it has now been at least 5 days since the latest security issue has been reported to Adobe about CF10 and 9 and there’s still no patch for it, just an advisory (which took several days to release at that). This continues to be the biggest problem for those of us trying to convince people to stay with the technology. The turn around time for patches needs to be quicker than this.
@Sean – yeah, at the end of the day it relies on Amazon Linux (CentOS based) – Ubuntu and Suse and RedHat all use too much of the RAM out of the box to allow CF to run at all on a micro, but Amazon Linux has a tiny memory footprint in comparison so you can get away with using a micro for a test/dev and very light use sites (e.g. personal blog, perhaps). Nothing I’d go to production with, but more than enough power for dev/test stuff. As for how it would run the test suites you describe, my guess would be very, very slowly or not at all.
@Denard, I’m a little surprised ACF can run on a free AWS micro instance, given it’s footprint, so that’s good to know. My local dev stack has Java configured with 1GB heap, 768MB perm size – and happily exercises most of that running thru our test suites – so I’m not sure how it would work in 640MB!
@Hermant – I concur with Tom – with Amazon’s free price tier for new AWS customers it only makes sense to offer a developer version that runs in the micro instance. Amazon clearly sees the value in offering free micro EC2’s to draw customers to the cloud, wouldn’t Adobe be able to easily piggyback this offering with a micro EC2 instance of CF10? Goes hand in hand with the ‘People are going to try to install this on a micro instance, might want to consider having an AMI specific to the micro instance’ suggestion I made both before and during the pre-release cycle.
@Tom – you can always use the AWS free tier and download/deploy CF10 yourself. It’s a bit more involved (obviously) but doable. You just have to edit the memory setting to something reasonable for the 640M total you have with a micro instance and CF10 runs pretty nicely on Amazon Linux (for a dev server, obviously). I have a preso up from cf.O() last year with some of the details on how to do it with CF10 (http://css.dvdmenubacks.com/ColdFusion_On_The_Cloud_Amazon_EC2_and_S3_cfObjective_2012.zip) and an earlier preso with step-by-step how to do it in CF9 (http://css.dvdmenubacks.com/ColdFusion_On_The_Cloud_Amazon_EC2_and_S3.pptx)
Tom, if you’re a computer: so am I. Sometimes it takes about three or four goes before I can decipher the CAPTCHAs on this blog. I don’t have similar problems anywhere else.
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Adam
Oh, that’s a shame. I thought it would be a good way to enable new users to get up and running and be able to start writing CFML without needing to install anything.
A free usage tier/time in the official AMI is a good next best thing though.
PS I still struggle with the CAPTCHA (are those O in background ? or a real letter ?) Maybe I am a computer 🙂
On that Amazon note – will you be making a ready-to-go free version with a developer ColdFusion install available ? You could do that much sooner…
@Lola: Here’s how you can reach me,
Email: rakshith@adobe.com
Twitter: rakshithn
Look forward to hear about your website.
May I ask again, how do I get in touch with you directly to give you details about our website?
@Aaron: I love to see that enthusiasm in you for the future releases and your keen intent to give your best during the pre-release. I too look forward to have you on pre-release and help us shape the next release, just as you did with CF10. Thank you!
@David: Thank you. We need your support to build a great CF11. Your contributions to the pre-release was huge. I look forward to your continued support in future as well! Thanks!
@David,
LOL! at the “They just call it PHP. The rest is implied.” *awesome*
-Aaron
Hi Rakshith,
Thank you *very* much for communicating the issues to the bugtracker team! You’re always very welcome. I’ve been anxiously/busily preparing for CF11 🙂
See you next year!,
-Aaron
Rakshith: Happy New Year to you too! Thank you.
I didn’t mean that was the only reason. You guys create a truly awesome product, that’s why I use it. Keep up the great work man.
@Everyone: I would take this opportunity to wish you and your families a very happy New Year!
@Sean: You are right that we cannot disclose the details. But some of the details of our surge are important – we are adding new customers and upgrade has been better than in previous cycles. Some revenue uplift can be attributed to the EULA and price changes, but we are talking of factors like units and customers. And at the end of day, customers buying and showing interest despite the EULA and price changes only resonates what we have been hearing from customers – the value that CF10 offers to their businesses.
@Andrew: We are doing better on both Standard and Enterprise editions. One way we are bridging the gap that you point for customers stuck with prior versions is by having deep conversations with them on the benefits of the new release. Like I said, this is has helped improve the business.
@John: I would like to reiterate again that the surge was not because one large corp or entity. There has been a steady upswing right from the quarter where CF10 was released.
@Scott: You will hear next about the ColdFusion AMI on EC2 when we launch this offering. We are close to making this available.
@John: No. The surge was not because of a large group or customer renewing the license. There has been a steady upswing across Q3, Q4 and now Q1 as well. Two high performing quarters in 2008 and 2012 does not mean sales have been declining. So your assumption is not true. As I have stated in the post, our customers like CF10 as a release along with the improvements/features introduced in CF10. This has been validated through our increased customer engagements this year. We will continue with these engagements during the next year as well.
@David: You could attribute the success to whatever you want to, but the overall business is on upswing and that is what matters.
@seanF: We are on working on it. The new installer to support Win server 2012 and win 8 will be made available.
@Subranath: Thanks! Great to see overall optimism. We will make sure to continuously provide updates on all the initiatives planned.
@David, @Roger, @John : Agree with you that we cannot make any assumptions on salaries for CF developers based on anecdotal evidence.
@Sean – I agree mostly with you. That’s why I suspect it was a large corp or govt entity that needed to do a system upgrade and that bumped up the numbers for this past quarter. I don’t think it will result in a real turn around. I agree that the pricing is cheap for the enterprise market but that hasn’t been the real source of the problems for CF.
Sean, you are dead right about the Enterprise market. And will admit when exposed to it so long ago, I was lost as to the mentality at the time. I guess most of use get into the view that the cheaper option should always be the best, within reason of course.
But it is so different, with the enterprise market being so the opposite I fell over backwards.
What I think would be more interesting, is how much of an increase / decrease sales have been on the standard editions.
