A rally cry for ColdFusion
Thursday, March 25th, 2010These are exciting times for ColdFusion. We have open source alternatives. Adobe just released their first shot at an official ColdFusion IDE, and they’ve even included Flash Builder in the package for free.
I’ve seen people comment that Adobe needs to promote and advertise ColdFusion more heavily. I think that this is a problem. While they are responsible for advertising and promotion to a degree, we must acknowledge that they’ve invested a lot into creating great tools for us to use and take some of the responsibility into our own hands.
I argue that we as the developer community need to do the advertising. We need to be building great projects and make it irresistible for others to give CFML a shot. Consider what WordPress does for PHP. I heard this comment a couple days ago from a coworker that does not develop web applications for a living: “I really like WordPress. This year, I’m hoping to learn more about PHP so I can do a better job at customizing my blog.” That’s where it all starts.
I really like Blue River Group‘s approach with their Mura CMS consulting. If the client doesn’t have a ColdFusion license (or the budget to buy one), Blue River informs the client that they have a free J2EE app they can deploy it on (namely Railo). I can’t remember if I heard this on a CFConversations or CFHour() podcast. Sorry guys. 
The point is that Blue River has created a beautiful application that is creating demand for CFML. The rest of us need to be doing this. I’d argue that this is harder than building a framework, and we have plenty of those. That work has been done. It’s time to get on to the applications, websites, and web services, the stuff that people care about. It’s time to meet consumers’ desires to have great technology at their fingertips, not feed our desire to be pious about our usage of CFCs (though that is still important to a degree, don’t get me wrong).
So I will ask. What are you working on to get us there? What can you start today or this weekend? ColdFusion’s fate is in our hands.
March 25th, 2010 at 11:00 am
Good point. Totally agree with you. CF Community already some great contributions, but most are are designed for developers, not end-users. imho, cause of this is that CF is corporate-centric platform. Never aimed for masses, opposite to PHP for instance.
March 25th, 2010 at 11:36 am
I agree with you about promoting a ColdFusion project we can all get behind and make it the face of ColdFusion but your blog is WordPress powered….
March 25th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Yeah, I wonder a lot about this because we look at applications like twitter and think “I could write that”. If somehow we could put together a community of applications like cftwitter, cffacebook, cfebay, cfcheckout, cfcms, cfblog… then an average Joe could plug in their Mom & Pop store and have an online presence.
March 25th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
I wonder about a mentorship system where someone “signs up” to either be mentored or be a mentor.
March 25th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Adam, my blog is WordPress-powered simply because it is the best tool for the job. I’ve considered looking at Mango.
March 25th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Vertabase project management software has proudly been CF for over a decade.
Many companies have bought CF to run our application.
But frankly, unlike something like WordPress, Vertabase and other CF applications are not consumer applications. They are business to business, groupware or for the enterprise. Where something is consumer side, it is in the cloud (like MySpace) where the technology is invisible and irrelevant for the consumer.
On the Adobe side, they could boost the production of commercial grade, business to business products written in CF by changing their channel strategy. They would need to include more partner selling for ColdFusion.
This is how Creative Suite is sold to the enterprise and therefore why there is a huge eco-system of add-on’s and customized 3rd party modules for Creative Suite.
March 25th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
I agree that apps drive demand, but do you think that Microsoft is counting on application developers and the applications that they create to prop up .NET? If you do then you’re wrong. They control a platform (Windows) and if you want to code against that platform you’re probably going to make friends with .NET. Adobe needs to put their money where their mouth is and as far as CF is concerned they spend very little on advertising. They are playing in a free market economy and they have a great product and that’s about all they have. Lackluster support, non-existent mainstream advertising and a bit of ADHD when it comes to focus. Google has it right, watch how they do it and pay close attention to their how, when and why because within the next 20 years they will have Microsoft’s and Apple’s collective asses in a jam.
March 25th, 2010 at 10:54 pm
To a large extent I believe Flex is a part of that drug dealer marketing strategy. If Flex has strong demand in the market, then there’s a valid use case for using ColdFusion as the back end. ColdFusion code integrates nicely with Flex and you also get the benefit of not having to depend on SOAP-based Web services (I’m not a Flex guy, only regurgitating what I’ve learned in class). I also like how ColdFusion 9 is being advertised by Forta, et. al. as the “enterprise glue.” But you’re right about the community getting more involved. That would definitely help ColdFusion’s PR game.
March 26th, 2010 at 6:00 am
Maybe as a community we should focus more on team work and making those existing projects out there the best they can be. I get the impression sometimes that a lot of open source Coldfusion projects (apart from frameworks) only have a person or two behind it. From the PHP side of things, I tend to notice more projects with a good number of people behind it. If the CF alternatives to WordPress isn’t good enough, we should team up together behind the one we think is closest.
