25 years ago, Adobe ColdFusion was brought to life by a shared passion for coding and a vision to make hard things easy for coders around the world. In tireless pursuit of that vision, we’ve fought harder every year to change the norms of application development and tackle every challenge that’s come our way.
In 1995, ColdFusion paved the way to create a unique web application software for Windows NT and 95 servers to help coders build the next generation of web-applications. By 1998 tools were added for an easy-to-use conferencing system and a new visual development environment. In 2001, Macromedia ColdFusion Server 5 provided the fastest way to build and deploy web-applications. ColdFusion MX perfected the ways to build applications with far less training time and fewer lines of code than ASP, PHP and JSP! By 2005 and the release of ColdFusion MX 7, more than 10,000 customers and hundreds of thousands of developers were using ColdFusion to harness the power of the Java platform and build powerful web-applications in record time.
In 2007, ColdFusion 8 made ColdFusion the ideal fit for everything from small departmental applications to reliable implementations of the most important business applications. By 2009, Adobe ColdFusion 9 was helping developers condense complex business logic into even fewer lines of code and in 2012, we released the standard, enterprise and developer edition of Adobe ColdFusion 10. This introduced a multitude of productivity enhancing features, seamless integration with the Java™–EE platform, and smart built-in solutions including support for HTML5 to rapidly build enterprise-ready Internet applications. In 2014, Adobe ColdFusion 11 offered coders a unique solution for end-to-end mobile application development, and much more.
In 25 years, Adobe ColdFusion has transformed into a battle-tested high-performing application server that has simplified web and mobile application development for every coder. In 2016, Adobe ColdFusion (2016 release) introduced the brand-new API Manager to measure, monitor and manage APIs. Adobe ColdFusion (2018 release) introduced the Performance Monitoring Toolset to ensure applications are as optimized as the server.
Today, the legacy that we’ve built has been used by over 70% of Fortune 100 companies and 60% of Fortune 500 companies and continues to be the undisputed choice for many brands to create great web applications that change the game!
A legacy is only as good as the people that helped create it! We’re grateful to you, our passionate community of coders, for sticking by us from the start. 25 years of Adobe ColdFusion is a milestone that is testimony to years of your unwavering support! Today as more and more companies are transitioning from building monolithic applications to serverless applications, we can’t wait to embark on this new journey with you! Thank you for braving the ups and downs with us and believing in our dream to define change in the realm of web-application development.
As we look back on 25 years of igniting passionate minds, we couldn’t be prouder of where we are now and where we’re headed. The future looks exciting and we hope to keep growing and building with you!
Staff
55 posts
Better check the release dates in your video…..MX came out in 2002. Not 2006.
Good eagle eye there, but to be fair it looks like a simple typo. It appears between references to 2001 and 2004, so I think they “knew” the date given the order of the slides but perhaps just finger fumbled. 🙂
I’ve really enjoyed using ColdFusion for the past 20 years. It was exciting to learn it and quickly start coming up with many ways to use it that were not even thought of with other languages. HomeSite will forever be my favorite IDE. Everything that I have used since has always been compared to HomeSite.
CFML has always felt like the perfect tool for creating dynamic HTML. An idea that is still way ahead of other languages that I have worked with.
Sadly, the latest version I have been able to work in is CF10 because companies I have worked for have lost confidence in the viability of ColdFusion and no longer were willing to upgrade. I have been stuck maintaining software that was the unfortunate victim of how easy it was to develop with ColdFusion. Developers that did not really know what they were doing could build applications that looked impressive but were a nightmare to maintain or were never really completed. So I have spend at least the last 8 years being the guy keeping the pieces together until companies are willing to invest in rewriting their applications in another language. It feels like I am working in a code Nursing Home waiting for the good friend I always felt ColdFusion was, to slowly die.
I would really like to stay with ColdFusion and try out all the improvements and new features, but the reality seems to be that the jobs available are for the ColdFusion Nursing Home. I keep hearing about companies that want someone that knows ColdFusion so that they can help them get rid of it…
At least for me, it is looking like I am going to be moving on to some over-hyped language that I will hate because all I will be thinking about will be how much easier it was to do this or that in CFML… and how much I still miss HomeSite.
I’m late to this blog post. So firstly, yay, happy 25th birthday CF. 🙂 I’ve been using CF for 23 years and it’s more enjoyable to code with than anything else I’ve had to use. Better support for cfscript is very welcome and should be the primary way to code, but having tags as a fall back gives people the choice and natural backward compatibility. Sadly I can’t afford to upgrade our CF servers any longer and will be stuck at 2016 for the foreseeable future and will have to consider open source alternatives.
The point about why Adobe don’t use CF for their newsroom – or their entire corporate site for that matter – is totally valid. It’s like Ford executives driving around in Jaguar and Lexus brands (which they don’t do as far as I’m aware). It creates a bad image of a product not being good enough for the company’s own staff, so why should anyone else touch the brand?
If Adobe execs were serious about CF they’d issue a directive that all Adobe sites being (re)developed must use use CF. I could guess why that hasn’t ever happened and it’s not appropriate for this particular celebratory blog post.
On a slightly more positive note, now that CF 2021 has launched and is modular, it would be amazing if Adobe could capitalize on that by releasing a free “core” edition of CF for anyone to use commercially to increase awareness of CF among students and businesses.
