I have something I need to get off my chest. This blog entry is targeted squarely at the ColdFusion community and, I think, should be kept exclusively within the ColdFusion community. I know I’m writing this on a public blog, but, let’s face it, not many people other than Adobe webstack developers are goign to read this.
What I want to say is that I really hope ColdFusion programmers can find it within themselves to stop trying to convince other programmers that ColdFusion is not dead. I’d link to examples, but I don’t want to raise their page rank any higher than it may already be.
ColdFusion’s not dead, it’s operating in Stealth Mode. The general perception of ColdFusion’s demise is our greatest asset.
I’m going to go out on a shaky, rotten, limb here and say that according to stereotype, most ColdFusion programmers can’t code their way out of a paper bag. Think about it. How many of you out there started out doing something completely different than programming ColdFusion? Then, one day in the early 2000s, you were tasked with creating an “intranet” for their company and putting an obscure database online.
Most of non-programmers in this situation first discovered Dreamweaver and and quickly learned that they still needed a server-side solution to do the job. Conveniently, Macromedia also had this thing called ColdFusion that made it really easy to do what they need. Presto-bango, 15 minutes later a new Intranet was born into the world! Cool! But not really. Now this uneducated office dweeb is labeled the Web Guru (or worse yet, the Web Master) and they get tasked with more and more projects like these.
The next chapter in the story is tragedy: Bad code. Cashing servers. Headaches. And, to be fair, we all did it. That intranet, over the following years, evolved into an unmanageable beast. Changes in one place would break code in other places. The code became a tangled mess. The entire thing gets thrown out and rebuild a few times. The Web Guru (now the Senior Web Guru) would institue standards midstream (you must indent in this pattern, you must name variables in Hungarian notation even though it doesn’t make sense, you must write your code in Comic Sans, etc, etc) in the misguided attempt to make the code more manageable. But it doesn’t help. Eventually this person quits in frustration and gets a job somewhere else.
Now, this is where the image problem forms. (Excuse me, I mean that his is where the advantage for you and me forms.) The next person on the project usually spends a little time going through the code before throwing their hands up in the air and saying, “This is a bloody mess!” They go to their boss and say one of two things:
ColdFusion is bad.
We need to move to .NET/Java/Perl/Smalltalk/CGI/Ruby/Whatever Or…
This code is bad.
We need to improve the code and hire better programmers.
This is a generalization. Clearly some CF projects go away because the company decides they need to standardize on something that’s not CF. (This is dumb! Why throw away all that money? And what happens 5 years from now when there’s something new you want to move to? Do you rewrite again?) Sad as it may be, some projects do get moved to other platforms.
But those sites that do not get moved (and the new development opportunities) are why I wish the ColdFusion pontificators would just be quiet. Clearly some people understand that ColdFusion has some amazing features that make things that would be very time consuming or expensive in other environments extremely easy.
Companies that choose ColdFusion and hire good programmers ultimately save time and money. This lends to competitive advantages. Think about supply and demand. We as ColdFusion programmers intuitively know that there is plenty of work out there. ColdFusion is not dead. There are lots of new projects (especially with Flex integration), lots of old projects to maintain, lots of government work, lots of private work, and more. The problem (I mean advantage) is that it’s hard to find good ColdFusion programmers. If there’s high demand for skilled programmers (even if the demand is small compared to the demand for something like .NET or Java) and a small supply that drives prices up. Programmers make more money because of how others perceive ColdFusion.
Despite the fact that the ColdFusion server is comparatively expensive when compared to other choices and that good ColdFusion programmers are costly, ColdFusion brings enough to the table to generously compensate. Forget about the admin-assistants turned pseudo-programmer. Forget about .NET and Java. Focus on strengths. ColdFusion programmers should play to their niche. ColdFusion should play to its strengths. Companies should take advantage of the power and flexibility of the language and skills of their programmers to keep raking in profits.
DougHughes.net 
Comments on: "I Wish You Guys Would Stop Pontificating About The Wonders of ColdFusion" (48)
So are you saying CF should not become more popular because it could affect how easily it is to get jobs??
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Ray – First off, I rewrote the ending a bit to clarify.
What I am saying is that we as CFers have a advantages in the platform that others don’t. A secret that others know and don’t want to hear about.