And maintain that Adobe needs to find a way, to get people to bridge the gap between those still using V5.0 to future releases, and I strongly believe open sourcing or making the CML engine free. Would encourage more of an adoption to the latest and greatest, potentially increasing sales if the package it right.
@John, it’s a shame Adobe aren’t allowed to disclose specific unit sales numbers. I’d love to see new unit sales for Standard and Enterprise, and upgrade numbers, for the last five years – but alas we can’t. The EULA has changed with each of the last three releases, which affects licensing revenue c.f. units sold, esp. with the changes in CF10 which raised prices for a number of configurations and would have affected upgrade costs substantially for some people.
I’ve always said CF is crazy cheap in the enterprise market so it’s good to know Adobe’s business plans are having a positive effect.
My guess would be it’s a byproduct of overall market growth. Everyone and their sister are developing nowadays.
Sounds like you had a large group renew their licensing or something to that effect? If this was the biggest quarter since 2008 (four years now), would it be safe to take that statement to mean also that the general trend is that sales have been declining over the past several years? What happen in this past quarter to break that trend?
when can we expect to hear more about the coldfusion AMI on EC2?
Subrata, where do not sky high salaries start? I know of more than one CFer looking for work and also know dotNET developers. Inside industry there is more competition from dotNET but outside the Enterprise there is more competition from PHP. In both cases it is not about developer costs as I have worked as a resource consultant more than once to validate CF readiness of people they were looking to hire and know what they paid. We have to avoid anecdotal evidence in this quest or IMO turns into a war.
Subrata, have you priced any .NET programmers lately? I wouldn’t say that CF devs are paid that much more if any. High end developers cost about the same from what I can see. Is there data that you are looking at that could clue us in on salaries across languages?
What? Subrata, salary should depend on how productive you are, how much value you add to the organization that’s paying you, what you’re working on, who you’re working for, and a bunch of other stuff. What language you’re authoring in shouldn’t play into it. At all.
Very happy to see this post. Its a Christmas gift from Adobe to us.
What I feel personally is we need to create more n more CF resources because nowadays CFers are asking salary like anything as CF resources are hard to find, which is not good for the whole community. Lot of companies(enterprise level) are developing application on .NET just to save this extra salary burden coz .NET resources are easy to find with lot less salary. So before cursing Adobe we should also show responsibility toward CF and think twice before asking sky high salary.
I’ll just be happy when CF10 can be installed on Windows 2012 Server without the many (unsupported) workarounds needed presently.
@Mike: We are looking to provide a complete solution for mobile application development using which you can not just develop full fledged mobile apps using your existing language skills, but also build, test, debug and deploy them all using the technology that you know and love. I would encourage you to participate in the pre-release if this interests you.
I was looking at the roadmap and I saw it said “End-to-end Mobile Application Development Workflow”
what does this mean?
Thanks!
@Aaron: I was surprised not see any comment from you on this post yet. Good to see it now. Thanks Aaron! I understand that the bugtracker is painful. We have communicated all the pain points to the team responsible for the bugtracker. Hopefully, among various other exciting news around ColdFusion, we will also have many improvements made to the bugtracker in the coming year. I can see how 11 will be lucky for us as I am already excited about the feature set planned for 11. Happy holidays to you as well! Thanks for your support, as always.
Happy holidays everyone! I look forward to more interactions as we roll our plan for 2013. I am also excited more than ever about how Adobe and the community can work together make a positive impact to ColdFusion.
@Shirak: Thanks Shirak! Absolutely! The passion in the ColdFusion community has been evident and it continues to show here as well. I have personally enjoyed interacting with every person who has commented on this thread and I have also tried to ensure that I respond to every comment posted out here. you are right when you point out that IDE is a critical piece in the productivity story. We have a great amount of focus on CF Builder in the upcoming releases and you will see much of improvements made to the IDE that will further enhance the productivity of our developers. ColdFusion Builder is also has a significant role to play in some of the new features that are planned for the upcoming versions. Stay tuned to see all the improvements! DW as a product caters to mostly to a different target audience than pure CF developers. And this has increasingly been the case with the recent versions. That said, we realize how some of our CF developers still like to work with DW. So we will continue to work with the DW team to provide support compatible with new CF versions that will come out in future. Thanks for your continued support Shirak! It means a lot to us.
@Gary: I can envision the pain point that you describe. Thanks for the feedback. We will look into how best we can address the pain point in the future releases.
@Travis: Interesting. Do you already need such a support for word document manipulation in your web app workflow? If yes, are you already using any solution. I will also be interested to understand the usecase on how you moight end up using such a server side word manipulation feature. Look forward to hearing back from you.
Hi Rakshith,
This very positive news bodes well for CF’s future. Excellent!
Let’s please further improve customer satisfaction, product quality, and Adobe’s image by enabling bugbase to better facilitate discussions. Currently, ticket authors and commenters are frustrated about the inability to “subscribe” to ticket comments and status changes. Bugbase doesn’t inform them when an engineer asks a question (unless the engineer actually sends an email) or when a ticket becomes “closed as unreproducible”. Thus, valid bugs can remain in CF. And bug discussions then occur in less appropriate channels that actually do facilitate discussions via “subscribing”.
CF rocks and 11 will be lucky. “Typed” on a screen keyboard so ignore any typos 🙂
Happy Holidays to Adobe and the CF Team!,
-Aaron
Dear ACF Team,
Congratulations for the good news, you guys plant the good seed now you getting the fruits. There is one thing we all notice on this blog, can you guess it? I guess you did, look the number of comments whether was positive or negative they all mean one thing to me, how passionate and how they love ColdFusion.
In my humble opinion, you guys need to focus on the IDE too, in today’s world IDE is the productivity factor, coming from Visual Studio to CF Builder it is like driving car then jump to bicycle. Many occasions I suggested to work with DW team not west time with new IDE, DW combine design and development tools, if you guys worked by adding CF features to DW we were in better position now. In addition to DW with CF features, you could include CF developer edition to Dreamweaver installer as optional server side pack. Imagine how many CF servers will be installed with DW copy, which will introduce to new audience how easy to have CRUD operations/services/PDF/image manipulation and many of CF features available as first class citizen with DW. I guess right now we have CF Builder, the focus should be on that at least bring it to Flash Builder quality.
