I am pleased to announce that we have just launched the new version of ColdFusion, Adobe ColdFusion (2016 release). It was not long ago that I communicated to you via a blog post on how ColdFusion has had a profound impact of web application development over the last two decades when we celebrated twenty years of Adobe ColdFusion.
Today we continue to make that impact adding ColdFusion (2016 release) to the list of releases.
The highlights of the release are,
1. Our Enterprise customers get a built-in security code analyzer that can scan your existing and new CFML based applications to identify security vulnerabilities with details such as criticality of the vulnerability and potential ways to mitigate the vulnerability.
2. Performance improvements to ColdFusion runtime – Your existing applications can run up to 30% faster, thanks to performance improvements that can be leveraged out-of-the-box and new performance improvements introduced which need a few changes to application settings to run the applications faster. We will also be releasing a performance white paper that will detail the performance improvements.
3. PDF improvements – We now add capabilities to redact and sanitize PDF files programmatically giving you the confidence to securely share PDFs to an external audience. There are other PDF enhancements such as updated archiving format support and extracting & applying PDF metadata.
4. And finally, as a part of ColdFusion Enterprise, the all new API manager component that has everything to quickly move your APIs from concept to production. API manager will take care of securing, managing, monitoring and enforcing SLAs on both REST and SOAP APIs. Though this is a new component introduced, the API manager is extremely powerful and yet very easy to use. API manager supports high scalability with very low latency to give you the confidence to successfully implement enterprise-class API strategy with ease. We will also have a white paper with details on high scalability and low latency for this new component.
I am confident that this new release of Adobe ColdFusion will get you as excited as we are about this new release.
As always, we owe all our success to our customers and ColdFusion developers and thank them for the continued investment in ColdFusion.
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Super late to this thread, but I too wish CF were free, but lets be honest CF gives you a lot out-of-the-box that would cost developer time so sure you pay for the license, but you do get some functionality in return. Does that functionality meet everyone’s need, maybe not, but CF is good for RAD (Rapid Application Development) yes, I’m a bit old school with that term, but I think it still applies.
There is also Lucee 5/CommandBox which is pretty cool and free if ColdFusion doesn’t fit the bill price wise.
@Terry
While they have still much work to do to shed the bad marketing perception… Kishore did like the idea I suggested of creating a BizSpark (Microsoft) like program for CF that gives out Free CF licenses to use over a couple years (they expire like a really long trial) as a way to attract new customers. So this may be in the works. Rakshith nor Kishore can make any major decisions like this alone, instead they must be passed up the chain for approval. So don’t assume if your idea isn’t picked up, it was them who shot it down. If a good idea that is overwhelmingly supported by the community is shot down, I think Adobe should let us know who blackballed it so proper feedback ends up in the right place.
Here’s what I don’t fully understand about Adobe’s approach. Probably the main selling point of ColdFusion, what really sets it apart from other languages, is that it’s quick to pick up and quick to become proficient in. ColdFusion, especially the CFML flavor, is far and away the ideal language for web developers who do not come from a programming background. Just imagine all the power you get when supplementing your existing skill set of HTML, CSS and (some) JavaScript with CFML. With that fairly limited skill set, you can do almost anything a large development department could, in a fraction of the time, all courtesy of ColdFusion. In it’s most simple form, CFML augments your HTML tags (think CFMAIL), giving you instant power that you simply can’t get anywhere else. It’s a awesome proposition. That’s how ColdFusion should have been further developed: making hard backend stuff easy.
Imagine you’re a small start-up. CFML lets you hit the ground running, but if you become a success you can scale like the best of them. ColdFusion is ideal for smaller organizations with an agile approach, for more creative shops like advertising agencies who just dabble in development. That’s where I would position ColdFusion if I had something to say about it. Basically, ColdFusion is the ideal platform for those who outgrow WordPress type solutions, and then all the way up to the enterprise level. ColdFusion could be HUGE.
Yet Adobe is concentrating only on the enterprise market in their product development and marketing efforts. I’ve already posted a couple of comments on how the new licensing restrictions are basically kryptonite to anyone running a non-enterprise, non-single site business, in short everyone whom I believe should be the core market for ColdFusion, given its USPs.
If you look at the enterprise market, this is exactly the place where the advantages of ColdFusion carry less weight and the disadvantages more. How much do big enterprises really care that a language is quick to learn and develop in? Just hire an extra couple of well-trained Java-guys instead. Why settle on a platform that is being talked about as though it were a legacy technology and for which experienced and even junior developers are hard to find?
I could still argue for ColdFusion in the enterprise, of course, but for smaller, more creative, more agile agencies, ColdFusion blows any other platform out of the water. Incidentally, this is the home market for Adobe: everyone using Creative Suite for digital is a potential client, if it wasn’t for the ever more enterprise-oriented licensing.
The exact same pattern you see in the development of the product from, say, CF8 onwards. I guess we can all agree that the JavaScript-generating frontend stuff in ColdFusion is a disaster (CFPOD, anyone?). It MAY be interesting if you’re a programmer who doesn’t know any frontend stuff, but no normal web developer would use any of it. If you think of ColdFusion in a stack with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, it doesn’t make any sense at all.
Probably the biggest contribution of Adobe to ColdFusion is ColdFusion Builder, an Eclipse-based IDE. Great for those who used to program in Java, but again, that’s exactly the market where CF doesn’t have that much of an added advantage. If I were Adobe, I’d look in the exact opposite direction and find ways to add features that fit with and integrate into the Creative Cloud instead. That’s where the masses are, where Adobe is strong, and – incidentally – where the USPs of ColdFusion would rally, really shine. To date, I find ColdFusion Builder (anything Eclipse, really) absolutely repellent – and I’ve really tried, trust me. I understand the paradigms of Eclipse fit well with hardcore programmers, but for web developers, it is definitely not a natural fit like, say, Dreamweaver or Sublime.
I’m from Europe, lived in US and South America, but I run a digital marketing agency from India, where I believe ColdFusion is now completely managed from. To me, this explains a lot. In India, there are perhaps 2 million Java programmers graduating from college every single year. Every bookstore carries loads of books on C# and Oracle, but you’d have a really hard time to find a halfway decent book on, say, Photoshop. For every designer or social media marketer, there are thousands of programmers. Marketing, design and other creative startups do exist in India, but they are a rarity compared to big enterprise outsourcing.
Of course, in the US and Europe the situation is very different. Every other street corner sports a creative agency, a web dev company or the next funky startup working on a marketing innovation. If people say that “Adobe doesn’t do any marketing for CF”, I think they mean to this part of market. I can think of a hundred way to get advertising agencies, web developers, app builders and other generally smaller and more agile companies hooked on ColdFusion. But pricing, marketing, and product development seem to be squarely going in the other direction, enterprise only. Maybe it does have something to do with Indian particularities, or maybe it’s simply that the product strategy is based on surveys of existing users rather than on the potential of this fast-changing market.
So no, don’t open source ColdFusion – that already exists and it’s called Lucee. Integrate the product experience, marketing and especially licensing more with Creative Suite and their clients instead. It would be a perfect fit, it’s just that Adobe itself doesn’t realize it.
@Charlie Arehart
My comments are directed at Adobe, as I want their stock to continue to go up in value. I want their products to be as (UN)popular as Windows 10 and the start of baseball season.
When I look at my revenue shares, of their product and I see a real big freaking gaping hole in their product marketing. What is Adobe doing to attract the next generation of developers to use Adobe ColdFusion? What are they doing to help foster a strong market growth, as I do not see it.
Microsoft for example didn’t just decide to give away millions of dollars in revenue opening up Visual Studio to students, home developers and pretty much everyone except for businesses, instead its a brilliant marketing tactic.
Colleges everywhere are teaching MS Languages, books are written and by the time a new developer graduates, they have a basic knowledge of the very same IDE used in the enterprise market set, save for the professional and enterprise versions have a few more bells and whistles.
Same is true for their Database, the .NET framework, Windows 10, and soon their flagship cash cow, MS SQL will be running on open source, including the limited “free edition” which easily holds enough data for everything in the SMB market.
As for what Adobe has done correctly is they have made their creative suite, which normally was well priced beyond the pocket books of many down to a monthly subscription model and for it not only have they seen incredible revenue generation, but an upswing in new market adoption.
@Charlie Arehart
First off, thank you for your response and for your site. You have saved me many hours of scouring the web looking for various things, including ColdFusion resources.
My observations are based upon what I do know about what is happening in the enterprise arena.
Lets break down the numbers, 171 sales per quarter is low. Even if that is all enterprise licenses, all charging maximum price, that is a very small slice of a global market that Amazon AWS alone provisions over 200 large-8 servers per day just out of one of their North American Data Centers.
Adobe should IMHO follow suit with what Redhat, Microsoft among others have done and move towards a software support as a sales channel.
The adoption rate will jump, as everyone loves free (beer), and in return more projects and even more support will come about.
Large organizations, Governmental, health and other institutions nearly all require what ever software they have, to have support in some fashion. This is one area that both Microsoft and Redhat (among others) have made a fortune up in terms of contracts.
This product is not just about creating a good product, but creating a need for the product, something that has changed in the software world.
Somewhere along the way from Macromedia to Adobe, ColdFusion has been lost in the shuffle. If Microsoft only sold 171 new units of any of its flagship products per quarter in a market, let alone across an entire sales channel, its not a win, but would be catastrophe.
So while my comments are just my simple opinion, unless Adobe changes course with this product, its going to become too obscure to support, it will continue to lose ground in number of new developers and over time key sector customers will abandon it,as more initiatives in both the private and government sector push forward to “open source” everything.
@Shawn,
Redhat just reached 2 billion in sales, and they are an open source company. The alternative spin, CentOS if anything has just helped fuel their market, not take away from.
Price is an important factor in some companies and very much so for beginning developers and small businesses. Many end up going the route of PHP, as nobody cares if it takes an extra week, or ten thousand lines of code to produce the same result you can get with ColdFusion in a few hundred lines of code. It becomes a sunk cost argument in that, a week or twos worth of extra development time and cost, still are less than the long term cost of deploying a ColdFusion product.
This cost of deploying any application includes the price of finding another developer to write code,and if are not aware, Adobe ColdFusion is not attracting new developers, and with it they are losing mass amounts of potential clients.
As new developers look for languages to run solutions, they do not look at ColdFusion unless its already in the environment they are in. Added to this, there is little incentive for a developer to learn ColdFusion as its a very obscure skill that for the most part is used rarely beyond some institutions making it a less overall appealing skill to learn than say, C# or Ruby.
@Terry Agree with most of that, but I’m a little weary having a their only revenue stream around support. That’s like 100% funding for police via tickets, which translates to a whole bunch of tickets. Do you really want them get paid based on making the product hard to use, lots of bugs and oddities. Technically support is almost included in enterprise given their support package includes upgrades along with support.
That and its probably impossible given they are integrated with code libraries that they do not own. Maybe not too impossible though. I have open source customers that integrate with commercial products.
I’m personally just happy with a server license model that doesn’t require buying so many licenses. The license cost isn’t a deal breaker for us. Having to buy so many licenses if we host our own hardware is. I don’t deny though if it went open source, it would attract a whole bunch more users.
I love ColdFusion, I have only used it for a few years unlike most. I went from ColdFusion to PHP and now use COldFusion when ever possible, but here are the problems with it.
Adobe, Your marketing is horrible. No book collections since 9. Look at the prices USED on those books and you will note that it still is in demand.
Lack of Marketing in general. Seriously, each new release should have the same press and attention as a new car brand, yet most of the time its a whimper at most..
Price, Yes I am going to say it. The price for your standard edition is HORRIBLE. Make it Free, hell make it all free and then pull a Redhat and let people pay thousands per server for support.
There are plenty of organizations that will not go opensource on anything without support, and its not so much a cost issue as a support issue.
Or lower the cost on standard edition. I can see paying a few hundred out of pocket but 1400 out of pocket to run one of my sites, not going to happen no matter how much I love the product.
@rackshit – Really? learn english if they don’t make sense. It’s PLAIN ENGLISH. I’m sorry if your product having major bugs is not a real concern. (typical Adobe)
I’ve been specific for over 15 years, and except for the odd occasion, Adobe listened, so now Adobe are ‘starting’ to get whats been coming for 15 years…. anger, resentment, revenge (cartoons of Adobe managers being beaten to death)… didn’t Adobe learn from the last hack… people HATE you because you make BAD decisions, some to the point that they hacked your company to humiliate you. And you’re still not listening. Read the blogs over the last two months and you’ll see hundreds of comments from many developers BEING ANGRY.