What do you think?
March 26th, 2010 at 8:35 am
@David
Having one person primarily behind a FLOSS project is pretty much the norm, and shouldn’t be viewed in a negative light. James Howison’s 2008 dissertation was actually a defense of this empirical finding. In short, he was able to show that “it is far more often individual work done ‘in company’, than it is teamwork.” I know we should always be mindful of the proverbial bus accident, but my anecdotal observations would lead me to believe that leading FLOSS developers are rarely the victims of such tragedies. Maybe it’s because we spend a lot of time indoors?
March 26th, 2010 at 10:23 am
David, I agree that we should be jumping in and helping more with existing projects. I’d argue that the projects with actual end users are in most dire need of love. Usually people get so caught up with what’s going on on the backend that they don’t give interfaces and user experience as much attention as they should. I know that there are exceptions to this rule, but that is a fair generalization in my book.
March 28th, 2010 at 1:22 am
Chris, as a member of the Mura CMS team, thanks for the kind words. There’s no question the apps make the platform. PHP experienced rapid growth (not matched in any way by ColdFusion) because of 2 things: (1) a broad array of useful and robust apps, and (2) the fact that there was a free development stack to work with.
We believe that ColdFusion (well, I guess more precisely CFML) could experience a huge spike in adoption through the creation of good, full-featured, open source apps that address common needs like Content Management, Blogging, Forums, and ECommerce. Obviously, I’m not suggesting there are none of these; merely suggesting that we need more, and ones that compete on feature-completeness level with their PHP equivalents. This may be the single biggest barrier to entry for the masses (not to mention gateway apps for the enterprise).
We are also huge fans of Railo and OpenBD, and see these as providing great alternatives that will drive CFML adoption (which should benefit Adobe in the long run).
Honestly, I’m surprised Adobe hasn’t focused resources to make sure their bases are covered in this regard. But their enterprise presence is strong, so I’m not sure it’s even a part of their plan to compete with the RORs and PHPs of the world. This would seem like a very short-sighted approach to me, but I’m not privy to their marketing strategy, so who knows. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing where things go.
In any event, I think I can speak for the whole team here when I say we think you’re spot on with your assessment. Great post. Nothing would benefit the CFML community more than a handful of rock-solid apps we can hang our hats on.
March 28th, 2010 at 10:34 am
Sean, thanks for your comment. The thing is that I’m not sure that there was a “marketing strategy” for PHP at that crucial moment when it was either going to grow or die. People simply started building great things with PHP.
If CFML is such a great platform (and I argue that it is), why don’t we see “fruits of labor” in terms of amazing open source applications or public web applications like Twitter and Basecamp? It’s time for us as a community to put our money where our mouth is or step aside whenever there is a “ColdFusion is dead” conversation.
April 6th, 2010 at 3:02 am
Hi Chris,
No, there was no marketing strategy. It didn’t need one. PHP was/is a good, freely available option widely supported by cheap shared hosting and was/is widely adopted for the reasons stated in my post above. My point was that, while I agree with you and certainly hope people heed your call, Adobe could benefit ColdFusion AND its community by playing a role in making sure the aforementioned apps were available, rather than relying on the community to create them.
Your question of “why don’t we see the fruits of our labor?” in terms of amazing open source applications is interesting, indeed. I’m guessing has a lot to do with ColdFusion’s presence in the enterprise. It simply doesn’t share the same needs as the CFML community at large as ecommerce, forums and blogs don’t play as big a role as b2b (as Mark suggested) or custom applications created to meet specific business requirements. I think this may also explain the CFML communities’ penchant for frameworks.
As I mentioned above, we believe options like Railo and OpenBD will go a long way to broaden CFML’s base and the hope is that as this happens, full-featured open source apps will follow.
Or maybe it just takes one good blog post to rally the troops? ; )
In any event, thanks for bringing the subject up. It’s an important one for the CFML community and one that shouldn’t end here.
November 25th, 2010 at 11:22 pm
I don’t mean to be rude or impolite but I suspect that those who believe that cold fusion is dead are not being very objective. They’re falling into the trap of becoming incoherent babbling demi-zombie-trolls.
There is plenty of evidence that Cold Fusion is thriving. It’s alive and well, but the haters keep bringing out their “cold fusion is dead” line just because they want it to be true.
http://orchidfunstorm.blogspot.com/2010/11/porting-from-cobol-to-cold-fusion.html
In fact I think the Tiobe Index should reinstate Cold Fusion as a real programming language.