One more thing to add before I end my comment, regarding to Ben Forta’s blog (with all respect, for me he is CF God Father) about using CF ajax features, in my opinion these kind of announcement will not serve CF despite the fact it is true. For example .Net has same built-in ajax features they start moving silently to JQuery in fact they include it with MVC framework but never criticize or announce publicly.
Congratulations again and keep the good work, I will be your number one supporter.
Yeah I was looking more along the lines of directly manipulating doc/docx documents (not just converting them). For example, a function called “documentFindReplace()” to search for and replace a variable within a document.
I think Apache POI might have this functionality, but the docx format is horribly difficult to deal with (such as Word splitting a single word across, what they call, multiple “runs”). Some companies spend $10,000+ to use Aspose products to deal with the complexities of Office… but that simply isn’t an option for most.
@Rakshith, Word to PDF conversion in CF9 requires OpenOffice and the results were terrible. (Layouts are often completely destroyed; nothing short of 100% accuracy is acceptable to customers). As a result we had to use a clever automation script to get CF converting perfectly to PDF using MS Word itself. Native MS Word to PDF should be implimented in CF11 with enahanced *MS* Office integration. You might think I don’t need it because I implimented it another way, but I also had to write a scheduled task to detect and kill occassional hung instances of Word on the server! Doh.
@Darth: Yes, we did have issues with the updates. We are sorry about that. We have resolved it all now and we have taken steps so that such issues don’t crop up again with the future updates.
@Roger: You will a much better PDF generation and maintenance support in the subsequent version of CF. Stay tuned!
@Travis: We already have a good integration with Microsoft Office. You can also convert Word documents to PDF using the new office support in CF9 or CF10. Let us know if you are looking for anything more specific.
@Brian: We have been having engaging discussions with our Government customers already via the roadmap discussions. The feedback from every goverment customer has been great and they too are excited about the directions that we are planning to take going forward. We can arrange a roadmap discussion where we first talk about the benefits of CF10 and then talk about our future directions. Reach out me : rakshith@adobe.com and we can set something up.
@Lola: You can email me: rakshith@adobe.com
I have never used the client side tags, most likely never will.
Someone else brought up PDF generation and maintenance. There should be a complete API for working with PDFs within ColdFusion. You should be able to work on documents to add or edit any of the meta data, tags, add or delete pages, work with security, etc. Adobe owns both products so this shouldn’t be a huge issue. Please do this before some other document format comes out and is required by US government or industry.
>>We have received positive feedback for ColdFusion 10<<
More than a few negative ones too when your updates screwed up our installations.
Rakshith, is there an email address or any other way I can contact you directly?
I would echo the call for re-engaging with your government clients. I’ve been long term on a project within the .mil space and in the last year ColdFusion is now viewed as has-been technology and in today’s fiscal climate, too expensive to maintain when the perception is that .Net can do everything for free (but discounting the migration cost).
We’ve been running on CF8 since it’s release (we started on CF3), and I definitely can’t advise them to upgrade to CF10 based on reports of issues with the CF10 upgrade … And while I appreciate the ease of use and rapidity with which product can be brought to bear in CF, I can’t convince them to spend the money to upgrade to at least CF9 — Not to mention that the product doesn’t appear on the list of network approved products for the .mil network — only because it hasn’t been sponsored and tested — As an aside, neither has Railo.
Unsure where to advance from here.
Will there be any improvements on Microsoft Office integration in upcoming ColdFusion releases?
ColdFusion 9/10 have pretty good support for Microsoft Excel manipulation (xls and xlsx format), and I do believe there is support for Microsoft PowerPoint manipulation (I haven’t used it)… but what about Microsoft Word?
@Sean: Thanks for weighing in with your thoughts on the CFML committee.
@Denard: Thanks to you too for sharing your feedback and thoughts.
@Lola: Thanks! We have a compelling feature set coming up around PDFs that you can look forward to. I certainly want to take a look at what you are building. We are working with the hosting companies and hopefully we will be able to offer a compelling set of options.
@Adam: Thanks for the feedback!
@Patrick: We are looking to support CentOS with the next version of ColdFusion.
@Brad: If we are on the same page now, it should not matter anymore. When you drew references to a couple of instances it certainly looked like you were indicating the contrary of what you just said in the post. Never mind, misunderstandings do happen. And it is all the more possible when you are responding to bunch of folks with various inputs. Thanks for all the feedback Brad. Appreciate it. Cheers!
@Rakshith – You make some valid points in re: the CF committee. Thank you for taking the time to address my concerns – I appreciate it 🙂
As former chair of the CFML committee I’ll elaborate on the point that Rakshith made: what the committee tried to do was difficult and a huge amount of work. I was the only member of the committee who’d worked on a standards committee and really knew what we were getting into.
At the time, creation of the committee was useful to help unify the community and the CFML engines. New Atlanta had spun off Open BlueDragon and formed its own steering committee. Railo was going open source as a JBoss community project.
Several years down the line, Railo has shown continued commitment to compatibility with Adobe ColdFusion, whilst OpenBD has gone its own way and stated publicly that compatibility is not a key concern for them. Today’s “CFML committee” would only be Adobe and Railo and they seem to be getting on just fine without a committee.
Both Adobe and Railo have ways to get user feedback and perform extensive testing as new releases are being developed. Their different approaches are due to their underlying natures – Adobe has a commercial product and has to be careful about forward-looking statements; Railo has an open source product and has to do almost all of its development out in the open.
I’m very pleased to see Adobe moving to more frequent releases for ColdFusion, as well as making a concerted effort to crack the education system and introduce CFML to students. I think the roadmap is really too vague to be useful – but Adobe’s hands are mostly tied there by the “forward-looking” caveat and responsibility to their shareholders. The roadmap does, however, show that there _is_ a long-term plan! My initial reaction to Adobe’s plan to run its own ColdFusion conference was “I hope that doesn’t cannibalize their support for community-run conferences!” and Rakshith has addressed that (good!).
