For those who mistakently think that programming with CF tags is equivalent to slower performance.. wake up and smell the roses. The CF app server at runtime will automatically complile the source code into java bytecode and cache it in memory, plus eliminate programmer’s comments and empty space. DUH

Guessing at why CF is not gaing popularity… I say that is not due to the CF platform. I will tell you why. By flaunting that CF is “easy to use”, the marketing people shot themselves on the foot. That invites untrained people to dable in CF. CF is not something you can learn in a short time.

With CF you can definitelly build a cutting-edge website.

vitalsoftwarecorporation.com
flsenate.gov

These are two CF sites that will blow you away. What you don’t see is that both of these organizations have a larger, non-public, website for the internal business processes. Both private and public sites are perfectly integrated.

Knowing the strenghts and weaknesses of CF makes a big difference. CF is absolutely amazing for server-side development. Read my lips.. JavaBeans. CF is weak on the client-side development. Using AJAX components and/or JQUERY plugins and/or Knockout to handle the font-end development is needed to fill in the gap.

Definitely use OOP language with a visual IDE and drag and drop compnents for traditional, compiled, installable, windows applications. For the web? I tried .NET, PHP, ASP, JSP, Javascript, etc. CF is my hands-down choice for web development.

I repeat, CF is not for the novice. You will need to plan the arquitecture or end up with a mess. If you know how to use it, CF is super fast web development.

It’s gr8 to use CF for business. I hv worked with both CF and .NET and i think CF is much better for business. It is easy to maintain and robust. In my project, ppl working on so called OOP .NET are always in tension. My application may have bad written code and over the period of 9 years quality of code has got worsen.. but the system still run’s much much more smoother and less error pron…

It is easy to argue that cf is not up to mark, but in reality CF provide better ROI then others…
CF rocks and it will rock in future.. n of course.. this artical is 5 yrs. old that is.. it is future where cf is still rocking..

And for php there is no one backing it as a company commercially-forget Zend.It is obsolete. What else one can use for the web other than CF. Java ..or Sun is dead as a company.
Adobe does not know it has a jewel as a product.

1. I am one of those terrible programmers mentioned in the thread
2. I am trying desperately to move the site(s) that I did build badly in CF to something else so I can get someone else to do it properly for me/my clients.

This post has been around for a long time yet I see no evidence that Adobe is giving up on ColdFusion. I do find it curious that it’s not being actively marketed. I often wonder what would happen if they just open sourced it.

A real cf developer once said to me that CF is basically the mother of all Java Tag Libraries. I don’t know how much truth there is to that, but it seems to me that the focus continues to be on streamlining the most common things that bad developers like me need to do.

There are, however, some shops that are still almost exclusively coldfusion based. I worked as an information architect at a small place that uses Fusebox and Coldfusion for everything they can. They all hate PHP, they’re embracing Flex like it’s the second coming, and they do .NET grudgingly when asked. Shops like that still manage to convince clients to invest in dedicated or VPS hosting with CF licensing. I’m not sure how they manage.

Another thing to note is that, for a long time, there were no ColdFusion based CMS platforms to speak of, which made it almost invisible when CMS was the shit. I’ve been watching Muracms a bit, to see whether they get any traction.

Keep on writing the good code to make up for mine.

Mr. Client: How long will it take to build this thing?
PM: If we use ASP, 8000 hours. If we use Cold Fusion, 1500 hours.
Mr. Client: We are using Cold Fusion.

Cold Fusion put the ‘rapid’ in rapid development. It was startlingly fast to build data driven web applications in.

However, all was not well. The extreme ease of creating moderately advanced functionality also invited horrendous coding habits, stuff that an experienced programmer wouldn’t even think of doing. Though there was some solid code being written, most of it was pretty bad, and very very hard to maintain.
The problem here was with the programmers, not the language.

It didn’t take long before Mr.Client became sensitized to the longer term cost of crap code, and began to associate that cost with Cold Fusion instead of with crappy programmers.

Along come the great white horse, the savior of CF, Object Oriented Programming. It promised the world on a silver platter! Your code will be easy to maintain and reusable! Wait a second, any decent programmer already had those didn’t they? Well maybe, but now you can have those but with 3 – 8 times as much code! And never mind that OO CF has never delivered on its promises. Ugly truth is, the Emperor is butt nekkid.

2008:
Mr Client: How long will it take to build this thing?
PM: 8000 hours if we use .NET, 8000 hours if we use OOP ColdFusion.
Mr. Client: ColdFusion? Doesn’t everyone just use .NET? I see no advantage to ColdFusion. We are going to use .NET.

In a knee-jerk reaction to the proliferation of truly bad code and architecture early in Cold Fusion’s days, its makers provided more and more ways to use a much more highly structured methodology, trying to make it more idiot proof. The CF Community gobbled it up, and propelled CF down the path of product suicide.

ColdFusion lost its competitive advantage when everyone got all googley-eyed over the lies of OOP. That is why the language is dying. There is no longer a compelling reason for stakeholders to choose it.