Over the last few weeks there have been quite a few passionate discussions happening on ColdFusion. This post addresses those.
Over the last few weeks there have been quite a few passionate discussions happening on ColdFusion, including the blog post from Cutter recently.
I thank the ColdFusion community for all the feedback and I want to assure you that Adobe is very much a part of the story on the revival of ColdFusion. There is no denying that the road ahead is challenging, but all of us here at Adobe strongly believe that there is enough potential in ColdFusion and want to see the platform as successful as ever. Rather than viewing Adobe and community as two separate entities, we are keen to work with the community with a common goal of reviving ColdFusion. And in that context the feedback that we have been receiving is extremely valuable.
While not every single feedback can be acted upon, I want to make the point that ‘WE HEAR YOU’ and we are taking actions and will continue to take them for the better of ColdFusion. I want to use this opportunity to discuss with you the initiatives, updates about the product and its ecosystem as well as product news from Adobe.
New Customers
We do hear news about an organization moving away from ColdFusion. How about we start by talking about how many new organizations are adopting ColdFusion? Nearly 2000 new organizations have chosen ColdFusion as their web application platform over the last one year. And this not a random number being thrown at you. There is data in our system to back this claim.
User Group Engagement
Since the beginning of this year, we have been engaging with ColdFusion User Groups across the world providing them support to keep the User Groups active. While we only had 22 active User Groups at the beginning of this year, the engagement levels have gone up. We now have 74 active ColdFusion User Groups that meet at least once a quarter across North America, Europe and the rest of the world.
CFSummit
CFSummit, as most of you know, is the first ever dedicated ColdFusion conference from Adobe. Thanks to great efforts from teams within Adobe and the ColdFusion community, CFSummit will be the largest ColdFusion conference with 500 + expected attendees. We have more than 20 speakers and 28 engaging sessions spread across two action packed days in Vegas. ColdFusion is going to rock Vegas, baby! Be there! Don’t forget to say hi to the Product Marketing Manager of ColdFusion, Kishore Balakrishnan, who is instrumental in running this large ColdFusion conference.
ColdFusion Community Portal
The ColdFusion Community Portal was launched by Adobe this year : http://coldfusion.adobe.com
The community portal is one centralized access point for information on the latest in ColdFusion. It also provides our partners and consultants to showcase their capabilities and latest innovations with the platform. It is also a User Group hub where ColdFusion developers can find information related to various User Groups and their events.
ColdFusion case studies
Organizations, across the board – from small, medium to large, continue to derive value from ColdFusion. This is evident in the case studies listed below where organizations have reported flat learning curve, product launches now taking under two hours which used to take a day, ColdFusion allowing 40% more projects on a single server, less lines of code (100k vs 4.5 million) and more. Here are the links for the recent case studies that talk about each of these in detail,
Prospective Medical Data International Inc.
Education Initiative
We at Adobe already have designed a brand new curriculum titled 'Introduction to Web Development', focusing on the latest in Client-side Development, Mobile Application Development and Server Side development through ColdFusion. The idea of the course is to provide a holistic view to web application development rather than focusing on individual aspects of web development. I can even challenge that there is no other web application development curriculum available for education that provides such a complete learning of all concepts related to modern web application development. All of this is made available free of cost along with the licenses required.
We are actively looking to partner with colleges. We have three colleges/universities that are using the curriculum in the fall semester. We will have many more in the upcoming spring semester. We are really looking forward for involvement from the community to promote the curriculum in your local colleges. The support from the community so far has not been encouraging although there a few who have made all efforts to spread the word to get adoption at colleges. We clearly need more support! We are open to not just colleges/universities, but also to anyone who is willing to teach web application development even at a local community center. There is enough instructor guidance available through videos for the entire forty hours of curriculum.
We are even willing to work with a community leader who can take the curriculum to an online platform for a much wider reach. Do reach to us if you have any ideas here!
Product Improvements
Although we make improvements with every release, we understand that there is more to be done in the product to overhaul the platform. ColdFusion has lost aspects of productivity benefits in web application development to some of the other emerging platforms over the years.
There are quite a few language improvements such as full script support and member functions that are already a part of the upcoming version – Splendor. The goal of Dazzle, the version after Splendor, is to transform ColdFusion into a high performing nimble platform that is truly modular, powered with revamped language constructs and an enterprise class package manager to encourage an ecosystem around the platform. I believe these, along with the mobile application development focus in Splendor and the continuous innovation in future releases, have the potential to bring ColdFusion back on par as a modern web application development platform.
We will also actively deprecate/remove features that no longer are relevant although keeping in mind not to affect existing ColdFusion applications. You will notice action here starting right from ColdFusion Splendor.
Support Improvements
Earlier this year, the ColdFusion support launched a new alias through which the community can directly reach support for free and instant support regarding all installation issues via the cf.install@adobe.com email alias. The support team effectively handle around ten email queries on a daily basis in cf.install@adobe.com related to updates, installation and applying hotfixes.
Here are a few Customer testimonials for support team:
"I contacted cf.install@adobe.com and they helped me very quickly."
"I wanted to thank you for the dedication and patience which you have shown our team here. You are a tremendous asset to your company and we truly appreciate your efforts on this case."
"The person who I was interacting with in the support team is magnificent and very very knowledgeable. He resolved the easy ones quickly and patiently stuck with me on the tough ones and got me through"
Support team is also active on Adobe ColdFusion forums providing close to real time resolution. This engagement on the forums is beneficial for ColdFusion developers who face issues and the forum interaction can lead to the solution being used my many more. Two of the support engineers are also one of the recent top contributors on the forum.
Even IDC in its whitepaper on ColdFusion believes that “ColdFusion's role as an integration hub of multiple paradigms of technologies and multiple developer ecosystems will continue as all the features that have been built into it are further integrated with new technology currently in planning.”
While all of us realize that all is not rosy, we need to work together to elevate ColdFusion from its current state. There is enough to be done by both Adobe and the community at large. Now that we have a fair feedback and idea on what is required, it is time to take the next steps. Here’s to many more years of ColdFusion! We are open to feedback. Reach out to us with any of the ideas that you may have on how we can work together for a better ColdFusion.