The ONLY thing Adobe should be doing now is listening to customers, instead of bing a Donald Trump and pointing at them until they give up and move to Lucee.
I wouldn’t bother commenting here if I didn’t think this is the LAST CHANGE that Adobe have to keep this product alive. Running a couple of events (mostly in the USA) just prove you have money, not ears.
“Why would Adobe launch a new version of the product when you think CF is dead to Adobe. ” – um dude if they O/S the product we can immediately fork it and remove Adobe completely from the process and can fix the bugs and remove the crappy features, and release a core version, and watch 10 times as many people use it as it works properly.
You forget Adobe management is the one who helps none. Hundreds of developers are asking you to fix the bugs that have been there for up to TEN YEARS!!
and you set them to ‘never’ or ‘not important’ as you’d rather put an un-necessary API manager (WTF? a really drunk night that one was) and other crap in the product, when half the CORE features are half broken.
Just a quick read of Adam Cameron’s blog shows the incompetence of Adobe to deliver, and that’s the tip of the iceberg.
No wonder key organisations such as Ortus and Daemon who have massive clients have moved to be part of the Lucee association. They listen, they fix bugs, they implement features that developers need, and they also do reject ideas that the community doesn’t see the need for. Learn from them, they have ColdFusion right and .lucee dialect is now a result of adobe being stuck in 2005 with cfml, taking it where we asked Adobe to go, but they were too busy adding unwated bloat to the product and charging loads of money for certification that held equal weight to a $20 test from brainbench.
Specific enough?
Many champions of ColdFusion have GIVEN UP on the product as Adobe doesn’t even listen to them.
How about those apples.
@Dawes: Your statements just don’t make any sense. Why would Adobe launch a new version of the product when you think CF is dead to Adobe.
I will appreciate if you bring out the real concerns that you have rather than making such blanket statements that helps none.
In Australia their licence conditions are not legal anyway as the product becomes ‘owned’ apon purchase and is no longer the property of Adobe, but the consumer. (which is why in AU you can chip an xbox or ps4)
Either way, get the point. Adobe is trying to KILL ColdFusion so it’s making it’s licence SOOOOo ridiculous that no-one will buy it.
Get the point. ColdFusion IS DEAD to Adobe, just like common sense, marketing 101 and good business practice is dead to Adobe.
Adobe should just O/S ColdFusion and move on to the next product they want to kill that is a best seller.
You were right, Shawn. I had a talk today with an Adobe representative for India, and I found him to be particularly knowledgeable and constructive. He was able to take away many of my concerns.
I understand now that if you run one site needing a license, you just order it online. Everyone else, whether service bureaus, web dev agencies, SaaS developers, outsourcing companies – everyone somehow needs to find a way to contact Adobe and negotiate a customized deal. That’s the new model, apparently it’s where the industry is headed. Though I think that’s more the enterprise part of the industry than the web dev side, it is true that once you get to talk to them Adobe seems pretty much constructive.
Feel free to make good on that promise, but I’m also going to clarify because I think you misunderstood what I said.
First I agree we should not HAVE to go through congress with our business plan to buy software and nobody does. But that’s why you have the unfriendly licensing you do now, because they either don’t understand your use case or do understand it and they just don’t care. That’s why I communicated our needs to them to find out which bucket we were in. Turns out they did care and just overlooked it.
I didn’t propose use case pricing. I got the $85 simply by dividing the full retail price of CF by the website cap you said it has (100). So that’s your cost per concurrent customer to use CF. definately a problem if you make $120/yr each and Adobe wants 70%. So I was not saying we should have to make a sales pitch to Adobe to buy software. Simply stating the math behind your argument.
Ahh, I like your can-do attitude Shawn! You make it all sound so doable and reasonable.
We do CFML outsourcing, web application development and hosting. We have some really small clients and some pretty decently sized ones. Some run on a 10 dollar/month Plesk package, for a few we set up a high-availability cloud hosting with fail-over. We are also building some applications on our own account. I guess we’re combining many different use cases at many different price points.
That becomes a bit hard though, with ColdFusion pricing set so randomly and without any knowable criteria. It seems you first have to establish a business and when it’s completely stable you can negotiate the price for the products you need. With other technologies you don’t have that problem, you can figure in the cost of the software as you plan your business. Using ColdFusion becomes a big gamble that way. Obviously, a hosting package you sell for 10 USD/month would become a problem if adobe decides out of the blue to start charging you 85 USD.
Maybe it’s my lack of understanding, but frankly I have a hard time accepting that it’s any of Adobe’s business if I want to use my expensive ColdFusion license to build a corporate intranet or a content management system. I don’t really want to have pitch my business to Adobe before I’m allowed to buy a license. Also, there are already all sort of hardware restrictions in the license. Why put this whole use-case charging on top of that? I fail to see the logic.
Let’s just say I’m glad no other company I know of works in that way. I don’t need to call Amazon to negotiate the price of my bandwidth for the year depending on what I use it for. I don’t need to somehow find the phone number of someone in Microsoft to pitch my use case for Office 2016 in order to find out if my pricing will be 300 or 10.000 dollar.
Anyway, it’s time for me to make good on my promise and to stop talking now 🙂
Support line isnt the right venue for that discussion. I don’t have any personal friends on the Adobe team. I just know what I needed to make it work for us and I came up with a way to present it to get my point across.
Also I never expected the proposal to work for everyone, just make CF viable for self hosting again for companies that can’t afford the large monthly cloud bill to stay in business. Thats our use case, and yours sounds very different.
So you are a SaaS website provider and your customers get barely any traffic from the sounds of it and you want to be able to load up 1000 websites on a server. So your complaint is that CF wants $85 for every site you host and you are thinking more like $8.50? Talk with them, 100 seems low to me for that use case, but 1000 seems too high. Maybe you meet somewhere in the middle.
Well, I’m not looking for a ‘better deal per core’; in our business, we tend to think in ‘websites per core’ rather than in ‘cores per website’. That’s the whole problem with the licensing: it assumes you have one website that runs on multiple servers. If you’re not an enterprise at the high end of the market, Adobe is doing it’s very best to make it impossible for you to use ColdFusion. It’s a shame, because Adobe didn’t so aggressively try to purge small companies, startups and web development companies from their ecosystem before.
See, it’s fine if there is some barrier to entry using CF, but really, with the current licensing it’s not just the bottom steps that are missing, the first 80% of the stairs are gone. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why Adobe does’t want people to use ColdFusion even if they’re willing to pay. On our cloud servers we can easily run hundreds or even thousands of small sites and landing pages. Yet Adobe limits a CF server artificially to a maximum of 100 websites and then they charge a supplement per website that is three times what a complete CF hosting package costs in the market! It makes me wonder why they give some companies a deal at a fraction of the cost than what they charge small companies.
It’s interesting you say we should discuss any grievances “in person”. It does indeed feel that when you don’t have any personal friends who work at Adobe, there’s no way of getting through. Given my previous experience, I don’t expect calling the support number wanting to discuss licensing will get me very far, though.
Anyway, I’ll stop talking now. I sound way more frustrated than I like.
I agree with you completely that the product doesn’t discriminate between projects. It assumes they are all higher end projects and I have told them as much. It’s certainly a problem and caps its growth.
I doubt small profit-less blogs will ever be covered in its scope, but I did call on them to expand that scope to cover projects that need a better deal per core to turn a profit. Doubt there will be a price drop, but there may be an option soon that enables you to cover more powerful machines for less.
Post CF2016 launch Adobe has been making a much better effort to listen to its customers, so if you have a wording of the licensing problem and its holding you back, now is a good time to bring it up, and if it really matters to you do it in person, they have no problem scheduling a call.
Thanks for your reaction Shawn. I also realize that legal language can get ugly pretty quickly, so perhaps some of the use cases the license seems to ban aren’t actually prohibited. But I’m afraid the problem is way beyond that.
Let’s face it: ColdFusion isn’t developing as quickly as competing technologies are, simply because it has been a very mature product for a long time already. But as other technologies are catching up, you’d expect Adobe to position ColdFusion more competitively. The improvements in the product in the last few iterations in no way compare to the enormous price hike disguised as CPU limitations, instance limitations and additional per-website fees.
I guess I was a little emotional calling Adobe “hostile” towards their smaller clients, it’s probably just indifference. Look at the page they send you to for information on the extra licenses you need if you want to host websites with CF: http://www.adobe.com/go/ColdFusion_Hosting_Agreement. The entire page is one sentence long and they didn’t even bother to fix the layout. Mails to the address published aren’t answered either, at least when I tried, though I did receive an autoresponder but it had no information on it. It’s all so unnecessary, a bit like the official ColdFusion Developer Certification still being stuck at CF9. Fine, we can create exams for our trainees ourselves, but all these details speak volumes about the importance Adobe attaches to ColdFusion.
I did end up talking to a representative of Adobe India, as he – pleasant surprise! – reached out to us in a promotional effort for CF2016. He was friendly and helpful. But then again: this is the age of AWS and Azure, where pricing is transparent and predictable and you can buy exactly the resources you need. I don’t want to have to telephonically negotiate three-year bulk deals just be allowed to use my already expensive license. If there is a surcharge for each little website we host so be it, but at least publish a reasonable and transparent price list so that we can calculate scenarios in which we could make it work. Still, this was a much better experience than the first two times I talked to Adobe about buying CF licenses: the first time they kept on denying they even had a product called ColdFusion, the second time they refused to sell us a license because our company, server and payment method weren’t all in the same Adobe-defined region. It’s absolutely maddening, as there’s just nothing you can do.
So far we never contemplated leaving CF, but obviously the 1500% price increase forces us to think. We calculated that retraining our entire staff and migrating our applications to a different technology will probably be cheaper that upgrading to CF2016. It’s such a terrible waste though, therefore it’s good to know someone is looking at the licenses. I won’t hold my breath, my faith in Adobe is now so low that I find it very hard to see a path forward with CF.
I’m sure Adobe can clarify, but I think most of what you mentioned was designed to not circumvent their other products. For example you build a website service that’s sole purpose is to convert documents into PDFs, you are essentially using their own technology against them (Acrobat and Live Cycle). They also don’t want companies to team up on hardware for no other purpose than circumventing buying another license. I agree the wording is a bit vague, and unfortunately that is common on the legal side. The more vague, the better for a team of lawyers to manipulate it’s meaning in court. Have you talked with Rakshith? They are taking a look at licensing right now. Maybe your suggestions would help bring it more inline with your expectations.
Running a ColdFusion-only shop, for years I have defended the product. But after one aggressive move of Adobe against the web development community after the other, we are now likely to give up. Adobe is not just trying to knock out the bottom steps out of the ColdFusion eco-system, but half the stairway.
The discussion here is case in point. The most important new licensing restrictions in my view have nothing to do with CPU cores – it is the relatively new 2.6.4 of the EULA, which bans development companies from hosting websites for their clients. Obviously, this takes away an important source of income from small and medium size agencies. Paying 9000 USD for a CF Enterprise license isn’t enough, we now need extra licenses for each and every website we host against opaque additional fees. Note that Adobe makes no distinction between a 5-dollar blog or an enterprise level client running many sites when charging additional per-client fees. In our case, an upgrade from ColdFusion 9 Enterprise to ColdFusion 2016 would come at a 1500% (!) price increase. Most if that is due to the new restrictions on running ColdFusion in the cloud.
Note that some more things that are expressly forbidden in the EULA: “use of the Software in a computer service business, third party outsourcing facility or service, service bureau arrangement, (…) or as part of a hosted service”. This is a blanked prohibition for outsourcing companies, service bureaus and “computer service business” to use ColdFusion – isn’t that everyone? Want to build Software as a Service based on ColdFusion – a social network, a book keeping application, a content management system? Expressly prohibited. Building and hosting websites for your clients? Forbidden. Having a content based website where people pay and login? I’m no legal scholar, but wouldn’t that be a “hosted service”? It seems insane to place such sweeping restrictions on the normal use of your product, but then again, so are 1500% price increases.