Why give away our competitive advantage?
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Because it makes sense to think of more people then just ourselves. Growing the popularity, and the userbase, of CF, helps everyone. Frankly, I’d rather there be more competition for jobs and less talk of CF being on it’s death bed.
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This seems like a rather short sighted view.
If talent is scarce, and the cost for that talent is significantly higher than other competitive options, inevitably management will choose those other options for future development.
There needs to be a reasonable balance between supply and demand, or the demand will disappear.
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@Ray – Part of the problem is that the meme of ColdFusion being dead is that ColdFusion programmers keep saying it’s not. It’s like that scene in Monty Python:
Body: “But I’m not dead yet!”
Large Guy: “No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment.”
Act with deliberate confidence, not by constantly justifying to others why you’re doing what you’re doing. Other will follow naturally if you’re successful.
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@Gus – I’m not sure that it’s short sighted or not. There are plenty of good programmers out there in CF and not.
In the end, I’m thinking about deleting this post. I’m not sure I’ve really made my point. It’s a complex multifaceted problems.
It’s also a bit tongue in cheek and I’m not sure that’s coming across.
My feeling mostly is that ColdFusion’s history and the tradition of non programmers using ColdFusion have halped non programmers write it off as an also ran. It’s not.
I’m also not sure that we as programmers have a responsibility or a need to change that perception.
Things are not that bad, really.
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First off – don’t delete the post. Nothing wrong with discussing stuff. 😉
Secondly – I agree with you in principal about the ‘just build crap, dont protest’ but at the same time – we DO need to evangelize our product. PHP is. Dot Net is. So I see no need to stop evangelizing CF.
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Hi Doug, I hear what you are saying but I’m not so sure staying under the radar is the best approach for securing CF in the market place and ultimately our jobs (if CF is your only language of choice).
As more and more outlets proclaim CF to be dead and dying, more and more IT decision makers will overlook it when deciding on a technology to use for their startup or replacement technology. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to only be working on Legacy support 5 years from now. I think the vocalization of our community is what sets us apart from others and helps educate the uninformed about all of the benefits CF has to offer.
If you are good (and passionate) about what you do, then you will have no problem finding work or commanding top dollar for your services. Take a look at yourself, I doubt you got where you are today because the pool of CF developers has fizzled out.
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I think Doug’s point here is that maybe we should keep some of CF’s better qualities close to the chest, that is what he was referring to with ‘competitive advantage’.
If Mircosoft sees that Adobe is pushing new features that might sway business away from ASP and towards CF, then they may try to mimic the same functionality in ASP.
Of course the flip side is that if Adobe, or the community, dont discuss it openly,how will anyone know about it?
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Competitive advantage is okay, but what you really want is sustainable competitive advantage. Keeping the benefits of ColdFusion under wraps might provide short term opportunity, but bites us in the long term. There are a lot of choice for RAD these days, and most of them get more press than ColdFusion. The more attention others get, the less ColdFusion gets, and the longer this goes on all effect the “common wisdom” of this particular market. The worse the common wisdom about CF is the more likely that decision makers will choose not to go with it.
On the other hand, I’ll agree that perhaps we shouldn’t take the bait and go nuts every time some tech writer with a deadline and poor work ethic does a story that CF is dying. Adobe has indicated that sales are strong, so the sky isn’t falling. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reasonably, rationally confront such stories.
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I say:
Don’t market your language’s talents, market your own. Any fool can make CF do flips. Only a master can do flips with CF.
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Another point: Most of my clients could care less about CF. Puffing up CF doesn’t mean anything to them. The server is a commodity.
What my clients care about is me and my team. They care that we get the job done and do the job well.
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Doug – speaking personally – I try to evangelize towards developers. I agree – a client may not need to know the technical details (CF can rss parsing!). Personally I don’t think all the CF is dead articles/responses are even involving clients much – although they may google and I’d like them to see “Cf is not dead” or “Cf is dead.”
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1. To be equally zen-like: What is the sound of a ColdFusion Master flipping language that doesn’t exist? Or in other words, if CF does die (not that is is likely) your competitive advantage if you are only basing it in Coldfusion is no longer sustainable.
