What is the status of ColdFusion today?

Question

This may seem like flamebait, but I can assure you it is not intended to be.

Having spent the last 10 years in the web business, I had heard of ColdFusion, but hadn't personally witnessed anyone using it, especially in recent years. My impression was that its heyday had passed.

Recently I started doing business with a company that was building a new website from scratch, and using ColdFusion to do it. My initial impression was that they were using an outdated technology.

Is this perception correct? Is it common to use ColdFusion on new websites these days, and how does it compare to "modern" architectures like Ruby on Rails, Apache Wicket, and so on?

Answer 1

CF9 is now in public beta. Adobe is putting a lot of energy and money into ColdFusion and the product continues to grow.

It's a very robust platform for rapid application development, and this is being strengthened in the CF9 release.

There are also new CFML engines - Railo and BlueDragon - which have free versions if cost is a barrier with the Adobe ColdFusion engine.

The ColdFusion community may be smaller than others, but it is very passionate and proud of what can be done with ColdFusion.

Finally, a lot of CF work is traditionally 'behind the firewall' - just because you can't see CF apps in the public domain, doesn't mean there aren't lots of them.

Answer 2

The newest version is in beta at the moment and you can download it here - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion9/

Personally, as cool as a few features are.... for a large project, it is just to expensive when compared to PHP or asp.net

If you are already a ColdFusion dev, by all means use it, I am sure it is going to be supported for some time, but if this is a new project.. I wouldn't get involved in it.

Answer 3

I am working with the cfml language since 1995 and @ Todd, in my opinion it is still cool and fresh. There are different (open source) engines you can run cfml on. It is getting a stronger community every year and it is not only Adobe anymore.

Answer 4

ColdFusion had the concept of tag based server side/client side controls in CF 2...when asp classic ..3.0 was out. CF has been quietly leading the game in technology for a long time. I am not sure whey it never caught on with the maintstream programmer group. But I have always known a lot of designers that prefer to use it. It is very powerful and writes like html. Then you can of course do the CFScript which looks very much like C#. Some sites that still use it today:

http://www.bofa.com - Bank of America

http://www.guru.com - freelancing site

They have had frameworks such as MachII and Fusebox for quite some time.

Don't forget that pretty much every property that came out of eUniverse was ColdFusion base...ie www.myspace.com (which is now .net).

It is still very powerful and continues to grow with a certain group of people.

Answer 5

ColdFusion Vs. PHP thread here has some great answers (including mine) on a comparison with modern technology.

In addition to what others have written in an number of "is coldfusion dead" threads i found an entire site on the topic whousescoldfusion.com.

Personally the biggest usage I have seen is in internal sites, and as a service with its many "out of the box" features like dynamic pdf creation and so forth. Additionally do to its easy of use for novice to advanced developer I've seen many integrations with full jee deployments even just for the rapid proto-typing any cfml engine provides, when everything is worked out they refactor their business logic down to java, often keeping the views in cfml over jsps.

Also Adobe has "official" propaganda on the matter.

Hope this helps.

Answer 6

My impression is that people who already use ColdFusion are still using it, and people who have never used it aren't investing in it. Kind of like Delphi. And COBOL.

Answer 7

It's like PHP, except you pay for it.

You can embed queries directly in a template and then loop over the result set directly outputting HTML, just like you can with PHP. Or you can use a framework and ORM to build your application in a more structured manner, just like you can with PHP.

Sure, it has some nice features (like cfdocument for PDF generation) but in my experience many of the nice "built-in" things would break down/exhibit bugs when used in an a complex way, and you'd either have to write your own replacement or work around the problem somehow.

It has its annoying quirks (and I am definitely happier to be coding in Python these days), but so does any language. It's not horrible. I just wouldn't recommend it for new projects.

Answer 8

Both CFML (language) and ColdFusion (implementation) are very much alive.
So are the two Open Source implementations - GPLv3 OpenBD or LGPL Railo.
And there's also BlueDragon.NET if you want to do CFML on the .NET platform.

For full details, see my answer on What is the career value in learning ColdFusion? which goes into details on why CF is still alive and kicking!

Answer 9

"Trailer for CFUNITED: Who killed ColdFusion?", with David Stockton

http://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/calendar/10969750/

come join us LIVE Tomorrow (July 30, 09) and find out yourself! :)

note: Recording available here if you're reading this after July 30, 09: http://tinyurl.com/cfmrecordings

Answer 10

I work with ColdFusion every day, and it's the scripting language I first took to on the web after I graduated from college. I've loved it like my own. Like everyone has said - CF9 is coming out soon, as is CFBuilder - both extremely exciting events for the ColdFusion community. But I feel like all the things that made the language great - it's ability to rapidly and easily build sites, the community which was so strong before, it's lightweight pick-me-up feel, are slowing and steadily being sucked out of it in favor of more 'enterprisey' concepts. It's certainly not outdated now, but it's trying its damndest to become so.

The state of the CF community is pretty fractured right now: Of the people who are vocal, the guys who blog and talk about this, it seems like there is a great divide: on one side are the OO purists who feel that OO is the savior of everything and the coolest thing to come along since sliced bread. On the other side are the people who favor the old-school procedural approach and think that OO in ColdFusion is silly and inefficient (partly true) and that OO is some newfangled kids' toy. And then there's everyone else, who is stuck in the trenches working with these concepts every day, just trying to write the best apps they can. A lot of very smart people who grew up with the language have since moved on - the OO/Procedural evangelicals are the ones who've stayed. However, the people who have stuck around are extremely passionate.

It feels more and more that ColdFusion is being used by Adobe as a strategic way to push the Flex platform. It seems, to me, that it is falling by the wayside, even with all the great changes being brought about in CF9. It's still competitive and it's hanging on, but it's got a feeling about it that it knows it's on its way out. Adobe claims that people are continuously adopting it, but the general attitude seems to be that Adobe is full of shit in that regard.

However, to really answer your question, it becoming ever more outdated doesn't make it any harder or less enjoyable to use. I also want to reiterate that it's having trouble keeping current - it doesn't mean it's a currently outdated technology. It's also still the easiest and cleanest language when it comes to connecting to a database, running a query and manipulating the results.