By the way, I haven’t blogged about it but after the formation of The Railo Company with investment from international partners, announced at cf.Objective(), I stepped down from Railo (and all US-based business has transitioned to the new European company). I mention that here since at least one commenter in this thread has recently accused me of shilling for Railo and being anti-Adobe, neither of which is true (and the latter never has been). I have opinions about both companies and their products but I’m happy to praise both when they deserve it and criticize both (again, when they deserve it).
Rakshith, thank you for all the personal replies. It means a lot t the community to feel heard.
I think there is a misunderstanding about what I was saying. Let me be very clear that I never said that Adobe was “anti-Railo”, nor did I suggest that you two didn’t get along. Those aspects to the discussion were both introduced by Ben (who perhaps hadn’t read the complete comment thread).
Please read my original comment which was addressed to Wil (by name) and his suggestion that Adobe “fully embrace” CF.Objective(). I interpreted that as a suggestion that Adobe take over that conference instead of creating a new one. I was simply pointing out the obvious potential conflict of interest that could create (which you have just confirmed).
Also, please do not put words in my mouth. I never once suggested that you should or would want to “spend effort and funds” to support a competitor. In fact, I have supported your decisions to protect your interests which was the whole point behind my first post. I have also seen you “draw the line” you spoke of recently (and supported it) and was simply suggesting to Wil that the conflict of interest might inhibit you from running a conference like CF.Objective() (or being more involved than you are now). I don’t know how to make it any clearer than that.
Since then in the conversation you have stated that you will continue to sponsor other CF Conferences, which I think is fantastic. You have also (unnecessarily) re-affirmed your working relationship with Railo and I think that is also fantastic.
IMHO Coldfusion should have better linux support. I like windows on desktop, but imho it’s not a good choice for web servers. Coldfusion should at least support distros like centos which are 100% binary compatible to rhel.
Also cfexecute should support piping like: ls -1 | wc -l
And last but not least support nginx as frontend webserver!
I started feeding back to a bunch of stuff people have said here, but it got too long (1000+ words… yikes!), so I’ve posted it on me blog instead of cluttering up the place here. It’s at http://adamcameroncoldfusion.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/positive-communication-from-adobe_20.html.
Just FYI, I’ve specifically responded to things that the following people have said: @jeff c, @Brad Wood, @Andrew Scott, @Andy K, @Rakshith, @Tom Chiverton, @Shawn, @ Dave McGuigan
Still a great thread and an excellent discussion!
—
Adam
It’s really good to hear all those future plans. I echo others when I urge you to spend time shoring up the core features. I also especially look forward to enhanced pdf features; our business model include pdfs as part of the social network site that we’re building. It would also be great if you could work with hosting companies in bringing back CF; while we love our hosting company, we’re planning to grow our user base over the next upcoming year and it would be good to have options to choose from.
Contact me if you would like to check out the site.
@Brad: I do not understand what you mean by accepting Railo. As Ben points out none of us are anti-Railo here. I too get along well with the Railo team. I had a some useful conversations with Gert and team at cf.Objective() this year. But when it comes to conflicting interests in business, I will draw a line. Railo position themselves as an alternative to Adobe ColdFusion. Why do you think that we will be willing to spend effort and funds to promote an engine that is positioned as an alternative? To put things in your perspective, why will you ever want to spend (effort/money) on promoting say Mura CMS or even Drupal instead of ContentBox? Just doesn’t make sense. Both the instances that you point out, fall along the same lines. If Railo does ignite open-source adoption, then good. No business can promote an alternative. On future directions, I am excited about our plans for ColdFusion that we are taking at Adobe. Our customers like what we are planning to build. This combined with the other directions that we taking will turn about to be exciting times for ColdFusion.
@Shakti: Great to hear that!
@David: Agree with you! 100% 😉
@Satch: That is an interesting area for us to explore. Since one of our focus areas next year is in promoting CF in education, it makes sense to work with publishers over the next year on CF related books.
@Denard: Let’s not forget that the CFML committee started as an initiative from Adobe. Sean has outlined, pretty well on his blog, the inherent issues that they faced in trying to a buy in from every stake holder. And it is a fact that as a policy Adobe cannot discuss about the upcoming features out in the public. The committee only but struggled while it lasted, not just when Adobe decided to step out of it. I don’t see a point in going through the entire excercise all over gain when you know it eventually wont benefit anyone.
@Jim: Thanks for offering to help Jim! Dan, you, Roger, Simon and others at the NCDevCon do a fabulous job running the conference. You support and guidance will help! Backward compatibility is a tough one to crack. Between CF8 and CF9 we did break backward compatibility and we still have a few customers running CF8 just because their apps are built using those features of CF8. But I agree with you, it has to be a right balance of breaking compatibility and modernizing the language.
@Henry: I agree that it will be great to avoid upfront licensing costs. We are already working on those lines. The cloud offering on Amazon EC2 does just that. It is a flexible hourly based subscription pricing. I will go over MAX participation that you bring in as Ben has already answered that.
@Daniel: Thanks Daniel! It is good to know that you are associated with the UG in Chicago. I think we are already working with the UG from Chicago. But do drop me a line ‘rakshith@adobe.com’ and we can take it from there. Thanks!
@Tom: Thanks Tom! Pre-release will be great way for you to understand the details. I can get you on the pre-release as soon as it opens up, if you are interested.
Shakti: There’s actually no book called “PHP 4 Dummies”. They just call it PHP. The rest is implied.
@Shawn, I’m not going to say ACF should ever be free (that’s really a decision for Adobe to make), but I feel that the productivity gap is a little overstated these days. Don’t get me wrong, I think ACF is a very productive language and worth every penny, but CFML no longer leads the pack like it used to back in the glory days. Other languages and platforms have grown and evolved significantly and caught up a lot to CF. I’m looking forward to new innovations in CFML that will readily justify its cost.
Ben, perhaps my observations were anomalous, but two specific examples I saw recently was the lack of Railo mention on learncfinaweek.com which was a community-driven project hosted and funded by Adobe. The second example was a conversation last month where the CF team declined to sponsor a prize for a community give-away if the contest advertized Railo in any way. To be clear, I don’t fault Adobe for those decisions as they are theirs to make, but they led me to believe that there was an sentiment in Adobe to shy away from spending money on things that advertized Railo. I welcome the news of that not being the case.