2. Yours is only one business model. Many of us work in IT departments where the decision to use a language is made by higher ups who do read the trade mags for the 30,000 ft view. And I would argue that them seeing unchallenged headlines like “CF is dead” is a bad thing.
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I agree with the sentiment that complaining about CF-critical articles might be counter-productive, but I’m not sure I agree with Doug’s reasons. Of course, reading the post, I really wasn’t sure if Doug was being earnest or if the whole thing was a joke (posting about CF-morbidity to complain about posts about CF-morbidity). I kept wanting to laugh but I wasn’t sure I was supposed to. 🙂
I hold a lot of respect for the people doing the complaining, but when I read the protests I think to myself “Don’t tell me, show me!” What I find very reassuring is that there is, in fact, a lot of showing going on: an active, collaborative, and innovative CF community. I think the active members of the community are doing a good enough job that it’s not necessary to be defensive.
Improvements in technology and practices, growth of the community, and higher visibility are all beneficial. As far as supply and demand goes, I’m sure that with rising CF adoption, any increase in the number of skilled developers (alleged competition) will be accompanied by a larger increase in the number of “pseudo-developers” (generators of business for skilled consultants who can rescue companies mired in bad code). The thing I’d point out is that every new “pseudo-developer” is a potential skilled developer in training and every new skilled developer is a prospective community member.
In conclusion, I think there’s no “there” there. Just keep up the good work. I, for one, am grateful and confident!
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@Ben: My feeling exactly.
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The danger is the self-fulfilling prophecy: if the rest of the world thinks CF is dead or dying, we’ve lost. Sure, we can keep working away in our existing niche, but no new people will be coming into the fold. I for one would count this as a disaster, and a sure sign that CF IS dying. I want to see growth, I want to see the naysayers eating their crow. And the only way to do that is not to “turn the other cheek” when people post misconceptions or lies about CF, it is to square up to them and beat them down. Maintaining the status quo is not enough, because while it might work for the short term, it is doomed in the long term. The day the rest of the world thinks CF is dead, CF is dead, regardless of what we think or know inside the CF community. So we have to take it upon ourselves (and I wish Adobe would do more) to blow these falsehoods out of the collective consciousness. And while part of that is done by building kick ass stuff with CF that everyone can see, it also means fighting the PR war.
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@Brian – I’m not sure I agree with you. By responding to “ColdFusion is Dead” with “ColdFusion Is Not Dead!” you’re allowing the other party to set the tone of the argument. I think that’s why you rarely hear Adobe say anything of the sort. Instead they focus on ColdFusion’s strengths.
This makes me think of an old saying which essentially points out that marketing is the practice saying the opposite of reality. Think about airlines which say their flights are comfortable and on-time. No way!
The more we respond to “ColdFusion is dead”, the more we look like someone poking roadkill with a stick to see if it’ll twitch.
Instead, I’d spend time making the best applications you can and blogging about it. Lead by action, not by reaction.
Consider Ruby. It’s my personal opinion that they were absolutely MADE by that video of a blog being made in 10 minutes. The funny part isn’t that no other language can do this, but that Ruby gets all the credit. They own that slice of perception now.
Right now the slice of perception that CF owns is that it’s Dead (or not?). Can’t we redirect this a bit? Can’t we start saying CF Makes Hard Things Easy? Or CF Saves Time and Money? There has to be another spin.
On that note, I pay attention to what my neighbors do. (Don’t you?) I compare my apparent successes to their apparent successes. It’s human nature. So I noticed recently that my neighbor bought a really nice new BMW. Don’t I wonder how he accomplished that? Yes. It’s the same thing in web development. If create compelling products that are successful in the market place other developers will notice. Do it enough and others will follow.
The notion that the entire CF market will dry up and blow away in the next stiff breeze if you don’t get up and say “CF’s NOT DEAD” is nonsense. There are thousands upon thousands of projects and companies and opportunities. Even if Adobe pulled the plug (did you catch that?) today there’s no way the market would just disappear. Things like that take time.
The best thing we can do is do our job to the pinnacle of our capabilities.
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Even in government CF is starting to lose its grip. If the perception of CF as a dead language doesn’t change, it soon will be.
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which in terms means CF needs more developers, which means one should advertise it as much as possible…
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@CF needs more open sourcr project
Um, I’m a bit sure why you set your name to a statement like that, but have you looked at RIAForge? 200+ projects built in CF.