Staff
109 posts
@Randy: You will hear an announcement soon. CFSummit will happen this year as well!
Is there going to be a ColdFusion Summit 2014? Is Adobe saying anything? Even if plans are not finalized, they must have at least put a hold on hotel and session rooms for specific days.
@ Save ColdFusion: I have sent you an email. I understand the announcement has been made, but if there is way for Adobe to have a conversation with the stakeholders at your company. I am keen on hearing back from you.
@Save ColdFusion – my 2 cents? Learn ASP.NET. It will both make you a better (and likely happier) CF developer by learning how to write code in another language, and it will give you job security should Adobe *not* manage to keep ACF from going the way of the Dodo.
My CTO just annouced that we are going to migrate all our coldfusion applications to .net platform by the end of the year, which means that, we (4 coldfusion programmers), will either have to find a new job, to lose a job, or to start learning asp .net by end of this year.
Adobe, please do something about coldfusion, you can keep rebutting or counterargue about the “Coldfusion is dying” statement, but please do some really fundamental reality check. Coldfusion is really a superb language, and I don’t want you to end up like Nokia, or blackberry. PLEASE….
Hi Snake,
Yes in Java sandbox is the security measure where strict limitations on which resource the applets can access. The byte code verifier in java checks for untrusted codes before the program is made to run. Applet class loader, security manager are the other elements in java for security system.
@snake: Are you indicating using java directly without the using the createObject to interact with Java? Can you send me an email at rakshith@adobe.com describing the scenario. We can consider fixing this in the current version.
You say sandbox allows createobject(java) in a safe way, can you please how to allow this function without allowing java to then be used to bypass the sandbox.
Apart from the major suggestions given by various developers,
I would like to see a journal on CF, long back we had “ColdFusion Developer Journal) – CFDJ, I hope through these kind of initiatives we can bring the community more closer and proactive.
Likewise, portals like CFLib.org, RIAForge.com, HouseOfFusion needs to be given special care/attention by Adobe CF team.
— David R
@Ajo: Thanks for the feedback.
We already have three colleges that have adopted the curriculum in the ongoing fall semester. We will have more colleges adopoting it in the spring semester. You can help us increase the adoption too. Here is a related blog post: https://coldfusion.adobe.com/post.cfm/thank-you-for-making-cfsummit-2013-a-success
We did share details about Splendor and Dazzle at CFSummit. We will share more details as we go public with Splendor and get into development for Dazzle.
@Patrik: Interesting thought about Builder and cloud offering. Something for us to consider!
@Alex: We are adding around 2000 new customers and that is a fact. Take a look at the two case studies that I pointed out in my response to Adam.
And when a new customer is one who has not bought CF ever from us.
The three colleges that have adopted the curriculum are Texas State Technical College. Allegany College of Maryland and American University. Please go ahead and promote them. I would love to hear your thoughts on how you plan to promote the curriculum in general. More information in this post here: https://coldfusion.adobe.com/post.cfm/thank-you-for-making-cfsummit-2013-a-success
We will not be open sourcing CF. Thank you for your feedback and honesty.
@Gary: CF Splendor will be released next year. Yes, we are in the pre-release for CF Splendor.
Gary, let me know if you want to be a part of the pre-release. That is the best way to learn about the mobile features in Splendor.
We have tested the websockets with more 60,000 simlutaneous connections. We are planning to come up with a whitepaper including this information. Stay tuned.
@Wil: I agree with you. Elishia Dvorak from Adobe in North America is our evangelist. You may have met her at any of the CF conferences.
Yes, it the same engineering team that works on both Buidler and Server. But there are dedicated resources working on each of them. You will see a lot of improvments have been made to Buidler as a part of the next release by this dedicated team.
@Snake: Thanks for your feedback. The sandbox feature already lets to use createobject in a secure manner. Am i missing something?
@Shawn: Absolutely. We are not targeting computer science fields. We are looking to partner with community colleges and universities that want to teach web application development. If you have some contacts at these colleges, send those to us and we will be happy to engage with them.
Just as I discussed with you at CFSummit, we are working on resolving the issues that you highlight with licensing.
UI is something we invested in the past and we continue to make improvements to existing features. But because of certain limitations and better alternativrs being available you will not see us introduce features centered around UI.
Thanks for your feedback.
@Denard: Adobe is very keen to work with you on your initiative – Team CF Advance. I did promote the initiative at both CFCamp and CFSummit. Let us continue to work together on this initiative.
@Sanjeev: Thanks for your feedback. Yes, we are heavily focused on the first point that you bring in. We already have a curriculum that is ready to be adopted.
Sanjeev, can you reach out to me at rakshith@adobe.com. We can setup a meeting to discuss the future of CF nad its potential going forward with the decision makers at your company.
@Miguel: Thanks!
@Aaron: We keep making bug fixes to CF10. The previous update fixed a lot of the existing issues. Aaron, we can communicate the actual vulnerability publicly, but we can communicate that to you privately to your organization. We are working on building such an infrastructure soon. I will keep you posted.
@Adam: Thanks for your feedback. While we making progress to engage better with the community, do remember that the engineers have a product to build and that is their primary responsibility. But having said that there is scope for improvement in the community engagement by the engineers. That is one of the reasons why we had seven engineers be a part of the CFSummit recently where the community got a chance to interact with the engineers directly. We will continue to provide or encourage more such channels for communication.
Being a public company we have policies that restrict us from revealing the names of the new customers. We do have case studies though with some of such new customers. Take a look at the case studies with Wall Street Maganate and Simul TV who are new CF customers.
http://coldfusion.adobe.com/coldfusion/index.cfm/showcase/wall-street-magnate/
All the UGs that have been listed on the community portal are active CF UGs : http://coldfusion.adobe.com/coldfusion/index.cfm/user-groups/
I agree with you that the community portal is a good start and there needs to be more information the portal. That is our idea going forward.
The new curriculum too will be made available on the community portal by the end of this year.
Legally, we cannot associate version numbers with a product until the product actually gets released.
The support folks engaging on the Adobe forums will improve with time. They might make a few mistakes initially, but the intent is clear. They want to help the community on the forums and I am confident they have and they will achieve that goal.