Sooooo… what you r saying is i dont need to read PHP for dummies and change jobs. great news.
Brad,
As far as I know, there has never been an anti-Railo policy at Adobe or on the ColdFusion team. I am aware of specific comments made by specific individuals over the years, but I have always chalked those up to be the actions of very passionate team members sometimes going overboard, and not representative of anything more devious. As for me personally, I get on well with the Railo folks, and have never had issues or voiced any concerns about them (which, to be fair, is not something I can say about some of the other CFML engines).
— Ben
Cf will never be free and nor should it be. It offers premium features that companies normally have to pay saas licenses for which can be pretty pricey. Every year I just expect a polished product and being you pay a premium for it, it should save you time and make things easier to do. Between those two things $8,500 seems like nothing compared to needing extra work force and 100k in third party licenses.
I would like to see ColdFusion get more billing too on Adobe’s site (and at their events), but we must be fair— ColdFusion is not Adobe’s only product and I’m sure every Adobe product users all want THEIR product on Adobe’s home page too. Adobe can’t advertize everything all the time, but hopefully they can at least increase the time CF gets in the spotlight.
Also, I would suspect that there is a relation between the products that get the most face time and the products that are most widely used and make the most money. Let’s say PhotoShop generates 10x the revenue that ColdFusion does, Adobe execs would probably ask you why it should get more or even equal face time on their site.
Of course, the big question is how much MORE lucrative ColdFusion could be to Adobe if they could shake the “old”, “outdated”, and “lame” stigmas that have permeated the world and get people flooding back to it. I’m frankly tired of seeing job postings on Twitter to convert old CF sites over to PHP and people asking incredulously, “What, you still use ColdFusion??”.
I hope for all our sake that this marketing push is for real and does good, because it’s about 3 years overdue.
And Rakshith, I do hope you’re serious about Adobe being accepting Railo because it’s not what I’ve been seeing. I understand that to an extent they are competition, but unless Adobe is about to release a free version of CF, (unlikely) I see Railo as CFML’s only chance to ignite an open-source adoption– the kind that caught on in PHP back in the day and made it the break-out language that half of the commercial apps in the world are written in now.
As long as the conference isn’t in North Carolina I’m good 🙂
And if you need any conference help please let me know!
I’d really love to see CF take a ‘feature’ break and concentrate on the core language. Maybe it’s time to break that backwards compatibility (keep CF10 as a long term) and ‘fix’ all the odd idiosyncracies in the language. Joe Rinehart did a great video that outlined all these awhile ago.
Make script the default, use tags in views, get rid of all the client side fluff no one uses, etc. This has all been discussed over and over again over the years. Basically modernize the language.
And I don’t think it would hurt to do another ‘tour’ and visit your big existing customers to let them know of this roadmap. As Roger pointed out ColdFusion is on or near the chopping block in a lot of the big government agencies that typically have been long time ColdFusion supporters. I don’t think Adobe can afford to loose these sort of clients.
@Rakshith – Awesome – almost everything I wanted to hear . In re: the CFML committee not adding any value… I’m assuming you mean it adds no value to Adobe, but it would add value to the community as a whole if Adobe participated – I would go further and say the focus of engines is different because Adobe withdrew from the committee. Stakeholder differences aside, most people I’ve talked to about this view Adobe’s withdrawal from the committee as Adobe refusing to play nice, which damages Adobe’s and CFML’s reputation in the open source community.
I am a part time CF coder for my own website only. As such, i would like to see Adobe encourage third party publishers to publish books on cold fusion (like they did in the early 2000s) There’s nothing on the shelves these days. All websites dedicated to Cold fusion have code/apps, etc, all dated prior to 2007…there’s nothing new being written,. It’s like the Cold Fusion community dried up when Adobe bought Macromedia. Given the relative ease in coding in Cold Fusion, I’d think that there’s still a good market for website developers that aren’t part of a larger organization.
This sort of insight and communication is great, please keep it up.
I still think nobody requires a CFTwitter or CFMobileTable tag or whatever you guys are thinking of behind the buzzwords, but at least we can talk about it and understand your reasoning.
Knowing CF sales are doing well is great news to spread too.
Hope to see you at Scotch on the Rocks this year too.
Rakshith,
Thank you for the great post. You mentioned an initiative of working with CFUGs more. I am with the Chicagoland CFUG and was wondering how I could get on the list to work with you?
All this info is very encouraging. Thanks!
-Daniel
Henry (and others),
Conferences evolve as companies and customers and markets and products evolve. That’s a reality, and one that has played out many times before. When DevCon and UCON merged to become MAX the former UCON base was upset that the content and focus was too developer-centric, and they were right, but that is what was needed then. And even DevCon itself changed when it evolved from being a single product event to a corporate event. And MAX has also changed over the past few years, and it is going to keep changing. And having been doing this for over two decades I can tell you that the same is true for just about every industry conference, big or small.
Last year at MAX we launched the Creative Cloud, and the response since then has been phenomenal. Creative Cloud is the single most important initiative for Adobe right now, and so MAX has evolved again and has becoming the Creative Cloud conference. This is significant, and yes, it changes the products and technologies represented at MAX – there are products that have never had much of a presence before that are now taking center stage, and others that are being deprioritized. This is a new MAX, no disagreement there.
Of course, ColdFusion fans will see this as yet more proof of Adobe’s dislike for their favorite product. Right? Well, funny thing is that fans of other products excluded or deemphasized feel the exact same way about their favorite product. Trust me, we’re hearing from them too. That’s unfortunate, because this is not about which products we like or dislike, and it’s entirely about supporting company and customer future direction.
The fact of the matter is that Adobe needs to do what is best for the company and their customers, and the new direction for MAX is intended to support just that.
And Rakshith and the CF team are right. This does create the opportunity for a more focused CF event. And considering the maturity of ColdFusion and the space that it occupies, the size of its customer base, the roadmap, and more, I believe that that’s exactly what CF and the community now needs.