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I have nothing to add other than I agree with Doug’s statement with “Another point: Most of my clients could care less about CF. Puffing up CF doesn’t mean anything to them. The server is a commodity.” Majority of my clients’ views are the same.
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I agree with most of what you say, Doug. However, this seems only to be looking at the short term. Yes, if Adobe pulled the plug the market wouldn’t just vanish tomorrow. But it WOULD vanish. I agree (and and also said in my reply) that DOING great stuff with CF is a big part of gaining mind share in the larger development world. But to say that it’s the ONLY thing we can do, or to say that we can’t do things in addition to speed up the process, seems incorrect. I’m saying we need good PR as well as good showcase applications. Adobe has been saying forever that it “makes hard things easy”, but that doesn’t seem to be making any difference.
If someone lies or misrepresents you, and you don’t reply, then that lie will become accepted as truth. Which is exactly what has and is happening to CF. I don’t think just quietly building great apps is enough, and it doesn’t trigger the change I want quickly enough. I think that correcting the common misconceptions is a definite catalyst to building the CF user base. Now, do we have to frame it as “CF is not dead”? No. But I think openly challenging the misconceptions about it would still be a good thing, regardless of how it is labeled.
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Here’s the question though. If I’m an ignorant (about CF) CTO trying to make a decision about a coding language, and I see a bunch of articles saying “ColdFusion is dead”, am I really going to believe that? How many “FORTRAN is dead” articles have you read recently? If a language is dead, it doesn’t make the news. When we as a community scream “NO IT’S NOT I SWEAR!!! PLEASE BELIEVE ME!!!” It doesn’t make the reader think ColdFusion is dead or not dead, it makes them think ColdFusion developers are a bunch of children.
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WOW! What a cool discussion.
OK, my $2:
Let’s run through the typical list of aphorisms:
“Put your (clients’) money where your mouth is” truly applies here. Do work, get paid, get contracts, and the platform grows whether decision-makers know what platform they’re using or not. As long as the sales of ColdFusion stay strong the detractors are just spouting a lot of hot air. The fact that there are more projects than developers at this point simply means the platform is growing!! What’s to complain about? The ColdFusion community is also growing, and as we pick up more and more interested developers we have a great situation. Do we need to be careful? Absolutely… it could implode. That, however, is unlikely. And as long as conferences like Scotch on the Rocks and cf.Objective() keep punching out more and more high-end talent, and companies keep investing in education for their existing developers, things will only continue to grow.
“Don’t cast your pearls before swine” also applies. Nearly anyone who says “ColdFusion is dead” is not leaving the conversation open for discussion. They have their minds made up. Let them think that… while they’re busy thinking that, I’ll be busy building great software with ColdFusion and Flex. There are times to speak up, indeed, but not _all_ the time or we’re just gonna be a copy of the contentious and unhappy Java and PHP communities.
“To everything there is a season” and sometimes that means keeping your mouth shut when you could get involved in a heated and pointless debate. It also means exercising judgment and acting when you think there is room for a debate. Example: the fracas surrounding the Computer World article prompted them to write a follow-up article that was far more realistic. It yielded great benefits for ColdFusion (ostensibly, anyway) by forcing them to acknowledge the truth. Every time, though, is not like that… we need to be very judicious about invoking our right to argue.
“Let’s not compare apples to oranges” by comparing ColdFusion to PHP, .NET, Django, or Ruby… because it’s not the same and it doesn’t deserve to be treated so disrespectfully. ColdFusion is about collaboration between hundreds of other platforms and technology as much as it’s about programming. It bridges between nearly every system out there AND lets us write software. It’s unlike any other platform available and it deserves to be discussed so. PHP, .NET, etc., only do a subset of what CF does natively or only does then partly… or with more effort. The fact is that ColdFusion doesn’t suit everyone’s needs and isn’t always the right choice for a project. It solves a problem for a different class of user than the others do and we need to focus on the pre-qualified sale to these people instead of the hard-sell to developers who prefer PHP, .NET and the others.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to pimp Alagad to people who don’t know the difference, do projects, have fun, and write about ColdFusion so that those that are actually *interested* can find out the reality of the situation when they come looking for information.