My company recruits and trains CF developers in India, many of whom end up moving on to larger enterprises. By eliminating companies like ours from the ColdFusion eco-system, Adobe makes ColdFusion less attractive for their enterprise customers as well; already it is quite hard to find good CF developers in India, as I imagine elsewhere, and forcing smaller companies out will only make it harder.
My question is: if Adobe dislikes web development companies, hosting companies, outsourcing companies, internet marketing agencies and service bureaus so much, why not sell ColdFusion to a company that wants to grow ColdFusion rather than euthanize it? I get that Adobe concentrates on extracting the maximum value out of their existing enterprise base before they pull the plug, but how is it helping them to force smaller companies out in such an aggressive manner? I just don’t get it.
@Rakshith (#190) – Micah asked *when* the AMI’s would be available, not (to my knowledge) about subscription pricing. So you didn’t really answer the question in #174. 🙂
@Micah (#174) – The latest official word I’ve heard on the release time frame of the AMI’s was June 2016.
@Rakshith – can you confirm June 2016 is still the planned release time frame for 2016 AMIs?
@Micah (#174): The subscription pricing can only work with the official AMIs. So I guess you will have to wait for the update to the AMIs to happen so that you can take advantage of the subscription price.
@Charlie Arehart you are one of my inspiration
i’m big fan of yours,ben,ben forta& sen etc .. i want to become next charlie or ben nadel of cf community
ColdFusion is one of most using word in my every day ..I’m don’t care about my company . i love my work & CF
Side Note: I’ve seen people declaring ColdFusion “dead” since I started working with it – which was CF4, still under Allaire, sometime around 1997-1998. Either the general populous is quick to decry doom upon that which it doesn’t favor, or ColdFusion is the Dracolich of the web development world.
@ Shawn (#173): We are exploring the alternate licensing option for customers who want to run CF on powerful machines.
@ Micah (#174): You can expect CF2016 on AMI by around May-June time frame.
@ Dawesi (#175): Although the number is impressive and CF business continues to do well, front page will always belong to the premier Adobe products that make maximum business impact for Adobe. There are a bulk of Adobe products that do get showcased on the front page.
@ Jack (#176): ColdFusion business continues do well with decent amount of growth as well. This cannot happen when an equal number of established customers move out of CF negating the effect of new customers coming in.
@ Dawes (#178): The marketing team did make a post based on the request made on this thread and Kishore, Marketing Manager for ColdFusion, has been responding to all the comments over there. https://coldfusion.adobe.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-marketing
ignore the two links by @indgurujobs2016 they are spam
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@charlie – someone coming to adobe, can’t even find ColdFusion on the website without Google. They’ve buried it even deeper than products that don’t sell. Adobe need to SELL ColdFusion or embrace it. (perhaps redirect coldfusion.com to a broader community site for cfml) #makeachoice #rightnow
Also Rakshith should be living on this thread, as he is the ONLY marketing for this product at Adobe, and that’s what marketing people in the real world do, reply quickly and immediately (he’s been doing well carrying the incompetent team of marketers at Adobe on his back – he should be paid double)
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Firstly I don’t care for coding comparisons, we all know the google search metrics (and especially trends data) is bogus research. It uses superficial data to report ‘real’ trends.
You can report how many devs use CF by jobs, first most CF devs are solo operators, so never will they be on the jobs boards, secondly people in large orgs stay there for years, so a second metric that fails on tiobe and google. (neither are scientic and I don’t know anyone who relies on either of these)
Thirdly, most cfml devs don’t use google to search the docs (this is clear). The current google trends graphs says that no-one is using CF, when clearly there are billions of hits every day serving cf pages around the globe.
Also none of these rating companies have access to anyone’s internal systems (banks, financial institutions, super companies, etc) so the ranking is completely fiction.
It’s not hard to find someone who knows cfml (and yes they all pretty much have a job), it’s WAY harder to find a manager who thinks CFML didnt die 10 years ago as they don’t hear anything about cfml at any mainstream conferences (with the exception of people like Aaron Conran (ex-Sencha) who did demos using it as his backend)
Google trends suggests that angular is more popular that most other javascript frameworks, but no fortune 500 companies seem to be using it on their public facing sites? So who is? The answer is the results are bogus. The adoption rate of angular despite the continued growth of jQuery on sites (not development-normally just wp plugins)
There are some big issues that need addressing:
1) Adobe won’t admit it sells ColdFusion
2) Adobe dont use coldfusion in ANY demos at conferences they demo their other products. #thisisjustdumb
3) progress. cloud cpu’s are slow compared to bare metal. if you get 4 cpu licence in bare metal, you should get 8 in cloud.
4) The price needs to COME DOWN, not go up if you want ADOPTION.
5) Adobe need to somehow allow cross-promotion of O/S engines. My suggestion about coldfusion.com being engine-agnostic would be a good idea IMHO.
6) Community is dead without resources. I’ve been a builder of several communities outside cf (much larger one’s than cf) and the key ingredient is money. (aka free product giveaways, cool product merch (by designers not developers) and quietly funding the hosting of fanboi websites. Just look at Adobe exchange, it’s a massive resource that hardly anyone uses because it has no-one on the ground pushing it.
7) Confluence is awesome, but the way the docs are done is terrible. Even the flash docs were better and easier to find stuff in. (even the lucee docs are better… #boom)
@Jack
That would be a hard official number to acquire that could take years. All they would know is who didn’t upgrade and say after EOL of the last purchased version, assume they left.
I know for a fact there is customer loss and its not small. I talked to several companies at the last 3 summits that said its getting too expensive for self hardware. I also know a few we consulted for that passed after we made a strong case. They don’t want the big AWS/VM bill or the excessive license requirement for self hardware. We have a project that is putting us in a similar position now. Whether its a gain or a loss who knows. In the end I bet they just count overall net profit/loss.
Losing existing customers is one battle. The other side of that battle is losing the ones who have done their research and opted not to use it. Those are a lost sale, and there isn’t a stat that will show that volume. You just have to put out enough attractive options and hope they cover everyone based on research and feedback. This is the largest area I think CF needs to improve. The product is only financially attractive for a fraction of all development use cases.
2000 impressive. Well done.
Thats the kind of info you put on your front page #adobemarketing
Can you please get an official answer the why cf isnt on the front page of adobes website with those numbers? Or in the first page of all products listing?
Still pretty impressive though given those are high chance to be enterprise or multi license as well, plus the marketing is far from maximized. I imagine it could be far better than that if Adobe had a competitive alternate licensing option that enabled them to make the sale vs lose the customer for projects that need a better deal per core to be competitive.
Just make sure you are responsible with those new customers so you retain them. Don’t be a company that relies on heavy new sales because your content with heavy turnover.
@Adam: New customers in this context are entities or organizations that have never bought ColdFusion from us in the past. Each such customer has bought one or more units of Standard or Enterprise. 8000 new customers will mean more than 8000 new units purchased.
@ Everyone: I stand corrected about new customers. I wanted to say 2000 new customers per quarter. We do not add 20000 new customers but rather it is 2000 new customers per quarter or 8000 new customers per year. I apologize for the confusion.
And yes, I am only referring to ColdFusion new customers here.
@Dawes
Since you mention it and others have circled around it, I did recently propose a different pricing structure and terms for bare hardware that will give companies that need a better price per core to be competitive what they need. I have heard this need mentioned quite a bit. We’ll see what they do.
20,000 ‘paying’ customers, I’m assuming that’s Adobe, not ColdFusion right?
If you have 20,000 new paying customers for cf then why don’t you market your product with that money? ($28 million if they all bought standard edition)
The reason other tech companies have huge communities is because they have an active use base AND the company markets aggressively in and around those markets.
They also clearly put their pricing on the website. Also the pricing for cloud should have a different calc than for bare-metal as bare metal processors are much faster than cloud processors. (at least twice in most cases), so you need more cores (nodes, whatever) to get the same power, which we shouldn’t be taxed for.
Adobe speaking at any conferences soon that aren’t theirs? Advertising in magazines/tech news sites?
@charlie, I think that if there was going to be any chance of a free version, it should be ‘express’ (aka cf core) and then sell the extended core as a product (.net integration, sharepoint, api manager, etc)… that would make sense to me. The core version with extended functionality was promised two versions ago in the roadmap. We’ve heard nothing more about that and no explanation why the departure from such a good idea (lean thin cf server)…
One CF is a great platform and should take on all the prestige of a JAVA framework because that is what it is. It helps us do some JAVA things quicker.
I currently own 5 Enterprise licenses of CF 11. I have not renewed to 2016 for the following reasons.
1) the licensing terms just became pubic days ago and I am not renewing anything without knowing what I am buying. And what I read now it doesn’t make sense.
2) the features in CF2016 are not worth the upgrade price or cost.
3) features that are included are often outdated before released. I mean the core libraries. Like Axis…. Remember it’s a Java application.
4) regular updates are slow.
5) development strategies have changed more browser based applications are being written so CF’s role is a lot different.
Here is my point. For CF to survive in today’s development environment where apple open sourced swift. And Python is gaining and and. By the way no one likes PHP. Anyway back to my point. The model has to change
1) open source cf
2) create a enterprise support system for corps that can’t use open source software that provider a validate the code base. And provide real support and updates.
3) pitch it as the best JAVA development platform. Sell it to developers. Go to the Java conferences
4) keep libraries updated and don’t roll out a new version unless there are killer new things that change the platform. No current users like the upgrade process incremental changes are the way to go.
If you can get more people using this platform there will be other ways to monetize it.
You have my contact info so if you want to change my mind give me a call. But I will not be upgrading until the value and cost meet.
For me, as an entrepreneur, ColdFusion is the best platform to create and deliver great solutions in my industry sector. I am not depending on CF jobs. I simply believe in the power and simplicity of this platform to build and create new things. Now if Adobe does not care about ColdFusion simply release it as open source. Many hundreds of thousands more intelligent developers are going to flock to the community and StackOverflow will naturally do the marketing.
@Shawn (#160) – I’m unclear how you reached the conclusion that I’m, currently, advocating that Adobe offer ACF for free. I mentioned this has been requested in the past and, for Adobe sales/legal/marketing reasons would be a more ideal solution, and that Adobe has clearly stated they do not want to bring a lower priced version to market.
But beyond that single paragraph, the focus of my post is on Adobe leveraging the solutions already available in the marketplace (open source CFML engines) as an on-ramp for potential customers who may later need the functionality only found in the commercial product Adobe provides.
This represents a (probably negligible) investment on the part of Adobe with potential long-term gains.
What I am proposing is precisely a shade of grey. Unless I’ve misunderstood your opposition to my suggestion overall.
@Denard Adobe doesn’t have the after commitment upsells of Microsoft or Oracle to be able to naturally profit better if they offended it for free, even if it meant more volume of developers. They would really need to throw their hat into the ring of Azure-like services. They don’t have a DB like MS or Oracle. No OS like MS.
Seems like it’s been black (Adobe’s way) for a long time, and your asking for white (Free). The real solution is a shade of grey somewhere in-between. I’m with you that the license doesn’t work financially for all use cases, but I don’t think free is realistic or fair to Adobe.
Hey Charlie (#154) – I believe that Adobe represents a feature rich value-add proposition for customers who start out on an open source engine.
I believe that ACF addresses pain points and has integrations that are more readily applicable to companies with an IT footprint (which only happens once you’ve well established your business, in my experience).
So, yes, for these reasons (and others) I believe that Adobe putting some weight behind the open source alternatives will lead to net new sales of ACF, because at some point some percentage of those companies are likely to want or need some of the functionality only available in ACF. I have no global numbers to put to this, only my experience in moving companies between [open source and ACF] engines depending on their situation and pocketbook.
The problems could just as easily be solved as you propose… by providing a super low-cost or free Adobe branded alternative – offering only the core functionality without all the bells and whistles. I also know, however, there is a long history of this being proposed/requested and Adobe has always said that Standard is their ‘cheaper’ version of CF, and they are not interested in bringing any additional lower cost alternatives to market.
In this case, they wouldn’t have to bring anything to market – the alternatives already exist and already fill the market space I’m talking about very well. This provides Adobe with an opportunity to romance open source engine customers and carry them on to ACF if/when the time is appropriate.