Thanks for all your feedback.
I’ve been avoiding installing Dreamweaver CC for awhile cause I heard it nukes CF, but curiosity got the best of me today, cause CFBuilder isn’t doing as good of a job with CSS and HTML hinting.
Going going through that process and seeing the CF disconnect, just amazes. Maybe I’d believe the argument that its a client side editor, thus server sides should be removed, but then they go and continue support for PHP. So the company is basically saying THIS language is worth preserving, but ours is not. So lets keep a list of Adobe’s self inflicted wounds for CF
-Dreamweaver drops CF but not PHP
-Adobe buries the CF product on its website. Its no longer in the homepage or sub menu. There is a huge amount of space under Web Development that they would rather leave empty than put a ColdFusion link.
-CC puts all kinds of obscure things in its CC offering, but CF gets nada.
-Adobe corporate site won’t use CF.
-Adobe’s web based marketing platform CQ won’t use CF.
While I’m happy with the CF product for the most part. CF’s representation inside the org can really use some work. The way Adobe has been treating its own product these days is not helping the perception of stability of ColdFusion. I really do believe CF can gain large marketshare many times what it has now, but if the company isn’t helping the vision, then its never going to happen.
@paul I agree to some extent. As far as the amatuer piece goes, there seems to be a precption that if something is easier it is amatuer and less mature. You even see it inside the CF community with script vs tags. I’ve got the impression of many script users that they think they are move advanced cause are they coding more towards ECMA. I think its a myth. I perfer tags cause it resembles XML and I can more quickly understand the structure of whats going on without relying on spacing alone.
I’ve also experienced it in the field and inside large orgs, though while they are throughly proud to do it the long way, my stakeholders are throughly proud that we are turning around projects next day, when the others want weeks. So value is in the eye of who’s running the show.
One thing, that doesn’t help Adobe’s cause is they don’t fully buy into their own product. CQ is Java, most of their corp site is Java. Can you imagine Microsoft not using .Net on anything they do? No way.
ColdFusion has always has been a good product, BUT the marketing of it sucks! How about more promotion of the language. Most shops see the product as “old” and a language for amateurs.
@Rakshith – thank you for the update. However, instead of waiting a week or more to respond and having Adobe talking heads keep blaming us for upgrading our systems, why not plan in advance for these things and then communicate in advance? This issue was Apache being updated more than OS X but Adobe hasn’t bothered to even look at Apache in almost 2 years. Version 2.2.22: Released January 31, 2012 at this appears to be the last version that CF10 will work with. So while some may not care about OS X, we do use Apache web server in real production environments. That should make staying up-to-date with Apache a priority for Adobe.
Don’t confuse our passion and frustration as dislike of Adobe.
@Wil: As Shawn pointed out, we are working to resolve the issue you point out.
@Shawn: It was great talking to you at the CFSummit. Thanks for all the feedback.
@Jim: I will have the ColdFusion support team reach out to you.
You know what would help CF considerably? Being able to find support contact phone numbers in an obvious place. I’ve spent the last 2 days scouring the site trying to find a phone number so I can speak with someone to resolve a problem with the CF administrator “forgetting” http basic auth credentials registered in the webservices area after a period of idleness, resulting in 401.1 UnAuthorized messages. I didn’t pay thousands of dollars for several licenses of Enterprise for my university to not be able to talk to a human when a feature is broken.
I went to CFSummit and as you can see with all my posts here, I didn’t go in thrilled but I took the opportunity to see what they were up to and express my concerns face to face. I assure you the caring didn’t stop with the blog post. The overall aura of the conference was a mixed bag of presenting solutions, new features, and listening to concerns. They didn’t seem too suprised at many of the concerns, and already had a concept in hand of how they will be resolved, so they have been listening and have a game plan. Course saying is one thing and doing is another, and we won’t know the verdict on that till release.
Someone did ask about your bug at the summit, and they said it was a high priority to resolve. My opinion, which doesn’t speak for Adobe, is that its close enough to CF11 that it would probably make more sense to have that into the release of CF11 with an update for CF10 around the same time, which gives them enough time for proper testing. I know you don’t want to wait that long, I know I didn’t with Windows 2012 server, but sometimes thats just the way it floats. My precision workstation is still Windows 7 cause Dell hasn’t supported 8 on it, causing me to missout on IIS8 which hurts my dev environment, and I have clients holding out on cf upgrades cause they hate 10’s EULA. Unfortunetly there is a corporate release process to things like this, so they never turnaround as fast as we would like them to. Only things like security holes and critical production issues get fast tracked.
Hey Adobe! In less than 1 month from the posting of this article you have already failed. Adobe claims “We Hear You” yet we see no evidence of that. No responses or announcements. When will you ever bother to respond to us and bug #3653076 https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3653076 about ColdFusion 10 on OS X Mavericks. The actual issue is really ColdFusion 10 on any Apache version newer than Apache 2.2.22. Strangely Adobe is and has been silent on this issue. So I declare that this blog post about Adobe hearing us and caring was just a smokescreen to get a better reception at CFSummit.
All of the upcoming stuff is fine and dandy, what bothers me is your software not being compatible with current operating systems. For example the new Mac 10.9 just came out and how long will it be before your software works on it? The same thing happened last year with Windows 8 and Mac 10.8. You guys ran a year behind with those. If you want to be current, make your software useable first, then worry about all that other stuff you mentioned.
Anybody figured out how to get ColdFusion or Railo to work within Koding.com. I love the environment, just not sure how to get it all setup properly with my favorite development language.
On the UI, if Adobe did make their own I’m sure it would be tied to version releases of software (Dreamweaver, CF) even if it was open source. I don’t think some of you are understanding the concept completely. So under the current model they tie the tags to an existing UI framework, and they get it looking respectable, and then they ship it with CF and its really not touched much there after. Obviously the community isn’t liking this approach and CF UI polls show that. Most of the complaints are around lack of updates and innovation. Others around customization. Also sounds like the redo opposition just thinks it will be the same car with a new paint job.