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Doug,
I agree. The best thing that we can do is to shine as developers and as a community. Instead of denying the allegations, which many political figures know can be just as damaging as the the allegations themselves, we should prove the misconceptions wrong by action and deed. One of the things I like best about CF is *the community*. I have been on the internet long enough to know that the CF community is one of the most passionate, genuinely helpful, up beat and *positive* online communities around. We are not a bunch of stuck up, condescending snobs that tend to gravitate around some online communities (Linux users are notorious for this). So instead of joining the flame wars we should extend our warmest welcome to our detractors and show them *why* CF and it’s community rocks.
Personally I am perplexed by all the bad press and the haters. If you just *used* CF for any length time you will appreciate it for what it is.
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Guys like this:
http://macapper.com/2007/10/05/life-without-adobe/
ColdFusion is just after his commentary on LightRoom… and he failed to include the CF icon for CF8. Still though… it’s not going away but it’s falling behind? I think not. Still I hesitate to comment in a situation like this because his statements are so absurd they bear no relation to reality.
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Well, I’m going to comment. Not to fight or anything, but at least to (calmly) point out there -is- debugging and feature wise CF is comparable (much better really) than PHP.
I don’t think a simpe comment like that will spark a flame war. 😉
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I went to Borders today and they didn’t have a single ColdFusion book in stock. I love programming in CF but if you can’t find a single book in stock at Border’s, that’s a problem.
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Ian, sorry bud, I bought the last copy before you arrived.
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All silliness aside, I don’t think the “Borders” weight holds up at all. I’ve seen some pretty poorly stocked stores out there and it had nothing to do with Adobe or their marketing. That being said, my favorite bookstore (Amazon.com) and such always has it in stock.
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Jared
Thank you. You just articulated the bizllion thoughts that I had floating in my mind while I wrote my piece. Not looking for polyps, just expressing a genuine admiration for an organized, articulate intellect.
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I wouldn’t hesitate to switch from ColdFusion if a tool, better for my purposes came along. I’ve tried other tools. I don’t still write CF because it’s what I know: I use it because it’s the best tool I’ve found for the problems I need to solve. Flex has somewhat narrowed those problems: I barely use CF for interfaces now.
If CF disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t change what I did. I’d just pick up the next best tool and keep going.
That’s the strongest endorsement I can give ColdFusion, and it’s one I wouldn’t hesitate to give to anyone who says “ColdFusion is dead.” If we’ve the need to prove ourselves, it’s as important to say well what is is that think as it is to do well that which we do. Not doing both is half-assed.
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Nothing like talking about being well put and leaving a word out.
“…it’s as important to say well what is is that we think as it is to do well that which we do”
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Good grief. Sometimes I may speak well, but I write like crap tonight…sorry, I didn’t read any of that before I hit submit.
“…it’s as important to say well what it is that we think as it is to do well that which we do”
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Yeah – What Joe said. 😉
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Doug,
It’s very funny that you posted this now, before I finish my big blog post about the Promoting CF BOF I held at MAX, because I was going to push this point of view as a devil’s advocate stance. Now that I don’t need to any longer, I’ll be free to say what I REALLY think in that post.
I think I understand what you’re getting at, but I can’t say I agree. Perhaps you are a victim of your own success.
I run a CFUG in a city where there aren’t a lot of ColdFusion developers. Cleveland’s largely a .NET town. I also ran the AUG for three years. As such, I have had to deal with a lot of people that are misinformed about ColdFusion and have stayed away because of that lack of understanding. It’s a struggle to keep CFers coming to meetings, too, because many companies are changing or have changed to other technologies, or they just don’t care to learn more than they know. Well, I am tired of it, and I am fighting back.
To bring it to a religious metaphor, I DO want ColdFusion developers to become missionaries and spread the word outside our ColdFusion community. I also want to get old CFers to become passionate about ColdFusion again.
I don’t want to bring in more beginners who will create the intranet spaghetti of the next five years. As someone who has had to interview enough of them over the past year, we already have enough of those, and, although it’s easy to develop in ColdFusion, it’s a double edged sword. What’s easy today is a mess tomorrow.
From your perspective, you know that there are a lot of crappy ColdFusion developers, but perhaps you think that there are also a lot of good ones. Perhaps you get so many good resumes these days that you forget that those people are the exception, not the norm. For every Jared or Scott or Critter, there are 1,000 developers that don’t know the difference between a CFC and a custom tag.