This stands in stark contrast to the ‘if I close my eyes they’ll go away’ stance Adobe has seemed to take in regards to open source alternatives, and provides yet one more avenue from which to generate a revenue stream, while simultaneously providing deeper penetration of CFML in the wider development world.
More customers using CFML of any varierty, surely, has to mean more customers eventually knocking on Adobe’s door. If they court those customers through that process, I can’t see how it wouldn’t lead to net new sales for Adobe.
Will there be pushback from sales and legal? Probably. It will require convincing some that instead of an ‘us and them’ mentality, this requires a ‘we’re all in this together’ mentality.
@gary @cfhour @scott @cfgrumpy
(Love the show, miss it! – did sign up for hostmedia account … in perpetuity!)
@charlie I have used your site quite a bit. You definately have been a resource over the years.
@hostmedia / Lucee Was having trouble with the ‘croc’ hosting so set this up. The annual cost worked for our very small project, the cf cost, even standard could not be justified.
Gary
@Rakshith Naresh
2000 more per year? I don’t see it in the metrics I look at for evaluation.
For example:
indeed.com, coldfusion. 2012, 800+ jobs in 2016 … 177;
http://www.tiobe.com: cfml appears and disappears from the 50-100 position. 101-150 is not shown. CF often moves into that range;
cfhour.com blog. 3 months without a post and both hosts have admitted to moving on to mobile and groovy and difficulty justifying using CF over other solutions.
I am not a hater, love coldfusion. It still looks like a language in decline.
Why has the EOL been reduced from 5 years (CF11) to 4 years (CF2016) for core support.
Also.
The End of Extended support for CF2016 is before CF11! (that is insane).
https://www.adobe.com/support/products/enterprise/eol/eol_matrix.html
@Rakshith and @Kishore – I know this is probably better suited to discussion under the forthcoming marketing blog you’ve talked about, however, given it’s in my head now I’ll raise it here and then reiterate it later…
Have you guys considered leveraging the open source CFML engine(s) as a pathway to ACF? In other words, would it make sense, and be feasible given your legal constraints, to recommend, say, Lucee, as an alternative open source CFML engine for your start-up/small business customers who a) cannot afford even Std ACF license but b) upon achieving success might likely migrate to ACF for the value added features it provides?
It seems to me that courting small business in this way would achieve further penetration of CFML (in general) in the marketplace, and allow Adobe to groom those customers towards buying into ACF when their coffers can afford the license and their needs demand the value added features ACF provides.
I already suspect legal would probably prevent you from doing this, but I can’t help but think there is (or should be) a natural progression from open source CFML engines towards ACF, and Adobe adopting/supporting/recommending those engines to potential customers who balk at the ACF license fee would very likely lead to future ACF customers?
Just thoughts rolling around in my head atm… I’ll hopefully have a clearer understanding of how this could be achieved by the time Kishore makes his post, but wanted to get it out there while it’s still fresh in my head 😉
Pricing
I suggest the following.
– 1 Enterprise license allows 8 cores spread across 2 VM’s A normal setup is to have 2 VM’s for HA reasons.
– Subsequent enterprise licenses come at a substantial discount, e.g. licence Number 2 has a 50% discount, following licenses have a 75% discount
The above will achieve
– Not reducing the initial licence cost, I expect the bulk of licenses are sold as one-off, with the number of organisations having 2 or more licenses would make up a small amount of the revenue pool
– Discounted subsequent licenses will remove the prohibitive cost for ‘successful’ sites & allow CF to scale in an origination. $11,000 AUD for a CF setup is still a bit high, but can be sold to management. $55,000 AUD for 5 front-end servers can’t be sold to management.
– the 2 VM provision is needed as 2 VM’s should be standard practice. So currently the initial cost of CF is $22,000 AUD – which is huge.
“With enough support from the community, we can get there.” — This, in spades. Don’t expect Adobe to do everything for you: you are responsible for promotion of your favorite language. That’s how it works with all the other techs: they’re successful because of their community, not because a company promotes them.
@ Martin: Thanks a lot!
@ Pete: Thanks for bringing up hackmycf. I should have mentioned it in my response to Raghuram.
@ Gary: We understand that the new adoption rate is not as high as it should be, though we get 20000 new customers ever year. We also understand that the number one concern that your customers have is about hiring CF developers. Through our education curriculum we are trying to get some fresh blood of cf developers. But we understand we still have a long way to go. With enough support from the community, we can get there. Lack of jobs is a burning issue. We tried to make some head way by creating an official job posting on web site or the community portal. We did not get a legal clearance on this. But that is not to say we have given up and blind to the issues being faced. We (the CF business team) very much want CF to succeed, perhaps more anyone else associated. The point is, we are making efforts. Are these enough efforts enough or is there scope for more efforts? Yes, certainly yes. Given the constraints that we need to work with we are committed to doing the best within the constraints.
@Denard. Sure. Thanks.
@ Ronald: Thanks for sharing this information. Lots of useful information for us to take back. We do make quite an effort on some of the aspects you spoke about. But more can be done.
@Shawn Grigson: We understand the cost is prohibitive for certain segment of users. We already give out ColdFusion for free for education purposes. Check out https://freeriatools.com/coldfusion/
The very reason we have Enterprise and Standard with different price points is to address the needs of someone who cannot pay the full price of an Enterprise.
Along with this, we have also introduced subscription pricing on AWS where you just pay the hour of usage. That said, there is scope to do better to encourage startups. I will spend some time thinking about how we can take cost factor out for a young startup.
@ CF lover and MS: We understand where you are getting at. We will evaluate about additional opportunities to promote CF based on the feedback here on this thread.
@Mark: You are right in observing that CF 11 was based on CPUs with a CPU defined as a group of four cores. With the new version – it is 8 cores per license straight away. I really don’t want the comments here to turn out into a EULA clarification. I have setup sometime with Shawn today to discuss some of the confusions/concerns he may have.
@ Roland: Good thought on the calculator. But we really cannot publish such a calculator because of the legal restrictions. EULA is the only document that is supposed to describe licensing to customers with all the legalese.
@Shawn #140
Ah, Ya, I got ya. And as I review more I am starting to have some other concerns that I am waiting to hear back on. Most of the concerns I have heard on this list I took as being CF2016 will cost more then CF11. However I have thought that would not be the case.
@Shawn #141 I agree they have not helped the cost of entry to use Adobe CF2016 vs previous versions. (At least from what I am seeing) And as I stated before There is one part of the CF11 agreement vs the CF2016 agreement that looks to not be included which might cause a very large cost increase to some clients. Again I am waiting to hear back so it might not be an issue depending on interpretation.
I do not know if Adobe puts the Pending EULA out to people in the community. I am guessing NOT. But I kind of wish they did because it seems like each time they make a bunch of changes to address a previous issue they fix that one part but then break it in other ways that they didn’t necessarily mean to do. I know this stuff is complicated and probably the people making it are more Lawyers then technical people.
Anyways. Look forward to seeing how this goes.
I wasn’t actually talking about this release as being more costly than any other. If the licensing is more favorable that is good, and a positive step forward.
It just ties back to my original point about CF being at a disadvantage to other languages primarily because of its cost. A cost you will not incur starting a project with RoR, Node, or PHP.
And the new release does nothing to change that fact.
That’s really the ultimate issue as I see it that hampers (and has always historically hampered) mass adoption of ColdFusion.
@shawn #134
Yeah. I feel similar. We have a project on deck where the cost per core isn’t even close to where we need to be to make it work with CF. I have a call with Adobe to address these concerns. Hopefully something comes out of it where we can make it work with CF.
@charlie I already have stated that my older posts did not phrase my concerns properly. I’m not as confused as you think I am on the licensing. Yet you keep trying to bring it up over and over again. I know I’m usually pretty wordy like you are. We both care about this product. But for now I’m saving my thoughts on license terms for the upcoming call.
@Mark the 8 core license has always worked for us before, but that is due to the nature of the projects we do. The upcoming one is of a different nature, and wouldn’t work under the per core cost. That is my real concern. No minor language adjustments of the EULA here or there would fix that. I do have an idea of something that would fix that and be fair to CF users and Adobe. I’ll let Rakshith decide if he wants to communicate what I propose.
@Adobe
The EULA/Cost issue that people keep mentioning is also an easy thing to solve. Have one of your devs write a cost calculator. Seriously – a day or two of effort on your side would remove the uncertainty and unease around how to properly license the product. Write a simple web page where people can input their web server specifications, and you output the number and cost of licenses needed.
Don’t forget to include the option to specify VM vs bare metal.
@Shawn #134 and @Charlie #137
The cost actually seems it might be actually the same when it comes to Enterprise. I don’t have the CF 11 EULA up right now and I need to head out. But If I recall in CF 11 EULA a CPU is defined as 4 cores. And you get 2 CPU’s in the Ent license. so 8 Cores. And in CF2016 you get 8 cores. So is the same.
I need to review standard but I am not sure those are the same now. I will have to relook later.
One thing that I have some inquires about that might make a Huge difference. But at this time I don’t feel like getting into it as it might not matter depending on what some of the meaning is behind some of the definitions that I can see could mean different things. Depending on the outcome of this I can see “it” being a Major cost added to Enterprise clients depending on how they deploy.
Agreed CF lover. CF is my full time gig and I also do some side work in CF. Not only do I have the CF battle at work but one of my side gigs is also considering moving away from CF because they have the perception that it is going away and I really think that the lack of marketing is hurting us in that aspect. That whole CF is going away rumor has been floating around for years but it is getting tiresome to have to fight it all the time. So I have to go have a meeting with this side job next Friday to present the CF roadmap and assure them that CF is going to be around for the future.
The one thing I still haven’t seen addressed in this thread, by Rakshith or someone with Adobe, is the prohibitive cost of licensing.
Several examples of this have been posted (the Australian cost of upgrading is mind-boggling, for instance) and it’s hard to view it as anything other than a cash grab.
And those saying it’s cheap, because developer salaries are assuming that everyone works for a big company in which dropping $10k is nothing to sneeze at.
But a lot of startups, the companies that now dominate the internet, started with one guy hosting a website in his dorm room.
That poor college student would NOT even consider paying for a CF license. Not with so many other viable alternatives.
So it would be a non-starter. They’d choose some other technology.
Pricing per-core is asinine.
Charlie,
I have absolutely nothing but the deepest of respect and admiration for you and your dedication to CF and the CF team. I didn’t mean to imply that you had ceased to be active at all – I meant to pay compliment to the fact that you are still actively contributing. I meant to pay compliment to your visibility and contributions to the ColdFusion community by including you in the list of other great advocates. I’m advocating for MORE of you, and I’m advocating that Adobe spend that marketing budget on promoting or hiring people with your enthusiasm and dedication.
My reaction was entirely because the type of complaints that were being raised resonnate with my own concerns, and I feel that people were being misunderstood pureley becuase of differing definitions of what “marketing” means. I meant to clarify that the specific type of “marketing” that was being asked for may be different than what was being heard, and that by a simple clarification, the discussion takes a whole different tack.
(“community building” = “marketing”) when it comes to a programming language, is the heart of my argument.
If I were Adobe, I’d be trying to get you on my payroll, and tasking you with finding 5 other people like you to build the community, be the voice of advocacy, and provide the transparency into the CF process that we clearly want.
It’s a great product. It needs a voice.
– I’m thrilled that Akami is out of the picture. That is indeed great!
Charlie and Adobe:
Marketing isn’t just about spending money on ad campaigns, and I think that is the source of the dissonance in the discussion here. Sean C hit it right on the head – the open source COMMUNITY around CF is pretty much non-existant, and what does exist is not well supported or publicized.
There are things that can be done that don’t involve magazine ads and superbowl commercials, and it is disingenuous to the community and to the people here asking for more marketing to reduce our argument to that level of ridiculousness. There is a valid complaint being made, even if you don’t like the terminology being used.
Instead of “Marketing”, what everyone is really asking for is “community building”. We aren’t asking for Adobe to spend money on ad campaigns – we just want to see more effort put into rebuilding the community.
There are easy things to do here:
– Write actually relevant technical articles, and publish (link) them in visible places like /r/programming, /r/coldfusion, and other places with social media exposure. Use those articles to get a discussion going about how CF solves difficult problems in easy ways by actually showing us. The quality of technical articles coming out from the CF team just isn’t where it needs to be to attract any attention. They are written for existing customers, not to a more general audience. Show the rest of the world how CF solves problems that are hard to solve in other languages. And please – have someone proofread the code first – do not let the quality of code in the articles be as bad (and incorrect) as some of the code in the documentation.
