For those of you that haven’t already heard, ColdFusion 8 is now in public beta. I’m personally hoping that the next release will resolve issues with web services.. right now the support for ColdFusion MX7 web services is pretty terrible. Any type of complex objects getting passed back and forth just simply don’t work when being called from a .NET environment.
It looks like ColdFusion is in fact a dying language. (#5)
I’ve always knew that ColdFusion was a bit of a dinosaur, but this is more of a confirmation for me than anything else. ColdFusion is great for doing some things very well, that other languages don’t:
But as the article says… and I think this pretty much says it all:
Debates continue over whether ColdFusion is as robust and scalable as its competitors, but nevertheless, premiums paid for ColdFusion programmers have dropped way off, according to Foote. “It was really popular at one time, but the market is now crowded with other products,” he says.
Having recently attended cf.objective() which is not the premiere, but probably one of the largest ColdFusion conferences in the nation, I’ve seen this first hand. Object-Oriented concepts are just now being adopted by ColdFusion developers. Concepts like domain modeling were introduced, object-relational mapping are just now having frameworks developed.
For ColdFusion to really revitalize itself, it needs to do what ASP did when ASP.NET came out. A complete revamp. ASP.NET while nothing like ASP was a very welcome change because of the great new concepts that it introduced, like a windows-form like programming structure (basically Model-View-Controller), event-driven architecture and the .NET Framework. ASP.NET did some great things for Microsoft, and Adobe should take note of that.
How messages like these are supposed to be helpful to developers is beyond me.
So here we are, Monday afternoon after returning from the cf.Objective() conference. Overall the conference was a very worthwhile experience and it was interesting to take a peek into the professional ColdFusion development world.
Over the next few days I will be making posts about some of the seminars that I attended during the conference, but I would like to make a general observation about the big hype at the conference, ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio).
Although Scorpio has been available as a public/private beta for a while now, I wasn’t aware of all the new features in CF8 until I attended the keynote by Jason Delmore (Friday) and Ben Forta (Sunday). Both speakers are clearly well respected in the CF community.
My biggest issue with most of the new features in ColdFusion is that they are not truly innovative. Most of them have already been done before by other web application frameworks (like .NET or J2EE) or can be done with third party extensions. (for example, Server monitoring, code debugging, image manipulation, MS Exchange integration, .NET Remoting, all of which are new features of CF8 Scorpio) The really outstanding features are the ones you would expect (integration with Adobe’s own products), such as better integration with Flex (another Adobe product) and Flash.
I must admit that I’m surprised that the CF team chose to go down the route of integrating debugging in CF8 directly with Eclipse. It would make more sense from a business standpoint to integrate it with Dreamweaver but I suppose there is enough of a community push to override any business motivations. The CF Eclipse project is one of the best things that this language has going for it.
I also heard a rumor that CF8 will also support OO-Interfaces, which is another feature that is readily available in other frameworks… ColdFusion is just catching up. These guys really need to get something out the door that is truly innovative.
