ComputerWorld talks about making ColdFusion “hot” again — and quotes me!
Monday, October 8th, 2007
Last week I attended the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago. Awesome event and I had a great time getting a chance to talk face to face with people throughout the development community (more on that in future posts). While I was there I was interviewed by a member of the press regarding ColdFusion and today I came across this article in ComputerWorld:
Of all the great things I had to say about ColdFusion they used this quote:
“If you join an organization that isn’t already using ColdFusion, it would be tough to convince them to start,” said Josh Grauer, a systems analyst and ColdFusion developer for Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.
Close, but what I actually said was that it was unlikely you’d pick up a language like CF unless you joined an organization that was already using it. I also said that CF has tons more to offer than PHP and other languages and that people don’t realize the extent of what you can really do with ColdFusion, but I didn’t get quoted on that one.
CF really is a great development language, but over the last few months I’ve seen a lot of debates around CF being dead (or not). The ComputerWorld article mentioned a few reasons why this kind of talk has started, but here are my thoughts on why CF is struggling:
No Good, Cheap Hosting
I work with CF nearly every day at my job and I love it. However, when I go to work on a freelance job I end up using PHP because I can’t find a good cheap host that fully supports CF. GoDaddy supports CF, but they turn off all the object functionality, so I can’t use frameworks. The other hosts I’ve worked with in the past, Dreamhost and 1&1, don’t support CF. I think it’s great that HostMySite has stepped up and partnered with Adobe to provide CF hosting support, but at $20+ per month it’s a little expensive when compared with Dreamhost or GoDaddy.
If I were hosting a large scale app or working on a project for a big client that really needed that extra level of support, then HostMySite would be my first choice. If the app is big enough, I might even consider setting up shop with Media Temple. You get what you pay for. But what about the 5 page brochure sites that just want a basic CMS back-end? I’d love to do those in CF, but I’d rather just do it in PHP then have to justify the extra $15/month.
Not Taught in School
The ComputerWorld article mentioned this, but I’m wondering why CF isn’t being taught in school anymore? Like a lot of Adobe’s products, you can’t really get a feel for just how great CF is until you’ve worked with it for a while. That’s partly why they offer students huge discounts on their software and free 30 day trials. The student who learns Photoshop in school is going to try to find a way to use Photoshop in their professional career. Mix CF into a degree that involved Java or even PHP and watch how people gravitate to the simplicity of CF.
Limited Exposure of Advanced CF Topics
I recently read a blog post written by a developer who had evaluated whether or not CF was a viable language. One of his criteria had to do with the level of community support around different frameworks and made mention of FuseBox and Mach II. He found that none of the frameworks he evaluated had any substantial community involvement and on the surface appeared to be legacy frameworks that were not being actively developed.
Now I know that these frameworks are very actively worked on and over the last two years I’ve seen a lot of activity in this area. The only reason I know this is because I did a lot of searching and a ton of reading to find this stuff. A lot of these projects have active user groups, but they can be hard to find. Documentation is limited and it can be difficult to find use cases. Now I have seen some great improvements being made to the different framework web sites and the community web sites in general, but it we need to pull these resources closer together so that someone taking their first look at CF really has the big picture laid out for them.
CF is/isn’t Java
Sean Corfield talked about this while at MAX and made the point that CF is in fact not Java. Why make that comparison anyways? Why can’t CF stand on it’s own? I think that CF’s strength is in it’s simplicity. I don’t want to program in Java if I can help it and I’m glad that CF offers that layer of abstraction when I don’t really need to be involved in the finer details. We should start talking about how CF can be leveraged to talk to things like Java and .NET without trying to say that they are replacements for them.
Ben Forta repeated a quote from somone saying “ColdFusion is what JSP should have been”, which is exactly right. CF is more of a replacement to JSP than it is to Java. It’s about using the right tool for the job, and CF is the right tool for a majority of the web application development I see going on. Java is an altogether different animal and is better suited for enterprise desktop application development.