– Provide more transparency into the bug and feature request processes. I can’t tell you how frustrating the current bug tracker is. I have zero idea how the Adobe team prioritizes bugs and features, and no idea where their heads are at, and no idea how long it will take to get a response when I file a bug. The CF team needs to share how its process works, and allow the CF community a better view into that process. The last time I called Adobe support to try to pay to get a bug fixed made me vow to never try again. (I got the bug fixed, for the record, and the engineer was wonderful, but trying to figure out how to get a hold of them was innanely dificult and frustrating).
– Rebuild the army of evangelists. The community around CF took a HUGE hit when Ben Forta, Sean Corfield, Ray Camden, Ben Nadel, and the many other wonderful evangelists (including you, Charlie – I still appreciate the effort you make) stopped writing about CF and/or moved on to other technologies. Get your engineers involved if you have to, but find a way to have real evnagelists again, writing real code that solves real problems and showing people the process behind it. Have a frequent and steady stream of blog posts, articles, technotes, whitepapers, or whatever you want to call them, and get some visibility behind them. Use experts – no softball articles. Show real code solving real-world, difficult problems. Pay these people if you have to – that’s a good investment of a marketing budget.
– Improve the forums. They are hard to navigate, slow, and it is frequently hard to search for relevant information. I also feel like Adobe should spend more time participating in the forums, and should do so very visibly when they do. Charlie and Adam and a few other people should be hailed as heroes for their efforts to keep the forums alive and relevant. But there are TONS of more advanced questions posted that simply don’t get answered. Get a CF engineer on those forums answering those hard questions, and doing so quickly. Turn some of those advanced questions and more innteresting topics into articles, whitepapers, etc, as mentioned above. It wouldn’t hurt to consider easier-to-use forums software with a lower barrier to entry.
– OFFTOPIC: Get rid of Akami download manager. It makes people nervous installing a third-party plugin to download your product, and has been a resoundingly hated change. At least provide a direct dowload option that works in addition to Akami if you must keep it.
– YOUR PRIMMARY COMMMUNICATION CHANNEL SHOULD NOT BE THIS BLOG. This is a horrible format for disseminating the type of information that it is used for. There are so many things that can ONLY be found on this blog that should be linked and documented in other places. Update information, security notices, download links to wsconfig updates …. those belong on your product page, and need to be more visible.
– Better release notes for updates, security postings, etc. We need more information. “We fixed a security hole” is not information, and gives no one confidence. After a reasonable period, you need to start disclosing what fixes you have made and how they directly impact production code.
– When I click “Learn and Support” on the ColdFusion product page, it takes me to a page trying to sell me CreativeCloud for the first 80% of the page. It is nigh on impossible to find relevant CF content, even if you go through coldfusion.com, and what little there is is buried – you literally do not see it unless you scroll. This page should be a hub for links to forums, documentation, discussion groups, and it should look like it is actively maintained. Even if you manage to find the link to the CF Devnet site, the content there is from 2014!!!! Show some feeds fromm the forums there. Show some links to the reddit commmentary on the articles you are posting there. Is there a CF twitter? I don’t use it, but it seems to be the thing for some people. Low effort to do either way.
– Listen to people when you do a beta. I know you must be listening to someone, but I can’t imagine it is the public-facing CF community. This goes back to transparency in your process. How did you arrive at the features you did – who aksed for them (or who paid for them)? Explain the strategic reasons for the decisions you have made in your product direction.
– Embrace the acctual Open Source community that remains. Throw them some support, or at least more recognition. Have your own engineers contribute and provide guidance on best practices, and actually improve the code! If you want to foster an open source community, you need to pu more skin in the game.
– Open source the easy stuff. I get that you can’t just open up the whole codebase, but open up the parts that you don’t consider competitive advantages. Allow us visibility so that we can verify assumptions about how the product works. Allow us to perform true security analysis, at the source level. Heck – some of us would love to help fix bugs in the product for you for free if we had the chance!!!
– Embrace the other CF engines – even the free ones. Show the world that there is enough interest in ColdFusion that there are other active implementations of the technology. That won’t cannibalize your sales. Your enterprise customers, myself included, will always be loyal. Showing that there is active commpetition in the CF product doesn’t weaken your position – it shows that there are alternatives, and there isn’t a risk of getting stuck with a single supplier. It shows that you are willing to compete on value and on features, and allows you to provide justification for the cost by showing how you differentiate. This means treating competing implementations as “frenemies”, and maybe even supporting their implementations in your own tooling.
The point is that “Marketing” doesn’t mean ads and commercials, and doesn’t mean you need to create old-school certifications. The type of marketing you need to do is image-based marketing. Show the existing community and the programming world at large how good the product is. Show them the amazing features that are baked in that make our lives simple. Give those of us that advocate for CF in our budgets a visible and vibrant and active community to point to to allay the fears of the people who sign off on our budgets. Give us the tools to help on-board the programmers we are hiring that have not been explsed to CF yet.
I too am a 20 year clubber, for the record. I still have my copy of the original documentation that I keep as a trophy of sorts. I don’t come to complain because I think you guys are incompetant. I come to complain because I want to see you be MORE succcessful, and because I passionately want to see the product expand its base.
If you want to dismiss all of the calls in this thread as “whining”, that’s fine. Enjoy the status quo, and keep-on-keeping-on or whatever… OR – read between the lines a bit, and realize that the whining you are hearing is comming directly from your most loyal and passionate users, and we don’t feel like our needs are bing met, nor our voices heard. That’s a problem whether you want to call it one or not, and it’s a problem whether it is a real one, or one of perception.
@Comment 79 and Lack of Marketing.
What these users are really saying, the adoption rate is low, the migration away is high and the number of opportunities is diminished. It is getting harder to eat with Coldfusion, so developer become further between and thus, migration away increases as well. This *looks* like a death spiral.
For more evidence watch http://www.tiobe.com /// index of programming languages. CFML is on and off the list for months at a time. People are afraid they will be left with skills that are not marketable.
Sadly, calling CF a Polygot language for the JVM, while technically correct, does not ring the $$Bells of recruiters.
-gary
@Raghuram #48 – For scanning a ColdFusion server for Lockdown, checkout http://hackmycf.com/ (it is a commercial service, built by my company).
@ Henry: I can clarify right now that CF being a part of creative cloud will not happen. I too like CF 2016 more than the release. But that is how we are supposed to call it as a policy.
@ David: Thanks for those encouraging words. You are absolutely right about not being able to please everyone.
@ Makhan: Interesting points. We are working on tutorials specifically this year.
@ Travis: We have already made a significant stride in addressing the number of open bugs out there. We will continue doing the same. Do you think just a release focused on language enhancements is enough to please everyone? There will many who will come back to say how do I convince my boss to pay for the upgrade for a bunch of language enhancements? I agree improving the language is important. But it will continue to be one focus area of the product and will not define a new version by itself.
@ Raghuram: Thank you! The security analyzer does others that you have mentioned except the check for lockdown implementation.
@ Peter Tilbrook: Thank you! Amazing to know that you too are a 20 year veteran.
@ Mike: The CF Business team is putting in a lot of effort to promote user groups. Please reach out to kishore@adobe.com for any help regarding user groups.
@ Denard: Thanks! And yes, as Charlie suggested you will us starting a new thread to discuss marketing efforts.
@ Aaron: You will see a performance whitepaper posted soon to back the claim.
@Shawn: As you probably already know, EULA is now available on adobe.com – http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/ColdFusion-2016.pdf
@ John: Thanks! You will hear from Kishore in another post.
@ Aaron: I have made the change to indicate API manager is a part of CF Enterprise. Thanks for pointing out.
@ Lakshmi: Kishore is planning to start another thread to discuss marketing.
@ Charles: We realize perception is the issue. We are driving the message on continued investment in ColdFusion in 1:1 conversations and webinars with our customers.
@ ms: The CF Gov Summit is yet to happen. It will happen on the 9th of March, 2016.
@ Shawn: There has been no specific change in 2016 EULA that will increase the licenses by 5 times. I realize you have been a strong proponent for CF. I have dropped you a note for a discussion about this and resolve the confusion you may have.
@ Ryan: Kishore will start another thread about marketing.
@ Lakshmi: You are right. The roadmap will be updated.
@ Shawn: I don’t why you think I was dodging licensing questions. I have dropped you a note on your email already to resolve the confusion. My previous comment was only a response till comment # 33. I had not even seen your comment yet.
@ Web dev: Thanks!
@ HarryL Thanks for posting the link.
@ Lola: The issue with the Akamai installer has now been resolved.
@ TA: I acknowledge the reason why you moved away from CF. Doesn’t the commercially supported Zend PHP server cost as well?
@ Mark: Thanks. I will make sure API Manager’s availability with Enterprise is more clearly documented.
@ Martin: Thanks a lot!
Adobe ColdFusion is really awesome for rich web apps dev
we are running intranet & internet apps in cf , we are happy with CF ( easy to manage,maintain apps& very flexible )
thanks for frequent release .. thanks CF team
happy 20th birthday CF
@Dawes
—-If you need more than that as infrastructure, you’ve probably got 5+ developers on staff costing ~500k, so 10-30k isn’t even a drop in the ocean for the benefits you get.—
Nope. Until a couple of weeks ago I was the only developer here (for years) and I’m responsible for everything “web” related including off the shelf products, engagement with contractors to build solutions as well as all in house development. I also do support for all these systems. My point being that just because someone needs 5, 10 etc. servers it doesn’t mean there is a huge team or that they have the budget to cover a massive licence bill. Nor does it mean the applications or infrastructure are poorly designed. We have had a number of independent audits done over the last couple of years and our environments are built as per the recommendations.
With regards to your other point about buying from the US. I would if we could but everything needs to be done via purchase orders and we have to prove that the product/service can’t be provided locally. If that wasn’t the case, absolutely 100% agree – Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Google etc. can all go get stuffed with their Australia tax. And before anyone says these companies aren’t jacking up the price for Australia (and NZ&UK) – that is exactly what the Government enquiry found. Microsoft were the only ones that were up front and honest about it (for what that’s worth).
@shawn… It’s not taxes, it’s 40% more (our tax is 10% and adobe is one of the companies who DOESNT pay their tax in Australia and is being hunted down by the AU govt) The Australian govt is also doing an enquiry because it thinks Adobe’s practices are illegal. The issue isn’t about avoiding tax, it’s about avoiding Adobe’s tax (30+% in uk and au) when downloading the product from the SAME SERVER.
So I side with the govt and will leave my comment as there is no law that says I can’t buy software in the USA if I don’t live there.
It’s actually restriction of trade in Australia to say I can’t buy software from the USA, when I live here. So Adobe can tell me no, and i’ll tell them their acting illegally.
@Shawn Comment 118
Ahh, I got you shawn, With that many cores, (Which Intel does have up to 24 core per single Processor.) I did not even think you might have been trying to reference the total speed aspect. I was thinking more along the lines of if you really have a server like that.
Makes since thank you for clarifying.
@Mark like I said in #114 I didn’t frame that correctly and use of socket was out of place. The point I was trying to get at is you can have more than 8 cores via some of the other options which are no longer available. Such as the 16Ghz option with a lower power processor. You are correct 40 wouldn’t satisfy the EULA as I don’t think such a low MHz processor exists to be able to squeeze 40 cores under 16 Ghz. I just used the number for dramatic effect. I’m just staying there are scenarios where someone under CF11 couldn’t upgrade to CF2016 1 to 1. I just wished I picked a right one in my example 🙂
@Rakshith
Great to see the new version out of the door and in the wild – though still has some rough edges on it.
However, really disappointed after spending time reading the documentation for the API Manager to only later discover it is an Enterprise only feature. This needs to be made a lot clearer in the documentation. All I ended up finding was a brief one line mention in the installation instructions.
On the topic of Standard vs. Enterprise and specifically the pricing model – who do we need to flog in Adobe for this (and the backwards EULA changes)?