So changing that model I suggest Adobe makes their own UI framework that they have control over and drive the ambitions of their customers. Then products like Dreamweaver,Edge, and CF would use this perfected framework to bring back the commercial level UI features that flex hand in spark. Don’t know if you guys have used Flex 4 and beyond but it was really nice. It gave you really deep skinning capabilities, complex image filters, photoshop blending modes, videos, and swf integration. It also had some nice data binding and handy Actionscript methods to put more work on the client side. My apps had comets flying around buttons, 3D video loop sequences, etc and you just don’t see this in web standard apps/sites. Anyway point is they did a great job of merging data and UI with the Flash engine. So since people aren’t happy with the UI features in CF and Dreamweaver, then its time for Adobe to take more of a hands on approach again so we can get back to the innovation we are used to seeing from Adobe products. Right now Edge is progressing at a snails pace compared to Flash’s progression, Dreamweaver is all over the place, and CF is still using dated elements people don’t like. Clearly swaying in the wind with community frameworks isn’t working. They can focus their products around 1 community framework and one day something nicer will come out and make them obsolete. They can avoid them altogether but then their releases will be slow and light building everything from scratch. Or they can make their own, stick with it and make it the best it can be to ensure it won’t get passed up.
I really didn’t have too much of a gripe about CF PDF’s in CF9, and I built an app for a very large organization that used them extensively (2000 page documents on the fly, with rich media). Speed was a bit of a concern, but I created a way to do all 2,000 pages in 3 seconds. There were a couple basic requirements we couldn’t accomplish without the full ddx capabilities which CF9 did not have. The work around at the time was to buy the 60k Adobe Live Cyle PDF product. Sounds like CF11 may fill those gaps though.
For mobile apps and analytics what are you trying to track that GA can’t do either via page impression or push/virtual url?
I agree that the ui stuff should go. But if they do keep it then at least make it so we can update the libraries ourselves or just override on a per site basis by specifying a new library path in application.cfc
@Shawn The primary reason i don’t use many of the UI features is that the libs are always so far out of date. If as Gary said, they were kept updated every 12 months (or 6 months), They’d see a lot more use from me.
With coldfusion looking to storm the mobile front ina version or two, baked-in analytics is going to be, imo, a requirement.
I definitely agree that CF needs a complete overhaul of it’s PDF generation, and I’d even say it’s report system is kind of shabby (the report IDE is always nagging me after a few minutes), but still, I’d rather use it than crystal reports, which has always destroyed every machine i’ve installed it on.
I’d like to see CF offer an easier way to do xsl:fo output. I wrote some code to do this myself once (have since misplaced said code, should re-do it some time), but it was a pain. I’m sure other businesses would love to take xml data from a source, run it through some xsl:fo created via Altova StyleVision, and spit out pdfs or word files of things like paper bills, invoices, etc. something like LOCAL.foo = xslfoOutput(inxml, xslfo, mediatype[pdf, html, etc]);
@Jim Java isn’t the only one. .Net has also tried it and it lead to things working in IE and not much else. But past failures from others shouldn’t be the sole reason Adobe doesn’t give it a go. Just cause they did it, doesn’t mean they did it right. Reality is client side coding is becoming extremely time consuming for companies. Its the fastest growing job in the web right now, right up there with mobile developers. While I’m sure you value the flexibility to use whatever you want, that flexibility is also making it very difficult for companies like Adobe to put out a replacement for Flex in web standards, because its too much of a moving target. And being a user of both, Flex 4+ was a much better user experience and developer experience, than the open libraries of today. It supported all kinds of graphical/functional things not supported in web standards. I’m not saying they should lock you out of doing it from scratch, but they should engage in their own version. They technically do it now, they just don’t use their own frameworks for the CF UI elements. If Adobe is going to win over more developer share with ColdFusion, then it needs companies to buy in, and that comes down to cutting their costs to make it attractive. While there is some room for improvement on the server side, the client side has far more room for improvement as those costs are rising very quickly for companies, and its really the bottleneck for web apps to take another jump. Course its harder to navigate, there are a lot of players (web browsers, frameworks, and companies with different visions of where the web should go). With high risk comes high reward. I also have a little more faith in Adobe, than I do Microsoft or Oracle/Sun for building a quality/flexible UI framework. Adobe has a long history of doing well there, and the other two do not. As far as cfscript, your in the minority there, but I agree they should be 1 to 1 if its going to be offered. Analytics is an interesting topic. Client side, GA fills this void pretty well and its free so I can’t see Adobe investing major resources there to make an offering. There is much to be wanted server-side though. Analytics on non-cf files like images, pdfs, and maybe videos (plays,completions etc,). Another hard one to do, cause it will be web server dependent. Hardware reporting would be nice if it was more extensive. They have the hooks now to do it yourself, but an out of the box one would be nice to have (and not in Flex). I think CF should come with all the hardware health features. Things like notifications of high CPU, RAM, Disk, server side errors, auto ban unnatrual requests, IP security like denying requests from countries you don’t do business in. Granted these are all things that can be built now, and I’ve done it before but companies only spend time on that stuff after their product is released, so it would be helpful to have something that can quickly be put in place so they don’t neglect security/stability to save time/money.
I’m sure Jim speaks for a lot of people. CF should focus on the backend, more power, more speed, more doing of complicated *backend* stuff. No more UI tags which are better suited being developed as custom tags, unless Adobe guarantee updates to underlying JavaScript / API code at least every 12 months.
I’m looking forward to an overhaul of PDF creation (something that CF was once the best at). I don’t know if Jim refers to the ability to do analytics as in data manipulation and charts or server performance analytics? Enhancements to both would be very cool.
A decade ago some people argued that CF’s value came from the built-in engines that do reports, charts, PDF, Verity which at the time cost money to add to PHP or ASP. So why not revive some of that past value and offer other tightly integrated engines? Maybe include a standard licence of FusionReactor with CF Ent? Or something else that boosts the value of the price tag, I don’t know what.
I’m going to have to disagree with Shawn in that I don’t want want coldfusion more UI heavy. The UI scene changes very rapidly, and hell, I don’t use CF for ui any unless there is something I just want quick and dirty for a simple form post.