— Ben
On the pricing issue – I believe it really is a stumbling block for a lot of people in adopting the platform. The standard server is currently an eye-watering gbp£1348 here in the UK via the Adobe store. That represents a huge investment for any relatively small hosting company. You could buy 2 or 3 physical server machines for that.
Look at something like Parallels Plesk control panel – historically it was expensive to buy outright, but now they have monthly pricing that is affordable to hosts of all sizes and it’s a massively popular platform. Have preferential pricing for virtualised machines like they do – I think my Plesk costs something like usd$17 per month for each virtual node, so that’s for a package that I think cost usd$600 or something to buy outright a while ago. I’d pay usd$25 a month for CF10 – but there’s nowhere that even does license leasing that I’ve seen. Monthly costs make much more sense to web hosts – Creative Cloud has worked out ok right?
You also need to get back on-board with large hosts such as Media Temple – who have hosted CF in the past, but don’t know anymore – for either cost or security reasons generally. Go to them with attractive incentivised pricing and they’ll adopt the platform, shout about it for you and grow the user base for you enormously.
Regarding participation (or lack thereof) in MAX; I think stepping out alone is an enormous mistake and will only serve to marginalise the CF community even further. CF should be actively encouraged and included in MAX – it should be pushed front and centre – use it as a platform to really educate people about it. Start talking about it in the same conversation as Dreamweaver and people will start to feel that way about it.
FYI. I notice on the Adobe site today MAX is the full feature banner – something I recall CF10 did not have even at launch! It’s a rather damming indictment for Adobe frankly, and I fear indicative of how they truly rank the platform.
Even if you click on Products on Adobe.com there is no initial mention of CF you have click more Products and then it’s buried deep in the catalogue with things I’ve never heard of.
Why not include the developer edition of CF as part of the Creative Suite installer perhaps? So then everyone who installs Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash etc. gets presented with the option to setup CF with a simple web server config and start using it with some good tutorials etc.
Considering the position Adobe hold in the creative industries it should be so very easy for them to make CF massive – I simply don’t understand where you’re going so wrong – sorry.
@Gary: Thanks! You raise a good point. We are evaluating various options on how to be cost effective on AWS and hosting solutions.
@Andy: Absoutely! Rather than opening up the alpha and beta we are planning to include a significantly greater number on our pre-release. We are also evaluating how to garner more pre-release feedback through recognition and awards. I am confident that the upcoming pre-release for the next version will excite a broad range of ColdFusion developers. Look forward to having on the pre-release yet again.
@Phillip: That is great news! I will reach out to you personally as well to understand more. Yes, with a strong curriculum in place it will be exciting to see you start offering a CF curriculum!
@Denard: Thanks. No, with each of the CF engines having different focus areas, I dont think the CFML committee will add any value. we are evaluating a partner program where we can promote open source solutions built on CF. It is still being worked out. I will talk about it once there are more details. Yes, though Enterprise is our primary focus our marketing will reach out to SMBs as well through the Standard Editon of ColdFusion. I believe that the partner program will encourage open source solutions and drive the interest to build solutions on CF. Stay tuned for details. Adobe will continue to be a part of every ColdFusion conference that we were previously associated with. We are taking huge steps in reassuring our customers having deep engagements with them to emphatically communicate our future plans and how ColdFusion will continue to be relevant and why they should continue and increase their investments in ColdFusion. We will continue to do this in the years to come arresting the situation of available positions for CF. With the business is good shape our plans are around rebuilding the community during the next year. That is the reason you see the initiatives targetted towards it.
@David: Cheers buddy! Look forward to your continued support in shaping up the future of the product.
@Ed: I don’t think there’s any need to be anxious. It is not a question of whether the support will be available. It is very clear that the support is on its way and will be available soon.
@John: Great to hear that. The initiative driven around education is what I believe will help spread the word out on ColdFusion outside of existing enterprises.
@Matt: I agree it could be an issue. But ultimately, we are running a business. Yes, there will choices made because of the pricing and there is no way we can fight the price battle and still run a business.
Rakshith,
I run my online class at a private liberal arts university in North Carolina using ColdFusion, and I’m thinking about including CF next year in the curriculum.
How about an open alpha/beta as well? I don’t understand a lot of the closed testing and slow leaking and secrecy revolving around NPI? I think the old thinking that you are tipping off your competition is bunk and is far outweighed by the added “testers”. How many of those initial, pesky bugs would’ve been quashed prior to release had more people been involved in the testing process? Microsoft even does it with Windows now…
If you want to foster community, how about starting with involving more of the community in the release of your product(s)? Take a page from Brackets.
I was lucky enough to be in a previous CF and CFB test group, but couldn’t help think that it would’ve benefited from more participation (it seemed that 3-4 guys accounted for the great majority of traffic in the private forums.)
Opening up these forums and testing to more people IMO would be a great boon to the product – as would the knowledge of the features being planned. I’m not interested in being surprised about new features, I’d rather be informed/armed with the proper information in order to make good decisions/help my customers make good decisions in the future. I think a more open dialogue and participation could only help here.
@Rakshith, thank you for your replies. It’s like Christmas has come a week early for CF fans. 🙂 It’s great that you’ll be handling social media connectivity like custom tags. Hopefully it will make it easier for Adobe to update as necessary and at no cost to customers who don’t have subscriptions.
Matt raises the old debate over pricing which is still very valid and part of the reason that take-up isn’t as grand as it should be, particularly with students, startups and small businesses. My main use is Enterprise so cost isn’t the key concern for my business but pricing has created a lack of young talent.
While the educational licence is free, students know it will cost them money to carry on using as soon as they leave the sanctuary of education, hence the greater appeal of learning zero-cost alternatives. When you start off doing your first commercial websites you don’t want big overheads like server licences or more costly shared hosting.
It would be great if the AWS cost with CF was really competitively priced. And a licence for shared hosting providers was made cheaper to compete more comfortably with LAMP/.NET hosting to encourage developers (inc students) building small websites to choose CF over PHP.
If CF is starting to make money again then imagine how well it would do if it was actually marketed! You know, promos on the adobe.com home page, ads on technology websites and loads of other things to get people talking about it (who aren’t already existing CF customers!)