We currently run 6 x CF Standard servers (all are VM’s running across different physical machines with various CPU/core counts). I looked into upgrading our new CF12 [*See note below] Standard licences to Enterprise however you have to be kidding with those prices. I’m in Australia and the prices are:
A new Enterprise ColdFusion 12 is $11,899 each (approx. $ 8,512 USD)
Upgrade from a brand new ColdFusion 12 Standard licence to Enterprise 12 is $10,639 each (approx. $7,610)
So before I even look at how many licences are required per server (due to core/socket count) I’m already looking at a starting price of $71,394! I suspect at the end of the day we would be looking at something in the area of at least a $1/4 million dollars to cover it legally. No chance.
I don’t see us as being over the top with our licence count. We have 3 servers to handle all internal websites and 3 servers to handle our external websites (each environment is an NLB cluster). In each environment there are 2 production serves (more for redundancy rather than heavy traffic). The third server is often used for UAT and development work however it is also a part of the cluster and can be brought into cluster in the event that one of the other servers has a problem (hence why it needs a full licence).
If the high cost of the Enterprise licences is because of included third party products – why not make the components an optional cost that can be added/removed from ColdFusion? E.g. option to buy Standard but add in multiple threaded Exchange integration. If you need lots/all of the add-on components than you buy Enterprise.
[*] I’ll call it CF12 while ever Adobe continue to call it ColdFusion 12 on the purchasing page ?. Add CF12 to the shopping cart and select Upgrade for the “I want to buy” question and in the list CF 2016 is listed as ColdFusion 12.
I can’t believe anyone would believe the licence is expensive….
How much does a developer get paid? How much is a Microsoft MSDN subscription? How much is a Jetbrains subscription?
Geez, it’s cheap for what it does. If you can’t afford US$1,499 (749 upgrade) for standard (anyone can afford that).
If you cant afford multiple enterprise servers, get multiple standard licences and ONE enterprise licence and rework your code
OR get Lucee for your standard servers, and buy ONE enterprise licence $8499 (4,249 upgrade)
If you need more than that as infrastructure, you’ve probably got 5+ developers on staff costing ~500k, so 10-30k isn’t even a drop in the ocean for the benefits you get.
For commercial software THIS IS DIRT CHEAP.
Note for AU and Uk customers : (MASSIVE DISCOUNT)
Also if you’re in the UK or Australia, make sure you buy your licence as a US person from the USA store. Otherwise you’ll get slugged an extra 40% for no reason. (we call it the Australia tax)… just sign up for a new account using a usa proxy, pick an address (use google or get a post redirection box if you want the product, or find a trustworthy CFUG member in the USA and get them to send you the serial9s) when they receive them)
Hit me up on slack (dawesi) if you need more information or a trustworthy person.
@Shawn Comment 113
The word “Sockets” Does NOT appear in the EULA. I think you are referring to this however for your justification of your example?
3.1.1 Adobe grants Licensee a license to install and use the Production Software on a per-CPU basis as
provided herein or in a separate writing. For each Computer on which Production Software is installed, the
minimum number of Production Software licenses that are required may not be less than the total number
of CPUs on the Computer. For example if a Computer has four (4) CPUs and the Production Software license
is for two (2) CPUs, Licensee must obtain 2 Production Software licenses for such Computer.
If so this is not Per socket it is per “CPU” which as I stated in comment 112 has a definition which IMHO means you would need 5 licenses for CF 11 with a 40 Core System.
If you are referring to something else in the EULA or some other aspects that makes you think I am wrong. Please share as I have the text in the EULA to show you are correct. I feel my current evidence is fairly strong as it is and I do not see anything at this time that would change what I feel would have been the correct licensing.
Please note I am not trying to justify what adobe charges or any of that. Simple pointing out that I think your take on the CF 11 EULA might be in error.
and 40 was probably a bad example. Not even sure if that exists yet. Whole point is we had options before. Now we have none. I spent a lot of time and effort with Rakshith in person, over email, and on forums to get those options in there. Very disappointed they only lasted one version.
@Shawn Comment 91,99
I believe you are incorrect with the number of license you need for CF 11 for a 2 sockets/40 Core server.
CPU in the CF 11 Eula is defined as:
1.4 “CPU” is each distinct central processing unit (physical) within the Computer, capable of independently
manipulating and operating the Software. Each CPU may contain one or multiple processing cores. The total
number of cores operating the Software in the Computer may not exceed the licensed quantity, and will be
the greater of (a) the exact number of cores operating the Software in the case when Licensee configures the
Computer (using a reliable and verifiable means of hardware or software partitioning) such that the total
number of CPU cores that actually operate the Software is less than the total number of cores on that
Computer; or (b) the sum of all the cores contained in every pCPU on the Computer. The total number of
CPUs in a Computer will then be calculated by dividing the total number of cores operating the Software by
4, rounded up to the next whole number in case the quotient of the division by 4 is not an integer. For
example, if the total number of cores operating the Software is 12, then the total number of CPUs equals 3; if
the total number of cores operating the Software is 14, then the total number of CPUs equals 4.
So basically, Each CPU is = to 4 cores.
So you would need 10 CPU’s count or 5 Licenses of CF 11.
“We very well understand why some of the customers are moving away from ColdFusion. It has got nothing to do with the product as such but the negative perception out there.”
That’s an assumption not in evidence. I can provide a counter-example: I used CF from 1.0 through MX, and was an enthusiastic member of Team Allaire.
I moved away from CF because of the product, not the negative perception out there, and not because of Adobe. I don’t miss it – but I would still have picked it over PHP before I found out how freaking much it costs these days.
As I stated above (see my first comment), I’m an OS X user, not a Windows user. So, unfortunately, I’m not able to do as you suggested, Jim. And in any case, I did double-check the cache folder but there’s nothing there. Thank you, though!
You can find the file download on Windows 7+ at this path: C:Users[username]AppDataLocalAkamaiCachetrials3.adobe.comadobeproductscstd12win64
Filename is: ColdFusion_2016_WWEJ_win64.exe
When I searched the C: drive it couldn’t find the downloaded file. I had to click into the C:UsersjpickeringAppDataLocal folder for search to find it.
Good Luck.
What on earth is Akamai Installer? I’m trying to get it to install the OS X version. It doesn’t seem to be running. There seems to be an “access denied” problem, but I’m not seeing anything as to how to get it fixed. That window has disappeared, so I can’t even go back to it to see what the problem is. When it is all but impossible to install the free version . . .
EULA: http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/ColdFusion-2016.pdf
See 3.1.1 and 3.1.2
“Reach out to me straight away if you know of any customers who are planning to move away”
@Rakshith you can start right here by answering the question on licensing, not dodging it like you just did.
@lakshmi I might be able to produce one for you, but don’t be surprised if its got a headstone and daisies.
Please update ColdFusion Road map ..its seems path changed or not available
I found too many place road map link to below path
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/assets/content/roadmap/ColdFusionRoadMap.pdf
please update in same path
My response so far till comment #33
@Arthur @milan: Thank you!
@Mathew: We do have dedicated marketing team working on an exclusive budget to promote CF. CFSummit, supporting CF user groups, sponsoring various conferences, promoting CF in education – all of this is managed by the dedicated marketing team. Please remember that a company like Adobe would have its marketing priorities different for different products based on the business oppourtunities availalbe. Not every product can be treated the same way from a marketing perspective.
@Lance: There are various press releases going out as a part of launch activity. We will also have an analyst(Forrester, Gartner etc) breifing soon. We are not banking on only the dev community to spread the word. Thanks a lot for all the support!
@Charlie: Thanks for posting those additional details about the new features. As always, you are awesome and the ColdFusion team at Adobe is proud to be associated with you.
@Greg: We very well understand why some of the customers are moving away from ColdFusion. It has got nothing to do with the product as such but the negative perception out there. Over the last three years we have been 1:1 conversations with our customers to let them know our current and future investments in ColdFusion via a roadmap discussion. If you are aware of any customer who is planning to move away from CF, please let us know. We will reach out to them directly and scheudle these roadmap conversations. These conversations have always helped clear the negative perception.
The other reason why some other customers are moving away is because of the dearth of CF developers. We started the education initiative – a free semester long web application development course. We have had some success from it but there has been almost zero support from the community to help promote the curriculum.
We have been having the Adpobe ColdFusion Summit for the last three years – it is clesarly the largest CF conference with more than 500 attendees. This event is completly run by Adobe.
Reach out to me straight away if you know of any customers who are planning to move away – rakshith@adobe.com I will make sure to have a 1:1 conversation with them to debunk the myths they may have around ColdFusion.
@bibin: Thanks a lot. You soon see a lot of articles and tutorials that will be published around the new feartures.
@Pete: Thanks for pitching in! Excellent points.
@Mike: Thanks. What and how do you want us to re-evaluate pricing or marketing? Let us know.
@Lee: Thanks for your support. We do have a dedicated marketing team focused on promoting CF. I have responded to Mathew about the marketing initiatives.
@Dana: There are quite a bit of language enhancements in this release. You will see a devnet article that talks exclusively about all the improvements that have been made.
These are the very same vulnerabilities that CF code/websites that are most vulnerable to. what else do you think we should have called it? No security analyzer can give any developer 100% confidence – it only does a best effort in trying to identify potential vulnerabilities.
@Travis: Documentation needs work. We are aware of it and the documentation is working on taking steps this year to improve it.
Travis, yes a vast amount of bugs have been fixed this version. And yes, not every single bug can be fixed as some were reported later in the cycle. We will fixing these bugs in the updates. If you are facing an issue that is yet to be fixed, please let us know or make your voice heard by voting on the bug.
With this release we have had focus on security, performance, PDF improvements, language improvements, CLI and the new focus on API management. When we plan for a product version it is impossible for us to focus on just one single area, say language, and expect every stakeholder in the organization to upgrade just becuase of language features.
You will find CF in multiple press releases from Adobe. But you may not find the news on the home page of Adobe. Please understand that Adobe has hundreds of products and products that get the maximum focus are the ones where Adobe has maximum business interests.
I agreed with #90,
Adobe should rethink about price of ColdFusion at least standard edition
should be free or give some reduction (marketing tricks try to spread it ) … KISHORE should answer this all questions.
whats going on there kishore ??
Everyone has their price point where they lose interest. Even if CF was $1, some would complain. You never get 100% penetration without it being free. We weren’t one of them we understood certain features of CF require a cost. However being a 2 socket/36 core machine on CF11 cost 1 license and CF12 for the same machine costs 5 licenses, is ridiculous. If we tried to hit our customers with a 500% increase, not only would we not have any customers, but they be offended at the notion we ever tried. For some reason Adobe doesn’t think this applies to its customers. Well mark us down as 1 reality check.
“Forgot about FW/1. I guess I was thinking back to around 2010 when we started looking for a new framework to replace FuseBox. ColdBox was pretty much the only one” — Yeah, ColdBox was launched in 2006, Fusebox stopped being updated in 2008, FW/1 had its 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 releases in 2010. cfWheels had its 1.0 in late 2009, with 1.1 in late 2010.
Model-Glue was going through its big 3.0 rewrite in 2009 (and stalled before 3.2 hit gold — which took four more years). Mach-II had also begun its stall by that time (1.6 in early 2009, then 1.8 in early 2010, 1.8.1 in late 2010, and 2.0 never quite made it — and officially sunsetted in 2013). Mach-II “died” because the dev team moved on to other tech. In some ways you can say the same of Model-Glue.
FW/1 is still actively maintained (with 4.0 close to alpha right now and 4.5 and 5.0 planned) even tho’ I’ve moved on to other tech — but I’ve been doing FOSS development for over 20 years in various languages so expect continuity as long as there are plenty of FW/1 users! 🙂
@Sean Forgot about FW/1. I guess I was thinking back to around 2010 when we started looking for a new framework to replace FuseBox. ColdBox was pretty much the only one that looks like it’s going somewhere (yeah, that’s right, a 15yo language only has one viable framework to choose from! The upside was that it wasn’t a hard decision at all lol). Both CFWheels and Fw/1 were still in their infancy I believe.
“The biggest reason for this is the pitiful level of contribution by the _COMMUNITY_ to open source projects in general.”
My guess is it’s because most developers don’t feel like they get enough support from the community in the first place. Most people only give back for free after they’ve received enough free things to make them grateful enough to actively give back. That’s just human nature. Another reason could be that most people who would’ve contributed don’t feel it’s worth their time because of the small community size and could’ve chosen to spend their precious time contributing, if they’re multi-lingual, to other livelier, larger communities (like PHP) so that they help much more people. In other words, it’s a catch-22 situation. The smaller the size of the community, the less people feel like it’s worth contributing.