Personally, I use ExtJS (not a fan of jquery) with my own custom ExtDirect stack with all kinds of happy security mixed in (and cutter’s cfqueryreader lib, great stuff) for just about everything. I can use as much or little of that client side framework as I want and use easily with any ui layout. For me, coldfusion represents a powerful and quick to develop backend platform to manage security, data, and logic, Freeing up UI decisions to what works best for for client side design. Compare with JSF. It’s client output looks horrendous and is a real pain to work with. It’s trying to mix server and cleint side and does it poorly imo.
I use pure cfscript, never tags unless unavoidable. All my code is object oriented similar to beans. I frequently dip into native java and the occasional .net library in my code. Hibernate/ORM is nice, but I haven’t found a project that justified it’s use/overhead for me yet.
What I want to see out of CF is more backend server power. I want hadoop integration for big data. stronger cfscript. I want cfscript looping over a query to be as fast and efficient as using cfloop query=”. I want to be able to perform every tag operation via method call. Even tho I’ve already created my own SSO stack for CAS with saml, I’d like that to be integrated. I want a proper json encoder that doesn’t treat ‘No’ as a boolean (even if I have to set a flag to achieve this). I want to build an xml schema file, have CF compile it into classes for use in webservices and the schema be properly referenced in the wsdl (think scomp from apache xmlbeans). I want to be able to limit /wsdl:service/wsdl:port/soap:address[“location”] in wsdls to https only in wsdls without having to manually modify the wsdl. I want support for large(and I mean huge) xml documents for traversing and transforming.
I want a powerful backend!
Front end stuff, for me, things like html 5 style powerpoint presentations and mobile are just nice things to play with when i’m not already using one of the things I use that is better designed for it. Sure, I see the pretty bells and whistles features as useful for pulling in new eyes to the product, but the client side changes so fast. current grids use, what, ExtJS 2.x? I currently use version 4.x. Nor does CF make it easy to access any of the underlying power from the included extjs. CF would need to have yearly if not more often updates to maintain modern UIs the evolve so fast.
However, CF based UI would be VERY attractive if analytics were in the mix. In fact, I think CF badly needs an ability to do analytics and just about everything. That would be really useful.
-Jim
Also just curious of the people that want to modularize or open source CF have you ever had to work deals with libary vendors when your company is:
a- a large company (10k +) employees
b- a start-up SaaS on a shoe string budget
If you haven’t, I’ll just say it is a very painful process. As a SaaS they will charge you 100 times the typical 1 website license and it will break the budget. As a large company they will give the “other” price which is basicly whatever they think you can afford. I remember a very large well known client I was trying to find server analytics software for 1 box, I kept getting 6 figure quotes for a product they normally charge $1,000 for. The next version of CF they add in all the server analytics functions and we ended up paying nothing to have the feature seemlessly integrated with our software. There is a great deal of value to have Adobe brokering these deals as a middle man. I hope when Adobe is looking at CF improvements it doesn’t overlook things like this or the developers/companies that value them.
They could never make the full offering open source cause the language itself is a combination of libraries from third party sources to achieve the more complex features like charting, image manipultaion. These all involed agreements and money exchanges between the vendors of those libraries. ColdFusion without these would be pretty bland. Those on-demand libraires are one of my top 5 reasons for using and selling the product as a consultant.
It certainly isn’t helping the product sell I agree to have all the costs up front, where Java and .Net hide them in the back. Java in mods, .Net in CALs/device or expensive Socket pricing but Adobe doesn’t really have any upsells after deployment, their revenue after purchase is hoping you do well enough to buy more hardware for your growing business, thus buy more licenses. How flexible they can get, really depends on those agreements they struck with vendors. Microsoft owns 100% of its stuff, though its not as robust, so its easier for them to put out these your first 3 years are on us deals. Just remember after that date is up, your locked into their pricing. Your forced to either pay up or rebuild. With CF, no suprises. Well almost none, EULA can shock you every once in a bluemoon.
Unlease Adobe open sources coldfusion it really will have a limited lifespan. I love CF and even created a decent CMS system 100% by myself… Then I stumbled across wordpress and without any knowledge of PHP was able to get it up and running in no time. MuraCMS is fine… but its no wordpress in terms of simplicity and elegance.
The platform is what the CF community needs. It needs to be an application that you can see and use and build on in a modular way. It needs to be something that any non-technical person can update and expand upon by installing modules.
Coldfusion is Adobe…at least that is the association that the majority of those out there who have heard of CF make… despite the fact that there’s RAILO and its amazing. If Adobe doesn’t open up CF then they might as well start getting out the coffin nails.
The PHP language sucks… but it does just fine!
It not just the language, its what you build with it. With the recent breach of the CF code now would be a great time to tear down the wall adobe.
Cf10 is the first release of coldfusion to receive bug fixes. Now doubt this is attributed to Adam camran publicising how bad cf product support is
I’m pissed that 6-12 months before a new CF version is released bug fixes stop, those fixes go in to the next version. We coughed out 20k when we upgraded to CF9 and I was too tired of adobe to try to get them to fix all the CF8 bugs – they don’t listen or care.
I’m pissed that security issues are conveyed as “there is a security issue here is the fix”. How are we meant to be able to assess if our $500 million in annual credit card transactions have been compromised? Do I need to have the powers that be convey an emergency board meeting or is this a minor issue? I’m left to reverse engineer the patch to figure out if we have a problem. NO OTHER VENDOR BEHAVES THIS WAY – ADOBE IF YOU WANT TO PLAY WITH ADULTS BEHAVE LIKE ONE
It is encouraging to hear these comments from Adobe.
@Justin: CF Builder Thunder, code name for the next version of CF Builder, is being actively developed along with the next version of ColdFusion server. It will be released along with ColdFusion server. You will hear quite a bit about ColdFusion Builder at the CFSummit. CF Builder is is being given more importance than ever as a productivity tool and it being revamped to transform Builder into a high performing IDE for both client and server side development. Let me know if you want to be a part of the pre-release so that you can try out the next version of Builder yourself!