Students – because we need more of them to discover and get into CF because they’re tomorrow’s CF developers and evangelists. Businesses – because the smaller businesses (which outnumber the enterprises by a huge magnitude) are on a budget and typically use the many zero-cost languages to deliver solutions for their business, shying away from CF because of no obvious reason why they should pay to use it, and they’re probably not aware of it due to the lack of younger people using it – which would be address by making it more appealing to students.
Anyway, if Adobe make the core free they could charge for using the extra modules. Each module shouldn’t be expensive, priced at an appropriate level for the functionality it provides. By making CF more affordable it will increase the user base and in turn more people will be buying the modules. Just an idea.
I had hoped we might see a free core level as well, with CF2021’s modular packaging, but it did not prove to be. There are clearly too many (or too many key) people who feel that there’s no need for them to “give it away” when it makes them millions.
And there ARE indeed “reasons why folks should pay to use it”. Every release has several dozen new features, large and small. Sure, some will sniff at them as “nothing they need”, but that’s true with any product and its updates.
And each update has not only added new “features” but also has evolved the language, more and more, so that modern devs will feel comfortable–and old school ones could even feel lost as those are leverages. Functional programming? closures? arrow functions? parallel programming? and so on.
Everyone simply needs to decide for themselves if the new features are worth upgrading to get, and indeed whether CF is worth paying to have. There are many (thousands) of people who still do, or Adobe wouldn’t be selling it and making millions off of it.
But sure, I agree there are always other ways things could be done, on many fronts. I try to remain a “half-full” kind of guy. 🙂
Great, but why Adobe doesn’t use ColdFusion on it’s own website? Newsroom page is written in ASP.
Perhaps because Adobe is a huge corporation, and different parts of its hundreds of web sites are built by different teams, and may have been acquired or purchased, or may be off the shelf software?
Indeed, I have no doubt that some of the people involved in such sites don’t even know if CF exists, let alone that it’s an Adobe product (Adobe has had hundreds of products, so they could be forgiven that).
And even if the team responsible for that newsroom site knew of CF, would it make sense for them to rewrite it? To acquire the skills to do that rewrite? To spend that time? Are we really in a place to judge that? And seriously, would more than a few people even notice or care?
Is it really a zero-sum game? Isn’t it OK if most or all of Adobe’s sites don’t use cf? Is its viability determined by whether it’s used on every Adobe site? I really don’t think so.
Of course, that’s just my opinion. I do realize some are always looking for ways to ridicule Adobe, whatever they may do. Maybe your question was sincere. I offer this sincere response, for whatever it may be worth to readers.
My question was sincere. Maybe I am stupid, I was just wondering how to convince customers to use some product if it’s maker uses products made by competition?
btw: why the latin extended is not working here?
I appreciate the sincerity in your question, Bartosz.
But seriously, if anyone considering buying CF were to notice that some “newsroom” page (within the immensity of the Adobe site) is running ASP.NET, and they chose to let that influence their buying decision (above all other reasons to use CF, documented on that site and elsewhere), then there’s perhaps nothing else that can be done to influence them.
And I can’t see it being a reason that someone will compel the team behind that newsroom site to change their tech.
Again, it’s not a zero-sum game. Will such a person only buy a car from a dealer where all the staff drive a car from that maker? Will they eat in a restaurant only if all the staff eat their meals there? Even if some car dealers or restaurants require such loyalty, must all?
Finally, regarding your concern about the latin extended font, I could point out that this is not likely “Adobe’s fault”, because the blogging software behind this portal is not written in CFML but an off-the-shelf package, but I’m not sure how you’ll take it. 🙂
It’s in fact a VERY popular blogging/cms package that runs on a certain 3-letter language–but you wouldn’t notice that because like most modern web sites, the underlying tech is no longer apparent. And FWIW, my understanding is that Adobe uses that blogging software (on more than just this CF portal) for the simple fact that it’s so very popular, widely supported, and comes with many features. Are there CFML-based blog packages? Sure.
But Adobe the company (rather than the CF team) has made the choice of what package to standardize on. Business do that, and they sometimes have to do that even if it means losing face for not always “eating their own dog food”.
As we celebrate CF’s 25th anniversary, and the pending release of its 19th edition, I’ll say that concerns like this are almost as old as it is. And being as mature a product as it is, there will always be things about which to quibble.
But there are equally many (many, many) more things about it “to convince customers to use” the product. This blog, the CF site, the CF docs, and many community resources attest to that, as does their ongoing vitality.
So I’ll raise a glass to CF’s birthday, figuratively and now literally, as I soon as I click the “post comment” button. 🙂 Hope that’s been helpful.
I have to agree with Charlie on this, but I do appreciate the sentiment behind the question as I’ve often wondered this about many business decisions myself. Ultimately, which platform to go with comes down to opportunity costs, the weighing of costs and benefits compared to the next best alternative. Given a finite set of resources (labor, capital, time) an entire company, an event-focused project team, a sales department or branch office must choose the option that will yield the most favorable (maximum) benefits while minimizing costs. This is simply basic economics.
And I’ve been using ColdFusion all this time. 25 years. Sheesh!
I am core ColdFusion developer and I started my career as ColdFusion developer only . I am thankful to Adobe in my career , I got an opportunity to work on different versions of ColdFusion.🙏
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