I’m wondering if we’re maybe seeing the beginning of the end for ColdFusion, at least as Macromedia product? My inbox has seen a few messages about the new 7.0 release of CF, most of which contain all sorts of assertions from Ben Forta (“ColdFusion Product Evangalist”) that this is the most important release in a long long time. Now go to the macromedia.com website. There isn’t a single stinking reference to this big important release anywhere, unless you count the link to ColdFusion 7.0 buried in the products listing box.
Makes me wonder if MM is truly committed to the product. It looks like the big direction from the mothership is communication tools (Breeze) and CMS-style products (Contribute, Web Publishing System). I remember ranting and railing about Contribute when it first came out. I took the position that Macromedia was entering into direct competition with the developers who were building various CMS tools/solutions and I was PISSED. Probably comically so! Finally, I look at the big push on developing dynamic Flash applications using ActionScripting and Flex. There seems to be a lotta Flash tutorials on the site talking about connecting to data & business layers using PHP rather than CF…
Finally, I also take a bit umbrage at the assertions that CF 7.0 is the most important release in the past 10 years. Yes, there’s some nice new reporting tools and some keen “native” tie-in’s to Flash and such, but does anyone remember the huge leap forward that MX provided in terms of Components and XML tools?
R.I.P, ColdFusion, and thanks for a fun ride. I’m almost out…
Comments
3 responses to “coldfusion 7.0”
I don’t think we should be writing the obit just yet.. though I do agree that Macromedia could be doing a better job of promoting the product.
CF still has a strong development community, and there are still lots of environments where it just makes sense to use it. It’s a great language for going from zero to programmer in a relatively short time, and is pretty powerful as a Rapid Application Development platform.
However, I do agree its days are numbered if MM doesn’t throw some weight behind it. With powerful, open, languages like Ruby on Rails (which just turned 0.10.0) and PHP getting better every day, proprietary solutions have got to work hard to stay relevant.
And I agree – I don’t see how any release could possilby measure up to the leap forward we took with MX.
Ya, thinking in terms of an obit is strong, but I think that the writing is on the wall for CF in terms of it’s continued existence as part of the MM product family.
Without a doubt CF has a place in the world. You and I both know that it seems to be a good answer for Government development purposes (easy to use, powerful features for entry-level developers, very low TCO for large organizations etc. etc.). In fact, I think that the TCO for CF is probably lower than for Open platforms such as PHP and whatever the hell else is coming down the rails.
Come to think of it, the TCO debate is a good topic of discussion, n’est ce pas? I’ll try to get a post in later today where I’ll make my arguement(s). But in a nutshell I’m all about blending Open and Proprietary technologies these days.