@Cutter: Thanks for initiating this dicussion. We are willing to do every bit to make ColdFusion successful. I am confident that Adobe and the CF developer community can together make a significant difference to the platform. I look forward to discussing with you in detail at the CFSummit!
@David: Thanks! Do reach out to me (rakshith@adobe.com) and Kishore, marketing manager for ColdFusion, (kishore@adobe.com) to help with UG meetings and more
@Daryl: The education initiative listed above in the post is step towards attracting new developers. We already have some adoption and we want to aggresively target more colleges and universities going forward. The idea is to then link the students who have taken the course with potential employers. We are also planning to have contests for students and organize hackathons. At the same time we will support community initiatives geared towards increased awareness of ColdFusion.
@Quigley: That’s great! I have sent you an email to discuss the next steps on how we can work together!
@Dana: Thanks a lot Dana! You have a point. I will make sure that there is more frequent communication from Adobe on ColdFusion.
BTW, @shawn, you are absolutely right in your comments and I second you on that.
@Shawn and everyone reading this thread,
I personally hate comparing products unless we are talking about diapers. they are only meant for one thing and just that. 🙂
for the technologies, never compare any two. definitely PHP != CF. they are different and strong in their own implementations even taking off the licence thingy. personally I have seen companies burning hands going down the free/open source road and falling into additional library licences and lack of proper support.
My intent above is to only highlight the lack of skilled manpower availability and lack of training avenues available to learn and grow the pool of CF skilled personnel. CF being a propitiatory tool needs to have proper courses and learning material other than help docs. IMHO a community should never take the core responsibility to teach a propitiatory tool, the owner should do it. if developers are promoting the goodness, what are we paying as licence fee to the company for then? just for building new versions?
In case CQ Vs CF. Well I know a doughnut and a cake are both made of dough. But when i’m there for a doughnut i don’t want to know about a cheese cake. even if it tastes great. it is good idea as a business to be able to showcase multiple products, but bad idea when a customer calls you asking for a production support.
lets just suggest on how adobe should raise the bar on CF marketing & training.
@Sanjeev
I also experienced Adobe competing against itself but CQ vs CF. Adobe is a Java house, so both products have a Java core. Since CQ is in Java and they need to be able to customize that CMS, they program in Java, not CF.
As far as hiring and no good CF developers I haven’t seen that. If your salary is right and you offer telecommute, that really brings out the cream of the crop. Thats apples and oranges to compare CF and PHP. Sure you may get your developers at a lower cost, but you need more of them and you end up paying for all these add-ons. Depending on your business that could amount to much more than CF developers.
@Rakshit,
Thank you for the article. It is definitely a great thing to keep the ColdFusion evolving and promising. But seriously, the product is not doing well in the corporate area. There could be many reasons, I just list two.
1. Lack of strong CF developers. This is a myth half true and half propagated by the hiring bosses. a vicious cycle is created where you put off CF because you cannot find developers and you are losing developers because there are no companies that work on CF. I tried hard to push CF as a language of choice to start-ups that I worked as adviser. I lost the debate when we could not find reliable developers who can fit the demand and push of a start-up. As there is no course of curriculum in the colleges, there is no one here who studied CF in their class rooms to give that confidence and love for this beautiful tool. The push on this area has to be very very high to change the tide.
2. ColdFusion support. I wish to meet those people who gave the extra fantastic review you quoted up there. No, I’m not criticizing or mocking the statements, but just wanted to say that the support may be fantastic but it is not consistent. This is dirty but I want to reveal that the large company that I’m working on is moving away from CF because they got bad support back to back in their troubleshooting consultations. Go back and check in the CF support team, who was the one on the call that day to say “why do you want use CF for PDF related jobs, don’t use it. Use our LiveCycle tools. They are better and good. Do you want to know more about them?” that very moment we felt is Adobe really interested in problem solving or just interested in selling other products via their costly support hotline.
I cannot dictate the mood of decision makers in my place, but they instantly decided that “any more relationship with CF/Adobe is going to sink us”. No one felt that it’s a fault with the guy on the call and he was just not doing well, but they felt Adobe in its whole is not interested in CF. that’s definitely not a good thought. Isn’t it?
Markets like America, Europe and Australia are focusing on CF, but not as serious as they were before. They are worried of costs and declining manpower availability. Tell you one thing, even after 6 months of searching all of Europe (sans England) we could not find a developer for our office in Paris. it could be that our hiring team are in competent, but 6 months is a lot of time to waste. The next day, we changed to PHP and out goes our team, shook a tree and there fell a dozen out to do the job. May be I’m just not hitting the right tone, but unless you see where the some 40-60% developers are present (places like Europe, India, Philippines) and improving their skills, the raise in product adaptation is not going to show any difference. other side of the coin is sending the sales guys out to print a hell lot of material and spam the bosses with the goodness of CF. your licences data will be better than 2000. definitely.
I apologize if it’s all a dirt shower, but just kick off that dust settled in the big lettered brand name of Adobe – ColdFusion and start thinking seriously why doing events and countless 1 member user groups are not enough to put the life in a declining but otherwise fantastic language called CFML.
@Rakshith – thank you for the update on the Adobe initiatives being pursued to bring CFML to more developers and to more companies. I also thank you for repeating what many of us have been saying for years about the lack of enthusiasm (I’m paraphrasing) in the community for both Adobe’s efforts and the communities efforts. I’m slightly disappointed that recent community efforts didn’t make your list, but… no worries, I’ll add it… 😉
For those that have not already heard, there is a new initiative in the community focused on building quality open-source CFML applications and promoting CFML as a language through several sub-initiatives. The new development initiative, dubbed ‘Team CF Advance’, will have a primary goal of advancing ColdFusion applications as an open source solution through development and improvement of open source software solutions combined with social marketing to help raise awareness of ColdFusion solutions as a viable open source option against other open source solutions. You can learn more about this initiative on my blog:
And you can sign up to the team through a Google form located:
This initiative is a positive step the ColdFusion community can take that will broaden the ecosystem, raise awareness of the language, mentor and instruct new and junior level developers and end the in-fighting and bring us all together around a common set of solutions to the open source market issues faced by CFML.