I’m actually more hung up on the idea that there IS a cost. One reason I loved Railo/Lucee.
Developers will evangelize a language they know, that they love, and that they enjoy working with. But with CF, there’s an extra complication to evangelization that none of the competing languages have to deal with: convincing your employer to pay for it.
I’ve tried to sell ColdFusion to an employer before, who was just establishing a new web presence. We had an old version of ColdFusion, ColdFusion 7, and the license was paid for it on the one server it was running on. It was an extremely hard sell to get them to even upgrade to ColdFusion 8, and when CF9 came out a few months later (along with attendant upgrade costs), I was told “No. The code we’ve got works, we have no reason to upgrade. Besides, the licensing costs are ridiculous.” I’ll bet this happens a lot.
I tried selling some of the new features, but it was to no avail. Few are the managers who want to commit a company to a long-term licensing investment year after year, when there are viable alternatives.
So…
So now, we have:
1) Developers who can’t host a personal website on Adobe CF that they control without paying $700+
2) An incentive against upgrading, in terms of license cost.
3) A further disincentive in the form of a punitive pricing model in installing CF on multiple servers, due to ever-escalating licensing costs, thus encouraging people to save money by overloading servers (contributing to a ‘coldfusion is slow’ mentality)
4) Tiers within the language, encouraging users to pay for an Enterprise license, usually to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.
Railo/Lucee is awesome, and I fully support those efforts. However, the conversation for Railo/Lucee with an employer is equally difficult.
“Hey, we should use Lucee instead.”
“What’s that?”
“Open source CFML.”
“Ahh. Who’s using it in production?”
End of discussion.
All I’ll observe in response is that CFML FOSS contributions are much, much higher as a percentage amongst the Railo/Lucee community because those folks are less tied to the receive-only mindset that grows up around commercial software.
In other words, my thesis is not about the _size_ of the license fees but due to the fact that it’s a commercial product in the first place.
So I suspect we largely agree but you’re getting hung up on the actual cost rather than that there _is_ a cost?
You know I love you, Sean, but the license costs are literally a non-starter.
If you want to start programming something, and host it yourself, you learn PHP and you host it yourself. The costs are your time, effort, and the cost of hosting a webserver. That’s it.
But if you want to host a CF server anywhere, for personal use or otherwise, you’d best be prepared to pay out of pocket for it.
Think of it like this: With Patreon, they say that about 2% of your audience will actually take the step to pay money to you. 98% of your audience will happily consume your content for free, but it is only a tiny fraction of your audience who will take the step forward to put forward effort or money to support you.
The same level of engagement comes with most things, it seems. Most are happy to ignore, or to just prioritize other things in their life, but you’ll find that committed 2% who want to contribute.
I’d suggest there’s a similar level of participation around open source. Of the people I work with, perhaps 4 or 5 of them contribute to open source projects on a regular basis.
The rest of them spend their development time in-house doing work for the company, and then on their free time they go and play with their kids or watch movies or relax, or whatever.
It’s not their job to make code for the rest of the community. If the community was large enough, it would happen anyway just by virtue of simple numbers.
CF developers stopped contributing, I think, because their employers kept switching them off of CF to other languages, and as such the number of active CF developers went down, thus further diminishing that 2%.
In other words, when you have a pool of, say, 400,000 developers working with a language, 2% of those (8,000) contributing to open source projects is a sizable number.
When you have 4,000 developers, 2% is 80.
And you can lay most of this, the death of programmers for ColdFusion nowadays, at the feet of the barrier to entry with ColdFusion, a barrier that doesn’t exist with any of the languages which are its competitors.
“Case in point, there are literally dozens of viable, actively maintained frameworks out there for PHP, whereas you only have about 2 for CF at the moment.” — to be fair, there’s really three: ColdBox, FW/1, and cfWheels, in terms of MVC.
For DI/IoC/AOP you have WireBox and DI/1 / AOP/1 (I assume cfWheels has its own internal version).
For testing you really only have TestBox these days (it’s awesome, and it has an MXUnit-compatibility mode to aid with transition).
But, yes, CFML is littered with unmaintained frameworks now (Fusebox, Model-Glue, Mach-II, ColdSpring, MXUnit, Reactor, Transfer** — those are the biggest names that have all fallen by the wayside — but there have been many others that never really achieved any traction). **Technically Transfer is still being maintained but it was taken over by one of the last really active users of the framework.
The biggest reason for this is the pitiful level of contribution by the _COMMUNITY_ to open source projects in general. It’s not specifically the “inhibitive licensing costs” but rather the overall mentality of a community that has grown up around a paid product and expects to receive (possibly for a fee) but never to give back — since that’s not how you interact with a commercial product provider. At one time, the only extensions available for CF were paid and closed source — which matched the mentality of the product’s community.
To date we’ve had three serious attempts at forging open source “foundations” and trying to get the community to be more active. All three have failed due to lack of participation by the community. We can’t blame Adobe for that. We can’t blame Adobe for the lack of actively maintained frameworks, nor for the dearth of (free) open source libraries and utilities.
You can complain all you want about Adobe’s lack of marketing (and, yes, their marketing of CF is pitiful) but that’s not the _cause_ of most of the troubles being aired here. You can certainly lay _some_ of the blame on license fees but at the same time, many of you here are saying how wonderful CFML is and what a great language it is, so you’re not put off by the commercial aspect.
What has killed CFML is the community’s lack of engagement in open source. That’s why there’s no WordPress or Joomla or whatever for CFML. There are a handful of successful _products_ built with CFML, and nearly all of those are primarily based on free open source CFML engines. Companies are moving away from CFML because the community — and the overall ecosystem it has failed to create — has been going downhill for the last seven years.
@Shawn Agree 100 percent!!
The greatest weakness of CF is its puny-sized community, which is shrinking by the day, and the sole reason for this is it’s inhibitive licensing costs.
The community is so small now it’s usually a mission trying to find any actively maintained third party components/modules/libraries for CF, even if you’re willing to pay for it. Even if you eventually managed to find something, you usually only have one or two viable options to pick from.
Case in point, there are literally dozens of viable, actively maintained frameworks out there for PHP, whereas you only have about 2 for CF at the moment.
Marketing has nothing to do with it. EVERYONE knows what a Ferrari is, but you’d still struggle to see anyone driving them. Not the best analogy I know, cause CF is hardly a Ferrari comparing to other languages.
Yeah Charlie, I can see why you didn’t want to jump on that grenade so allow me.
So basically folks Adobe went back to the old CF 10 license model that requires excessive purchases of CF licenses on a single machine. So if you go out and buy your own server at say 2 sockets/40 cores which is pretty common these days, they want you to purchase 5 CF Ent. licenses. We own our own servers and many of our customers do as well. This new license model is not even remotely cost effective for us.
As a result we will be begin moving to another language ASAP and re-coding all of our new stuff on deck. We’ll move all of our customers off CF by CF11’s end of life.
I just want to say I think it is UNFAIR to the CF community that we have to take on excessive license burdens to effectively cover up for the AWFUL marketing job at Adobe. They squeeze and squeeze the community until there will be nobody left, while the same people making the same mistakes keep their jobs.
I’m not even going to leave the door open that we’ll be back if its fixed in CF13 as the trust is gone. The first time you pulled this and fixed it in CF11, I overlooked it as you guys didn’t know. This time around you knew exactly what people thought and you did it anyway. I really don’t care about Adobe’s marketing failures or its absence of a central community because I won’t be apart of it anymore.
Languages should be free.
If you want to know why PHP is used more than ColdFusion, why Node and Ruby despite their newness have eclipsed ColdFusion in terms of user base, that’s why.
.NET and PHP have the added advantage of being almost included by default and easy to set up with IIS/Apache respectively.
If a startup client is choosing what technology they’ll be on for several years, will they go with something that requires a $5k license (or however much it is now) just to use the application server, and install licenses for multiple machines in production?
Or will they go with a language that has a thriving customer list, an excessive number of competent developers skilled in the language, which can be installed on any number of servers for zero licensing?
You can market CF all you want. That’s really not the issue.
The issue is that ColdFusion, like all languages it’s trying to compete with, should be FREE. Ideally, it would also be open-sourced, or at least have an open standard.
Until then, it will never, ever achieve parity with those other languages.
Just the simple facts of the matter. I love ColdFusion, but it’s not an easy sell at all, and a big reason for that is that it’s lost momentum over the years as so many free languages have proved to be viable (and in some cases superior) alternatives.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
You need to go to “Upgrade Now” option in the web link: http://www.adobe.com/au/products/coldfusion-builder.html and click on “Edit” option to upgrade.
Direct CF 2016 Windows 64-bit download minus Akamia:
ftp://cust-dl:$Poyr8Rfed@sjftp.adobe.com/ColdFusionInstallers/CF2016/ColdFusion_2016_WWEJ_win64.exe
Thanks Adobe.
I have to agree with Charles (#79) as I too work with the feds a lot and it is a constant struggle to get them to let us to continue to develop in ColdFusion. Just like Charles says, I hear it ALL THE TIME from the higher ups in a couple of federal organizations that they feel that CF is on its way out and that they have a hard time finding (let alone keeping) developers. Hopefully the CFGovCon was a big success but I haven’t heard anything about how it turned out.
Several companies I did consulting for, including a couple of government agencies, switched from ColdFusion to other platforms. Their reason is the perception, real or otherwise, that Adobe is close to cutting loose from ColdFusion and either canning it or doing what they did with Flex.
They go to the MAX conferences and there is little or no mention of ColdFusion. They open up ColdFusion Builder and the opening page has news stories that are 2 years old. You go on the Adobe site and you have to do some searching to even find ColdFusion.
How does any of that create client confidence in the future of the product? Does Adobe honestly think that a client is going to invest thousands of dollars in a product that has the perception of ending soon?
There is no question that ColdFusion is a rapidly shrinking market for developers. As a result, many developers are switching to other platforms which is then, in turn, causing even less demand for CF.
I have to agree….as nice as ColdFusion is I wouldn’t advice anyone to put their future plans in it.
This few hours for the EULA is turning into days. Why so long? How can people even make an investment in this product without knowing how much it covers?
At least come out and say no usage terms changed if that’s the case. If those terms got worse you owe it to your community to tell them, not sell product under the assumption it hasn’t changed, only to get a surprise. That would be very dishonest sales tactics.
Great to see ColdFusion new release
we purchased ColdFusion 11 ent version last year for $8500 ..
today i said our manager that ColdFusion 12 released they very happy & told upgrade with new version
then i told we need to spend 4300$ for upgrade they surprised and asked why they are paying huge amount for upgrade ?
i told ColdFusion is very featured product that why they charging huge amount
i agreed this price ok for new licence but i really dont understanding why should we pay huge amount for upgrade??
I love CF <3
great to see adobe get it’s head out of it’s bum and put ColdFusion on the front page on launch day… oh wait it will be in all products, oh wait it’s here somewhere… ah the media release is on an obscure blog and no media coverage… well done…
ADOBE – WORST MARKETING TEAM EVER!! Your CEO is a fully fledged idiot. #missedopportuniesforadobe-number239408293048290
I think it’s the pricing that needs an overhaul more than adding new features. It’s an almost impossible sell at the current prices when options like C#, PHP, Lucee, etc. are out there at no additional cost. IMHO that’s the reason companies have moved away from CF, not a lack of speed or features.
@Rakshith and the rest of the CF team – congratulations on the release! I’ll be eager to hear how some of these features are adopted by your enterprise clients.
@Charlie – A new thread started by Adobe for the express purpose of gathering the ideas and opinions of the community on how they could achieve more marketing success is an awesome idea. I’ll be interested to see if anyone @Adobe takes the hint… I mean… suggestion, and starts such a thread.
In either case, I do feel that release day is an appropriate time to question what, if any, marketing changes Adobe intends to implement with this release. Most of the ‘we need more marketing’ posts here seem to be from folks just being genuine about how it affects them and their career options. Valid points, I think. A dead horse, yes, but unfortunately one that still causes concern about job security for many CF developers, and still needs to be beaten once in awhile to see if it’s really still dead 🙂
Charlie, I realise it’s tiresome to keep going over and over the same points (particularly about Marketing or the lack thereof), but in my case, my whole career has dried up. I was working hard on building a career contracting in CF work, and it totally dried up in Sydney. I gave up looking for that kind of work. All I ever heard about were a very few jobs maintaining legacy CF applications so their staff programmers could work on migrating their applications to other technologies.