I want us to bring in developers who already know how to develop, and will pick up ColdFusion because it allows them to be productive. We need to focus more on them. We need to make experienced developers want to pick up ColdFusion.
Where I agree with you is to stop saying, “ColdFusion is not dead.” The community needs to show that ColdFusion is thriving. I say that not from the reasons you give. I think CF is, by far, the best choice out there. More people need to discover that fact.
With more good ColdFusion developers, we’ll have better examples, better code, and a bigger voice.
You’re entitled to your opinions, Doug, and, although I think you made some good points, and understand you point of view, I just don’t agree with it.
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Jeremy said “When we as a community scream “NO IT’S NOT I SWEAR!!! PLEASE BELIEVE ME!!!” It doesn’t make the reader think ColdFusion is dead or not dead, it makes them think ColdFusion developers are a bunch of children.”
Do you know what a Straw Man is Jeremy? If you don’t, please go look it up. Because it is a logical fallacy, and you just committed it. And, to a lesser degree, so are Doug and most of the others that are pushing that side of the argument.
No one is screaming “ColdFusion Is Not Dead Please Listen To Me” blah blah. This is not what I am advocating doing. What I am saying is that, in addition to showing the world that CF is great by example, we also need to challenge lies and misinformation about CF when it is pushed by others. This can be done in a very calm and rational way, without sounding like a child or a zealot. I really don’t understand how anyone can try to argue that this isn’t the best approach.
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No, I don’t think it’s a straw man, though I may be guilty of a bit of hyperbole. @Brian, although YOU may be making logical and well-thought-out points, your comments are typically strewn throughout a bunch of reactions/posts of others that are more emotional and, in my opinion, frantic-sounding. Regardless, however, my point is not regarding whether CF aplogetics are valid or logical, but that, even if they are, they do more harm then good.
You may be a very logical person, and take all sides of an argument into consideration before making an intelligent and informed choice, but the majority of people don’t think like you. They think on a much more surfacey, gut-feeling level, and on that level, even deigning to enter into the argument validates the other side to some extent. It’s like the cliche – “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.” Well, we are dignifying it, and from the non-CFer’s point of view, it can trigger another quote – “Methinks thou dost protest too much.”
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Jermey, I guess I’m not sure where these “frantic” discussions take place. Do you have a link or reference to such a discussion? Are you talking about blog comments related to CFDJ cancellation? The ComputerWorld article? I’m trying to get a handle on where the discussions are taking place that everyone seems so keen to put a stop to. Have I missed something?
If someone says in public “don’t use ColdFusion, it’s slow as a dog”, you are honestly saying that the best course of action is not to correct them? To point out the fallacy in their argument? If we “don’t dignify that with a response”, then believe me, most of the people who hear it will assume it is true. Why should they doubt it? They’ve heard from 20 people how slow CF is. They’ve never heard a counter-argument. Clearly it must be true.
I think that’s an incredibly bad idea. I’d respond and correct them, the same way I’d respond and correct someone who sends me an email claiming that Bill Gates will pay them for forwarding it.
The bottom line here is that I’m not sure what is being argued here. If the push is to stop people from posting alarmist, frantic, or zealot-like public comments or articles about CF, then I say I agree with you. Even though I haven’t really seen this happen yet. I also agree that we need to lead by example and build great apps to help silence critics. But that is all I’m going to agree with. I don’t think anyone is going to convince me that logically rebutting people who propagate falsehoods about ColdFusion can be some kind of detriment.
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No, you’re right. If someone is claiming something specific like “ColdFusion is slow as a dog” then that needs to be addressed, although I would think that a comment like “What? Where are you getting that from?” would be more effective than a long list of statistics or logically thought-out reasons why ColdFusion is not slow as a dog.
However, I was referring to the “ColdFusion is dead” type arguments which are obviously just flame-bait. I don’t know. I see a difference, but maybe it’s just my perspective.
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Ok. I’m a bit late to this thread and I’d be lying if I said I had the patience to read every comment in their entirety.