We are asking CFML developers for the following, as applicable:
1. Sign up with the team to assist with leading or developing/designing against projects, mentoring other developers/designers, and helping this team grow and sustain open source ColdFusion based solutions.
2. Spread the news about this new initiative by posting on social media and blogs, pointing either to my blog post, the sign-up form or both.
Any assistance you can give to help spread word of this initiative would be greatly appreciated by all members of the team.
Thank you all for your time and have a great day!
Product Improvements – ColdFusion in Big Data is a bit unclear. Java is pretty well established on this front for learning, and many companies have been built off Hadoop services.
One very unique strength of CF over the other languages is its seemless failovers for HTML5. The other languages have web sockets, but its highly under used because it doesn’t have enough penetration to be reliable. CF has the seemless failover for this for 99.9% penetration so there has been a lot of good in recent upgrades and CF is capable of exceeding others, but will it cash in? With small number of developers people may not see enough CF apps utilizing that advantage to make waves. probably another year or 2 and companies won’t be supporting pre-HTML5 browsers, so the advantage will fade.
I think Adobe should try to make waves in UI. There is plenty of headway to improve. Speed of build is certainly one of the bigger ones. Flex may be on its way out, but it was very handy in UI functionality exposure, customization, and skinning. One big player (.Net) has already blazed this trail, and it lead to much frustration on the web with .Net apps working well just in IE. Surely Adobe can do better than that. CF DataGrid is very dated as is YUI in general. Adobe has always had a niche for the visual eye. I’d like to see Adobe taking a shot at building revolutionary UI elements via web standards, and using CF to make it easy to create/manage like it does for Java and JS now. Skinning should be wide-open, and come with extensive functional components, that are exposable like Flex for customization. Whether it uses JQuery or an Adobe created framework, the value is in the quality and the speed to build. Every developer uses this stuff now, so its not special case. Adobe needs a vision on this. There were all kinds of plug-ins before to do things, but the vision of Flash, changed everything for over a decade. Same deal today, sure there are tons of libraries that much of it now, but they don’t have the resources like Adobe to execute the vision. If Adobe made a really killer open source library it would gain visibility among all languages, and if CF greatly improved its speed of creation, it will win over developers. Client side coding time is quickly increasing. There is a huge niche for a faster way to do it.
Modular Licensing – I’m split on it as I see advantages and disadvantages. Probably the best selling point I have to large companies and start-ups is CF offers them the extended libraries they need, without financial strings attached. This is a huge hurdle for both types to overcome in the other languages. Say you want extensive charting. A SaaS start-up isn’t going to pay the standard license, they are going to pay a huge fee for using that product in their own product and its going to haunt them for the life of that product. Large companies face the same issue via high availability. Adobe saves companies like these a lot of money with the all inclusive package of quality libraries and many use it solely for that reason. CF is very popular among Gov apps because these are orgs likely to get hit with library pricing that will blow their budget out of the water. So if you strip out things like PDF generation, Image manipulation, Office Integration, Charting etc CF is going to really lose a lot of steam in these environments. It will also hurt productivity. Fast paced departments just want to get things done, they don’t want a list of barriers when they make a request that all come with additional pricing and extra time to work out a deal with vendors. CF just has it available on-demand, and most of these libraries are enterprise quality. On the other hand I do like the idea of modular licensing in that it might lead to new libraries being created that might not be available. We already have something like this available though with CFX. To be honest CF Standard is pointless and I don’t even try to sell it. The limitations are not feature based but usage based. I can’t see any of my companies saying “I want to pay 80% less for my CF license, at the expensive of the apps having a bottleneck anytime there are race conditions on PDFs, images, etc.” Maybe a good compromise is to make Standard and Enterprise different in features and not in availability. Standard you have to fend for your own libraries and Enterprise you get it all like you do today.
Licensing – If your going to expand developers you need to offer attractive licensing. Sure this is companies, but this is also developers who start their own business, who turn into big companies. Since the VM era, Adobe really hasn’t had fair pricing across the board. Prior to CF10 VM users got hosed in that their licenses wouldn’t go nearly as far as a dedicated machine, cause Windows/Adobe will count the cores as CPUs. Dedicated users enjoyed the standard 2 socket policy, which worked. Now with the new licenses, its the dedicated users that are getting hosed as Adobe thinks 4 CPUs per socket is the norm. Well 2014 is almost upon us and Intel has released 12 core sockets, so that dedicated guy that once was covered under one license, now must pay for 3 licenses, increasing their cost 300%, plus assuming two upgrades before the hardware is retired, 300% more there. This is very unattractive to start-ups. As someone who has helped several start-ups launch they don’t want to run on junk, nor do they want to play $3,000/mo in VM costs to run machines that can handle some peak traffic. Buying hardware and then colo for $400/mo is more attractive. Many of them expect their core developer/s to manage the equipment and they have support plans from Dell to cover hardware failures. Whos is your target? Is it the guy whos got 500k in bank loans or VC, or is it the developer who’s putting all his own money into it. Adobe needs to come to terms with a balanced licensing plan. Windows gives you 2 sockets and a huge core buffer to cover future processors, limited by CALs and VMs. 2 socket or 4 installs up to 24 cores total for VMs, which ever benefits you more, sounds reasonable for today’s hardware. As far as AWS drop the price to a percentage of usage under that model. 8 Cores you pay 33% of the normal license. With a more attractive EULA, companies would be more open to using CF on new projects. This will win over some of the small companies. The bigger ones usually have different factors… leading to licensing part 2 modular or current methodology.
I’ll make a few posts each addressing my experience with the product in that aspect.