Gotta say, 7 years later I’m still in love with ColdFusion. It has its flaws and quirks, but it’s got so much going for it there’s still nothing I’d rather use even though I’ve now invested a pretty respectable chunk of time in learning Ruby, PHP, and Python.
Keep up the good work! So excited for the future of CFML.
Hey Rakshith,
Thanks for the update! Not a couple of days ago I was sharing on LinkedIn how much of a bad taste Adobe has left in my mouth over the past couple of years with CF. This blog post addresses some of the issues I was complaining about (specifically, getting CF into colleges), but I still have a few questions:
Will Adobe now participate in the CFML committee?
Will Adobe begin to take any major role in pushing open source use of ColdFusion?
Will Adobe be focusing it’s CF marketing efforts on SMB as well as the enterprise?
What are Adobe’s plans to promote the language and raise interest within the open source community?
Will Adobe continue supporting, and sending resources to, NCDevCon, RIACon and cf.Objective(), despite the possibility of throwing their own CF conference?
While the number of instances sold might be going up, the number of available positions for CF have gone down – even in traditionally CF centric locations (like DC). Does Adobe have any significant plans to help address this situation?
All in all, this post is enlightening and inspiring – I would love to see Adobe refocus it’s efforts on CF – as others said, it’s pretty well felt like Adobe has abandoned CF in the past couple years – their latest marketing push included. And with the announcement that MAX will not have any CF specific stuff, the landscape seemed even more bleak. This is a positive note from Adobe in a time when some of us are frankly considering abandoning the technology altogether in favor of newer technologies and those with a larger jobs base.
— Denny
I think pricing issue is the biggest issue for ColdFusion application server.
As per users point of view, if I can host a application comparatively very less price than ColdFusion then why I will opt for ColdFusion. It doesn’t matter what is the server side language you are using to develop my application.
What are we doing with ColdFusion for business outside the enterprise? I realize that while PHP is the most common platform online most of it has nothing to do with coding jobs. The grand majority of PHP is for pre packaged CMS solutions. Still those solutions drive the platform in ways we have a market gap in CFML.
With that said, we need a stable and healthy platform. Being number one is not about having the most instances but being a product market fit. It is my opinion that outside the enterprise we have not achieved awareness of where ColdFusion achieves product market fit. Who are the customers and what problem does CFML solve the best for them? What features solve what problems?
I did some personal extensive research on the state of the platform doing my own interviews and see possibilities. The possibility of an Adobe sponsored conference, a roadmap, a focus on cloud instance solutions and communicating with us like this are positive moves. This type of buzz could get my publisher to move on a new ColdFusion Book.
Thanks Rakshith – was hoping we might be able to get a little mroe specific. We win 8 users are getting anxious over here!
I think most people would consider if something is still broken, like the line debugger and getting to start/stop a cf server would be enough to do a point release.
But I guess time will tell how quickly these things get polished 🙂
Just FYI: I’ve written-up my thoughts on this (and the gist of some of the comments) on me own blog: http://adamcameroncoldfusion.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/positive-communication-from-adobe.html
—
Adam
I’d like to talk to you about your education initiatives. What’s the best way to start the conversation?
@Henry: How do you think you can support us? Do you have any contacts at a few colleges? We are working on providing the installers. Early next year is when these would be available.
@jeff: A majority of our customers are buidling mobile apps or websites. We are looking to provide a unique end-to-end solution so that our customers do not have to look beyond CF to build a full-fledged mobile app. That said, mobile is just one of the features planned. There are other host of features planned including the PDF improvements.
@Henry: Your point taken on keeping it updated. The social apis will be implemented as custom tags that can be updated without having to wait for a new version of CF. And yes, we will keep it up-to-date with the new updater mechanism.
@Wil: You saw us participating as the platinum sponsor of cf.Objective() last year. We will continue to be involved with cf.objective()
@Brad: Not true anymore with our participation since the beginning this year. We were actively part of cf.Objective() and CFCAMP where Railo was very much a part of the conference.
@Elias: Interesting idea for sure. We are evaluating it.
@Gary: Thanks for the encouraging words. We are excited to share these updates with the community. I have answered how we plan to handle social apis in my response to henry. Do take a look.
@Andrew: Thanks! We are spending enough effort to correct issues existing in ColdFusion Builder and the server. You will see that in action when the new release comes out.
@Henry: Absolutely! The features will be designed such that they can be easily updated.
Thanks for the feedback guys! Let us know any other thoughts that you may have. If you have any contacts with the local colleges around where we can promote the curriculum that will help. Let us know.
@Ed: We are working on providing the Win 8 support as soon as possible. Early next year is when you can expect it to be available.
@serigo: Phill has answered your query on certification and tutorial. Thanks Phill!
@Brad: Yes, we will provide such updates as often as we can. Glad to see the impact this is making. The focus of MAX has changed particularly in this year. And it is only fair that CF gets a better a focus through a dedicated conference with all the attention it deserves.
@Tony: Interesting perspective on encouraging CF projects. Something for us to consider. The roadmap is not frozen, but an ongoing document that will get updated as we move along. We realize the importance of package manager and there is a good chance of it making into subsequent versions of ColdFusion.
@Roger: Thanks Roger. Great to hear this. The details of the conference is yet to be worked out. Out involvement with other conferences will not change. We will continue to support other local conferences such as RIACon and NCDevCon.
yes, good point about the social apis – would be handy to have so long as they were well supported and up-to-date. i’d welcome a creative cloud style monthly subscription pricing model for server licenses too – all my other web host packages are sold on a monthly deal, which makes sense when you bill hosting monthly etc.
I have to say that I am fascinated that Adobe are talking more about their product called ColdFusion, it was almost like this part of the company didn’t exist.
Anyway good to see more work going into promoting the product is finally been addressed, in both education and conferences.
But what worries me, is the multitude of bugs and enhancements, that had been reported in a lot of cases over 10 years ago.
The next version of ColdFusion Builder, had better have a stable editor, that supports full code collapsing and isn’t sluggish when compared to a lot of other editors. I spend more time fixing the editors problems when coding than I am being productive.