At the same time, the Users Groups disappeared, to be replaced by Users groups that only dealt with Creative Cloud stuff. And the community vanished too – where’s CFTalk now? or it’s equivalent? Gone. Even the CFTalk archive is gone.
So on CF, there’s virtually no promotion presence at all in Sydney. The major developers are all either using other technologies or have gone to open source CFML.
I’m not expecting to see CF giving PHP a run for its money, but Adobe could make an effort – even a small effort – dont you think? There arent even any CF people in Adobe in Australia as far as I know – support, marking, sales, sales-support, pre-sales, anything. When I have a question to ask, you, Charlie, are the only person who bothers to answer. (For which I am EXTREMELY grateful, dont get me wrong. What we’d all do without you I DONT know!!)
It must be very disheartening for the CF development team to see the terrific work they do just dropped in the in basket somewhere to languish until the version comes out, meanwhile down the hall, the Dreamweaver team promotes PHP for all they’re worth.
SO I build my own sites, and I build sites for clients who dont care about what technology is to be used, just what’s seen on the public side of the site.
Hi All,
For all the download/install and how to issues with CF 2016 release, please send an email to cf.install@adobe.com
Thanks,
Rahul
@charlie
A closed mouth is never fed. If you have made such points like many others have, then you sound like you concede that they will never do it. I’m sure you have a strong CF niche of clients and you have your reasons for looking at the short term, but for the rest of us that have a longer term interest in CF, we want to see the product grow so it’s around for our entire career. I don’t see how anyone can accept this marginal effort as good for the long term. I don’t think people are asking for perfect, they are asking CF to be on the level that people expect from enterprise products.
A post on the topic would be nice, but I don’t think people should be silent outside of that, they need to apply pressure so it finally gets don’t. If the community doesn’t demand it, they won’t get it.
Excited and happy to see new release from Adobe.
Congratulations to development team.
Sounds good that this release focused on vulnerabilities to attract the enterprise applications market.
1. Hope SQL Injection scanner, var scoping check kind of tools integrated with the scanner.
2. Do we get the vulnerability report some thing like white hat?
3. ColdFusion server hardening, lockdown implementation scanning available?
4. script protect enabling too not resolved xss attacks earlier. addressed in this version?
5. Developers expecting Whitelist/blacklist inbuilt feature from the long time(Not ESAPI one).
With bright future ColdFusion rocking as it has RICH, SECURE, HANDY features!!
Happy coding,
Thanks,
Raghuram Reddy Gottimukkula
@Matthew
I echoed the marketing concerns extensively during the alpha and beta.
@Charlie, no offense, but you have no business telling people to give it a rest. It’s been a major issue for almost a decade now. People are getting tired of the excuses. They want to see the product get it done so it flourishes for many years to come.
@Charlie
If Adobe can’t even have a tidbit on their main website about a new version of one of their products (on the day it launched), then I would say it is not a serious product to them. Actually, looking at this 2016 release… it is very telling that it isn’t a serious product to them. How many blogs/posts/comments did anybody read about wanting a ‘security code analyzer’, or some random PDF stuff?
Now I agree that Adobe is a big company with numerous products, and ColdFusion probably doesn’t fit in very well with their best selling list. Honestly, it probably doesn’t even make that much money for them. It’s just another acquired product that got farmed out to India.
Obviously there is some sort of language barrier/miscommunication (or simply no sense of direction) in ColdFusion development when wanting bug fixes, language enhancements, keeping up with other modern platforms and so forth = CFClient, ‘security code analyzer’, and HTML5 charts.
From the above comment I can see some developers are saying Adobe needs to support ColdFusion, I’m totally agree with you. What Adobe can do better????
– One of my friend works in Adobe IT what I heard from him. Adobe is decommissioning all it’s CF apps and moving towards Java and HTML5. If it’s true then how they can convince others to use it, if they are not using it?
– I have seen in my college days there is student connect program by Microsoft for .NET, but I never heard this term from Adobe in India.
– No video tutorials by Adobe in Youtube channel for new features and no proper documentation for new features.
– The certification program by Adobe is totally stopped I guess? So, it’s very difficult to find a good CF programmer.
– In market there is very few CF jobs available and most of them are maintaining a legacy application. So, for better career option developers are switching to other languages.
I don’t know if ColdFusion will be in market or not but for my future recently I switched to Salesforce. But, still helping some people in CF projects.
Congratulations Adobe on another release of a great product.
While it doesn’t seem like a lot to some, I can assure you we will use ordered structs and the safe navigation operator quite a bit.
It’s been said in this forum (and others) that Adobe doesn’t listen to their community but the truth is they just can’t possibly do everything that everyone would like them to do. I for one feel that they’ve taken our suggestions.
Thanks again to the whole CF team and keep up the good work!
Ref comment #30 – @Charlie – I apologise; “ColdFusion”. I’ve known from Allaire days and have no excuse!
Marketing for marketing sake is pointless, though you hear the clammer for it here, but I bet that most of us just want recognition for a product that we’d all like to use, see developed, be known, secure, adopted, promoted and generally see progress in all areas.
To adapt a once keynoted phrase “ColdFusion isn’t dead. Long live ColdFusion”!
Glad to see a new release (although typically just after we’ve migrated to new servers on 2012 r2 and CF11 there’s this and Windows 2016 – ha).
My only thought on the marketing / spreading the love thing, would be to include CF within Creative Cloud. Thought that for a while, unlikely, but just a thought.
PS. agree it should be just ColdFusion 2016 – also calling it the ‘2016 release’ makes it sound like a free update, which I don’t think it is.
@Charlie
I’m not a marketer, but I think the marketing and promotion that people are calling for is pretty obvious, it’s lacking, and it’s not as ridiculous as you’re making it out to be.
No one is saying that they want Adobe to run PPC ads for ColdFusion, but it would be nice to see it mentioned on their website, along with products that Adobe actually cares about. Simply a presence on their website = marketing. Similarly, an occasional mention on their Twitter feed = marketing.
Having developer evangelists for ColdFusion = marketing. Making it easy for people to use might not mean putting a course in schools, but it might mean having a skilled developer blogging, answering questions on StackOverflow, and building out tools that make ColdFusion easy to use and integrate with other technologies. It’s the things that the most active and helpful members of the community are doing, without Adobe’s help (John Berquist, Ryan Guill, Brad Wood, Ben Nadel, Sean Corfield, Ray Camden and the list goes on). Even promoting the work that people like that are doing and have done increases the exposure for CF.
I could go on.
A few takeaways:
1.) Your documentation is a mess and needs an overhaul. There are still links that are pointing to old versions of ColdFusion. There is also missing information in sections, such as the ‘functions by category’ reference not being updated (Example: ArrayEach is not in the array functions category along with other missing functions). Also, the reference examples should be short and straightforward, with all the function information (including parameter order) being accurate.
2.) Bug fixes… have that vast amounts of bugs been fixed in this version? Why would you release a ‘production’ product with known bugs?
3.) With all the blogs/articles of ColdFusion developers complaining about ColdFusion’s lack of language enhancement/fixes, why did the ‘2016 version’ focus on random stuff that the consensus of developers didn’t even ask for/want?
4.) Is ColdFusion being dropped? I don’t see any mention of this release anywhere on Adobe’s main website. I have to dig through the product listings to even find ColdFusion.
The language improvements are extremely sparse in this release. What happened to all the ‘To Fix’ items in the bug tracker?
Calling a feature the ‘Security code Analyzer’ seems like a potential bad idea. I think it gives people a false sense of confidence, in reality it only ” enable developers to avoid common security pitfalls and vulnerabilities while writing ColdFusion code.”
I’ve used most of the programming language …i feel that ColdFusion is far better than any language only problem that i found there is no marketing CF
Rakshith & team doing more things for CF
Please Concentrate on cf marketing
marketing is very poor
It’s good to see Cold Fusion 2016 being launched; although I echo @Greg’s points above.
Adobe need to start shouting about Cold Fusion if it’s to continue being adopted for development by both businesses AND developers (old and new).
In a world full of competing development technologies, Adobe Cold Fusioon is not a front runner when Adobe fail to market and promote the product, support the community and gain market support.
The Railo / Lucee changes have left a fragmented open source CF community seeking a stable route forward, but I fear that Adobe still have their [marketing] head and Cold Fusion 2016 firmly buried in the sand.
I hope Adobe may re-evaluate their pricing, model, marketing and approach – to the benefit of all prospective stakeholders. Every other software house is doing so and the longevity of [Adobe] Cold Fusion depends upon this.
@Greg –
1 – Adobe has been organizing the CFSummit conference for the past few years, it had 500+ people at the last one. The conference is totally focused on ColdFusion and is organized and promoted by Adobe.
2 – This has been a complaint since Macromedia purchased Allaire. If you have any concrete ideas on how they can market it, you should reach out to Kishore, he is the Product Marketing Manager. They do have marketing budget and they do stuff with it, you may not see it directly.
3 – Agree this could be better, I started a project http://cfdocs.org/ to let the community help build better docs.
4 – Agree, but not sure how exactly they would support them.
All of us know that CF is very easy to learn,famous for building large scale enterprise level application quickly.But still no one in these days are interested to use ColdFusion to build their new application.
Rakshith, as a Product Manager its your responsibility to find out the reason from your customers, Why they are not building any new apps in CF , even why they are migrating their existing apps to other platforms.
I have been working with CF since more than 5 years here in India.Sad to say , But here are few truths,
1. The Complete development of ColdFusion is happening in India, But I have not seen any of conference organized by Adobe to promote ColdFusion in last 5 years.(hardly 1 in lastyear.)
2. Poor poor poor marketing. I do not understand why? May be Adobe itself want to kill the product. They do not even list coldfusion under their product list in most of the places.
3. poor tooling support, documentation is poor(documentation site speed is horrible) and many more…
4. Platforms like ColdBox looks very good as a framework, support them.
I am tired arguing with people saying “ColdFusion is not dead.”, the pace with which CF apps are migrating to other platforms , I do not see a bright future with CF..
I request Adobe/Rakshith, please help ColdFusion.
Glad Adobe continues to support and invest in the platform, but I have to agree with previous comments outs here that more marketing is needed. You can’t just rely on the dev community to tweet about it…get the word out there!
Looking forward to trying out the new features in this version.
Coldfuison is perfect language but adobe need to do some marketing
if someone use CF one time they love it
our all exiting application we are planning to migrate to CF
we used other language but cf is easy to maintain & flexible
love cf
@Ian: The EULA for the new versions will be made available within the next few hours.
@Aaron: We thank you for reporting the vulnerability that you have listed out here.
As Aaron Neff pointed out, I will request you to read about existing and new features available that takes care of ensuring administrator is not exposed by default.
The security analyzer does not claim to identify 100% of vulnerabilities, nor does any other security code analyzer out there.
Security Scanner.
ALL the high profile attacks against CF sites were because the CF Admin was exposed to the public
PLEASE tell me you have now taken drastic measures to ensure this exposing the CF Admin to the public is now hard to do instead of the default configuration
If you have the BALLS to release a security scanner but have not addressed the fundamental reason CF has received poor press coverage – you must be complete fools – and have 0 concept about security, specifically the size of the ‘attack surface’
1) ‘security analyzer’ sounds like another cfform
– do you guarantee to detect 100% of vulnerabilities?
– what do you specifically scan for?
– has this tool been independently verified by security professionals?
– Of the past CFAdmin vulnerabilities, what % can this detect?
This is a horrible idea. It give developers a false sense of security – You can not claim this tool detects everythign (the halting problem from your CS education) – and will be useless against the next attack vector
This is a evil version of CFCLIENT. CFCLIENT was an embarrasment for the entire CF community, however it didn’t do any harm. What you have done here
– will do harm
– paradoxically it will INCREASE the amount of insecure cf websites out there
(keep in mind I’m responsible for discovering this vulnerability http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2014-0572/)
Christ, thats only the first feature you have listed. I’ll get back to you on the other ones
22 Sep 2025
Las Vegas, NV