Expanding Developers – When I was going to school 00-04, mine taught .Net primarily because there was a large transition of desktop app developers that built products for Windows based machines (90% marketshare) that were moving to web based apps. Visual Studio was their IDE of choice naturally and Microsoft provided the school all your products (expect windows) at no cost. I suspect most of the schools are similar where they simply transitioned to web keeping their core language in place. I came to CF after educating in both PHP and .Net because it was just much faster to code, and I felt diversity in other aspects of the web; graphic design, databases, server maintenance, and SEO were very important. The time I gained in efficient coding enabled me to pick up the other aspects at expert level.I think a good start in colleges would be to target Digital Media and Web Design/Development programs, not Computer Science fields who will be a hard stone to move. These programs focus more on being well rounded in all the aspects that make the web what it is today. Companies these days want to fine tune their budgets, so if you can wear many hats as 1 hire, those candidates are more likely to get hired and get beyond normal pay. In college that’s what students want more than anything, good jobs out of school. Of the schools that Adobe partners with they should also think about creating an internship marketplace; a place for students looking to get real world cf development, and companies looking to build apps off that experience. I think that covers the learning side of growth, now another hindrance of growth licensing…
Gr8 to year positive news, but facts and data would be better and more believable.
Cfmldeveloper.com and cflive.net will help to give cf a reboot wherever possible, but please for the love of science, please sort out the security in cf so it is safe to host on a shared server with createobject (java) enabled.
The ability to increase the number of ColdFusion developers has two huge facets. One is Adobe promoting and getting ColdFusion into the education system at many levels. Not just devs but MIS programs so future bosses know about and can trust ColdFusion.
The second part is the ColdFusion community. I’ve sat by rather quietly watching people in the community eat their own. The in-fighting has gotten beyond ridiculous. In part I understand why, it’s passion! Many would not be screaming at Adobe if they didn’t passionately love working with ColdFusion. However, that passion is manifesting itself as anger and hate. Some of the hot tempers need to learn how to re-channel their passion in a more positive manner to help grow the community instead of dividing us. That is something I’ve had to learn a few times.
For Adobe’s part in the community you really need to be more responsive and publicly responsive. I truly think Adobe needs more people in America (I presume that’s the largest market, but it’s the only market I can see.) working within the community.
Lastly it’s my opinion Adobe needs more developers working on the two ColdFusion products. During the last release cycle when I was working on the beta’s I was told the same team works on ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder and that they only work on each part-time with most of the time focused on ColdFusion server. If this is still true I believe this needs to change so there are dedicated full time teams on each product. Each product needs more enhancement updates during the product lifespan instead of mostly bug fixes.
Regards,
Wil
Rakshith, thanks for your update to the community. It would be nice to hear how CF11 is coming along? I’m guessing it’s in a closed alpha release state at the moment?
Nearly half of website visitors are using a mobile device and they’re all potential candidates to download an app, if a website is offering one. What will CF11 provide to help with mobile development? Can you be specific please?
Push notifications and delivering data to mobiles is big and will get bigger. I’ve encountered limitations with that trying to develop something cross-platform that can handle more than simple messages, especially when the app is in the background. What tools will Adobe provide to help devs create websites and apps with CF back-ends? There are various tools out there already including cloud services that do push notifications via an API, but it would be great to have something more unified so we don’t have to glue so many different services and technologies together.
I would use CF10’s websockets to handle push notifications but the Android browser doesn’t support websockets and Flash is not supported on Android as a fall back. Also there’s no performance metrics to suggest CF can handle 100,000 active installations of an app sending data back and forth. So that route is a no-go without spending lots of time and money and taking the risk. Are there any tasty details you can give us that might address any of these issues please? Thanks.
ColdFusion is attracting NEW companies and developers? Seriously guys, I think it’s time to stop daydreaming and face the reality – a reality that is very different from what your marketing-job-descriptions forces you to say/act/promote and, maybe, believe too. ColdFusion is dying slowly and steadily everyday. Rather than showing numbers/statistics that nobody else, except you, can see and verify, why not discussing facts that are public and notorious.
What is the point of mentioning meaningful/manipulative/subjective data information just to create a positive impression?… For example, what does it means that “nearly 2000 new companies” adopted CF in the last year? Is this the number of licenses sold? If yes, then how many of these are updates? More yet, how many of these “nearly 2k” companies are buying CF for the first time to start building new stuff, new projects and systems, as opposed to those just maintaining or upgrading the product into their infrastructures? The number of users of a given system grows as the number of users (internet, whatever) grows too. Adding more servers, etc is something VERY natural, and doesn’t mean that a given technology is growing (actually, sometimes far from it). What are these universities/colleges teaching CF that you talk about? Please tell us, we’d like to promote and spread this! Oh, you can’t disclosure details? That’s ok, but please don’t think we’ll believe CF is doing just great… No, it’s not, and WE know this for experience.
Numbers and “beautiful” statistics don’t hide the truth we all see in the market these days. Instead of trying to push a “positive agenda” – and I know you guys do your best with the money Adobe gave you, seriously – I’d like to see more discussions about things that could make a difference such as the possibility of open sourcing CF, aggressive pricing (and product features) adjustments, pretty much as Adobe did with Flex (a new release, under Apache, is live btw). That can save CF from ostracism in the medium/long term. The rest, is just marketing mambo-jambo. Sorry for the honesty.
Adding CF builder to the cloud offerings would be nice. Or add support for CF back into DW CC.
Hi Rakshith,
Nice to read… Really interesting and encouraging.
So what all are the educational initiatives currently going on.
Can you share some thoughts on the product improvements happening in Splendor and Dazzle.
Feed back – http://cfmlblog.adamcameron.me/2013/10/observations-on-rakshiths-recent-blog.html – and subscribe.
—
Adam
Excellent post! I think regular communication like this would go a long way to alluding some of the fears/misinformation that generate inside the community.
Rakshith,
I love the idea of the education piece of the puzzle – please contact me directly as my organization would love to be involved in one way or another.
Do you have plans to attract new developers? Most of the companies I’ve seen leave CF did so because they couldn’t find devs.
This is really an encouraging post Rakshith, Thanks for being attentive us.
Please organize more Adobe connect sessions and UG meetings for us.
— David R
@Rakshith,
Thank you for this initial response. I know that the team is hard at work, and still have faith in Adobe’s desire for ColdFusion to continue to succeed as a platform. I look forward to this dialog continuing.
If you can pull off fixing CF Builder and sending out regular patches to that product, you’ll move up a step in my book. I used to have you on a pedestal, but these days it is quite shaky. Also, a little news goes a long way. I know you might be waiting for CF summit, but there has been silence on development for months! What is up with CF Builder!
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