Last week I attended the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago. Awesome event and I had a great time getting a chance to talk face to face with people throughout the development community (more on that in future posts). While I was there I was interviewed by a member of the press regarding ColdFusion and today I came across this article in ComputerWorld:
Of all the great things I had to say about ColdFusion they used this quote:
“If you join an organization that isn’t already using ColdFusion, it would be tough to convince them to start,” said Josh Grauer, a systems analyst and ColdFusion developer for Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.
Close, but what I actually said was that it was unlikely you’d pick up a language like CF unless you joined an organization that was already using it. I also said that CF has tons more to offer than PHP and other languages and that people don’t realize the extent of what you can really do with ColdFusion, but I didn’t get quoted on that one.
CF really is a great development language, but over the last few months I’ve seen a lot of debates around CF being dead (or not). The ComputerWorld article mentioned a few reasons why this kind of talk has started, but here are my thoughts on why CF is struggling:
No Good, Cheap Hosting
I work with CF nearly every day at my job and I love it. However, when I go to work on a freelance job I end up using PHP because I can’t find a good cheap host that fully supports CF. GoDaddy supports CF, but they turn off all the object functionality, so I can’t use frameworks. The other hosts I’ve worked with in the past, Dreamhost and 1&1, don’t support CF. I think it’s great that HostMySite has stepped up and partnered with Adobe to provide CF hosting support, but at $20+ per month it’s a little expensive when compared with Dreamhost or GoDaddy.
If I were hosting a large scale app or working on a project for a big client that really needed that extra level of support, then HostMySite would be my first choice. If the app is big enough, I might even consider setting up shop with Media Temple. You get what you pay for. But what about the 5 page brochure sites that just want a basic CMS back-end? I’d love to do those in CF, but I’d rather just do it in PHP then have to justify the extra $15/month.
Not Taught in School
The ComputerWorld article mentioned this, but I’m wondering why CF isn’t being taught in school anymore? Like a lot of Adobe’s products, you can’t really get a feel for just how great CF is until you’ve worked with it for a while. That’s partly why they offer students huge discounts on their software and free 30 day trials. The student who learns Photoshop in school is going to try to find a way to use Photoshop in their professional career. Mix CF into a degree that involved Java or even PHP and watch how people gravitate to the simplicity of CF.
Limited Exposure of Advanced CF Topics
I recently read a blog post written by a developer who had evaluated whether or not CF was a viable language. One of his criteria had to do with the level of community support around different frameworks and made mention of FuseBox and Mach II. He found that none of the frameworks he evaluated had any substantial community involvement and on the surface appeared to be legacy frameworks that were not being actively developed.
Now I know that these frameworks are very actively worked on and over the last two years I’ve seen a lot of activity in this area. The only reason I know this is because I did a lot of searching and a ton of reading to find this stuff. A lot of these projects have active user groups, but they can be hard to find. Documentation is limited and it can be difficult to find use cases. Now I have seen some great improvements being made to the different framework web sites and the community web sites in general, but it we need to pull these resources closer together so that someone taking their first look at CF really has the big picture laid out for them.
CF is/isn’t Java
Sean Corfield talked about this while at MAX and made the point that CF is in fact not Java. Why make that comparison anyways? Why can’t CF stand on it’s own? I think that CF’s strength is in it’s simplicity. I don’t want to program in Java if I can help it and I’m glad that CF offers that layer of abstraction when I don’t really need to be involved in the finer details. We should start talking about how CF can be leveraged to talk to things like Java and .NET without trying to say that they are replacements for them.
Ben Forta repeated a quote from somone saying “ColdFusion is what JSP should have been”, which is exactly right. CF is more of a replacement to JSP than it is to Java. It’s about using the right tool for the job, and CF is the right tool for a majority of the web application development I see going on. Java is an altogether different animal and is better suited for enterprise desktop application development.