CFML is the same, as a language it is old and it is showing its age. Changes made every 3-4 years are too far apart, and things like being able to support all ORM Events should have been added when ColdFusion 9 was a twinkle in someone’s eyes.
Polish off what is there first, and then begin to develop modules/plugins that Adobe can seriously make money from. Like I would rather see a more OOP programming style in ColdFusion, with support for an MVC framework that authors can leverage from, before I start seeing Social Media integration.
Like having LINQ searching in ColdFusion, similar to the way .Net does it, I love LINQ.
The biggest problem is the Market Research that Adobe uses to field test their concepts, is coming from the wrong type of developer. But that is an opinion from observation only.
Wow, that’s the most stuff Adobe have ever said about CF in one go, ever! Glasnost! 🙂 It’s all very positive and reasuring to see the development timeline cover the rest of the decade. B-)
However, I am concerned that there’s still focus on features that would require CF-served client-side code. Even built-in social media integration worries me. Client side code including code that accesses Internet based APIs will date quickly and become a frozen snapshot in time from the moment any edition of CF is released. For example, what if FB/Twitter change their APIs a year later and shutdown support for their old API a year after that. Where does that leave CF customers who’ve invested in CF11 and are locked into its support for a specific API version? They’d have to upgrade to CF12 as there’s no guarantee Adobe will release free updates for any length of time. It’s a similar story with mobile development. If you use a 3rd party framework or tool you can keep updating your own code to use the latest release. But if CF has a particular flavor/version built-in you’re stuck with that forever until you upgrade to the next version of CF. It’s cfform and cfajax all over again.
I’d be interested to hear how Adobe will address these issues? Buying a CF subscription is not a good solution (after paying $8K for each Ent licence). I’d rather see more server-side technology being created and integrated, that’s what CF has really been about from the start. Social media integration should be handled by open source plugins for CF, like the good stuff at RiaForge.org.
Adobe, please work with your Dreamweaver team to get them to keep their CF support up to date please. Builder isn’t everyone’s first choice of dev tool, especially if you’ve come from a web design background or just prefer a more accurate visual layout.
All that aside, it’s really exciting to hear so much good news from Adobe. Thank you! (What brought on the sudden change of attitude? Is there a new boss?)
It will be good to add CF Command Line tools to better, centralize, automate, share and manage code via command line for the next version of CF, just like ruby gems.
Wil, I can’t speak for Adobe, but they have been pulling back from anything that openly supports Railo lately (which is entirely their prerogative). Most CF conferences have pushed more and more Railo lately which probably presents an issue with anything being largely sponsored or run by Adobe.
I would be nice if Adobe fully embraced CF.Objective().In my opinion it has felt like Adobe doesn’t care much for this conference.
couldn’t agree with that forta post more. more work on things that you actually want CF to do… front end stuff is really not where it’s at. built in libraries to access twitter, facebook apis etc. would be more welcome for me. keep focussed on the handling and processing of data – that’s why you use it.
Sorry, but the roadmap doesn’t seem to be improving on what CF does best. Multi-screen layout and mobile UI aren’t areas where I need CF to be better or where there is a shortage of good tools. I won’t rehash all the arguments (http://forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2012/11/25/When-Using-ColdFusion-No-Longer-Makes-Sense), but please Adobe, give me more powerful query of queries (left join anyone?) and the ability to create a natively tagged pdf that meets accessibility standards. Allow me to get nice looking data into Excel without having to drop into POI for everything. Oh, and we’ve abandoned MAX as a waste of money for CF devs, so glad to hear there might be something useful in the future.
great stuff on the education plan – something i can definitely support. really really need to sort an installer that works in server 2012 and windows 8 – is frankly embarassing. it’s just a case of making a new installer and fixing the connector – not a long job.
So DevCon (ColdFusion-centric) becomes MAX back in the day. MAX starts to bring developers and designers together (long overdue) and then MAX kicks out developers… hmmm
These items are good news. Many corporate datacenters are in cost cutting mode and supporting multiple server side technologies is seen as inefficient and redundant. The cost isn’t an issue usually, the IT management wants to see long range support by a company that seems to support their technologies. These sorts of communications and especially the CF road map support that view.
I’m curious as to how you will support the new conference. Will it be located in one place or move around? Will it be part of Max or totally separate time and place? How will it effect your support of local conferences such as RIACon and NCDevCon?
what is adobe’s stance in sponsoring and working with the opensource community to improve on the perception of the coldfusion brand? hackathons, sponsorship of projects, etc?
I see no plans for a package manager on the roadmap, is this being considered since it is a key feature (selling point) of many languages out there (ruby, python, node, .net). also if a package manager is considered, will it be opensource?
Thanks for this update. Please give us updates like this often as they are very helpful. I’m most excited about the possibility of a dedicated CF conference. I was very disappointed to see CF completely cut out of Max this year and frankly, it worried me a great deal about how that might reflect Adobe’s internal feelings toward ColdFusion.
Thanks again!
~Brad
@Sergio – My understanding is that Certification is being worked on. As far as tutorial goes, checkout http://www.learncfinaweek.com/. If you are looking for a particular topic, you can suggest it here: http://www.learncfinaweek.com/feedback/
Cheers..
We need more certification options.
Certified and structured tutorials for developers.
@Wendy: This is great news. I will get in touch with you. Thanks for reaching out!
Any updates on CF on Win 8?
Would like to work with you on the Education Initiative (as described above) to get ColdFusion included in the curriculum at our college. Please contact me.
@Adam: Thanks! It also feels great so share such updates with the community. We will keep posting any such updates we may have.
@RobG: Appreciate the input. As a policy we do not disclose details on pricing or changes if any ahead of time.
Are there any plans to reduce the cost of the ColdFusion server so that more companies will be able to afford it? One of the biggest problems (IMO) is the extremely high price of admission. After all, php, rails, python and .net are all FREE.
Hi Rakshith:
It’s really good to hear some positive news regarding Adobe’s investment (be that $$$ or time, marketing, motivation etc).
It’d be good to keep this sort of positive messaging going.
Keep to the good work.
—
Adam
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