From the Adobe perspective, I don’t think it’s possible for me to overestimate just how _alive_ ColdFusion is! Yes, ColdFusion went a bit quiet between the merger, like many of the 80+ products Adobe now has, however, those times are behind us and ColdFusion 8 is kicking ass and taking names/orders!
I agree with a lot of what Doug is saying about not wasting our time defending ColdFusion’s supposed demise. ComputerWorld had an author who was just clueless and Sys-Con is just spewing sour grapes (and they make it quiet obvious). Those two incidents aside, the only people saying such ridiculous things are fanboys of other technologies (mostly Ruby and .NET) who need to poo on everything else to justify their talents and experience.
Sure. I love a good flame-war now and then but I only participate in them today out of pure entertainment. The only comments I feel I need to defend are when someone actually identifies a weakness in ColdFusion. I don’t care about misinformation, because in the end, people realize the truth, and the fanboy claiming CF was dead, will eventually look the fool.
I recently learned something my parents tried to teach me a long time ago. You can’t preach to people and expect them to convert to your way of life. Instead, you should walk your path and stay true to your ideals. I’ve found that eventually people will want to know what drives you. It’s only then, that they really care to hear the answer.
Let’s also not forget the roots of this community. ColdFusion was the very first web application server on the market. Our community has been around since the dawn of the internet. We invented this game! ColdFusion developers defined the Rich Internet Application back in 2001 with ColdFusion MX and Flash Remoting. People thought we were crazy, flash wasn’t for building applications, it was for stupid web cartoons and skip intros. Now, everyone and their mothers are pickung up Flex and sweating our style. The fact is, our community has been defining the web since it’s inception and we continue to do so.
So keep on pushing the boundaries of the web and creating some of the most impressive applications out there. Eventually people will ask, how the heck did you build that? How did you integrate with all those aspects of the enterprise? How did you do it so damn fast?
ColdFusion. Rock’n’Roll!
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+1 to Adrock’s comment. Especially the ending.
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Doug, I understand where you’re coming from. You feel that the talk about these articles will be as bad as the articles themselves. That could be true if we took a defensive position. Rather than do that, I propose that we do three things:
1. Like Jared said, let us do the best work we can in ColdFusion and in any other languages we may use.
2. Like Adrock said, let’s build beautiful applications and put them up on the web so others can see what ColdFusion can do.
3. With these two actions, we also need good press (as Brian Kotek was saying). And good press means that we should be writing good technical articles, case studies, and positive experiences we’ve had with ColdFusion. We should put these articles up on our blogs and in our magazines, but we should submit some of these articles to other, more mainstream, publications. Kay Smoljak just started blogging for Sitepoint.com, and she is doing an excellent job of promoting ColdFusion and answering questions that non-ColdFusion programmers have about the language. We need more of what Kay’s doing.
As Editor of Fusion Authority, I am happy to work with any authors who would like to write for me and put positive case studies, news, and tutorials up on Fusion Authority Online. I have some articles almost ready to go up.
We are working right now on Vol. 2 Issue 3 of the print journal, and it is coming along beautifully. I am also happy to say that our readership is growing greatly since MAX, another sign of ColdFusion’s growth.
Judith Dinowitz
Editor-in-Chief
Fusion Authority and Fusion Authority Quarterly Update
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@all – I’ve been thinking about sponsoring a “something amazing” week. IE: For one week anyone who wanted to could somehow describe something amazing they’ve done with Adobe tools. We’d all link back and forth to the various incarnations. If nothing else, it’d be a good stream of something positive with, ideally, no mention of anything negative.
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@Doug, that’s an awesome idea.
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@All
To fuel the fire of promoting Adobe tools…
I ran into this Video on ZDnet on “What is Web 2.0”.
http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13569_22-154425.html
What grabbed my attention was at min 0:50 where (and mind you this is Andi Gutmans, a co-founder of Zend i.e. PHP) he describes what to look for in a language for developing web 2.0 apps. He basically described CF 8 to a T.
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Great! Cozmo, if you would like to take that video and, based on what he says, write an article on “Why ColdFusion 8 is the Perfect Web 2.0 Language”, I’ll be happy to edit it and publish it on Fusion Authority.
If you’re interested, email me offlist at editor AT fusionauthority DOT com.
Judith Dinowitz
Editor-in-Chief
Fusion Authority and Fusion Authority Quarterly Update
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