Comments on the future of ColdFusion
by Neil Middleton 12:46 pm Wednesday, 17 December 2008.

Earlier today, via the comments of an earlier post, we received a comment on the recent announcement that Jason Delmore of Adobe was made redundant in a recent set of cutbacks.

“Do you have any comments on the Product Manager for Coldfusion being made Redundant at Adobe? I have been developing in Coldfusion for over 10 years and have always been sceptical of people say CF is dead and no one uses it anymore (Well apart from the CF5 era but lets pretend that did not happen) however with the Product Manager leaving this suggests rumours of Adobe either Selling, Making open source or dropping investment in CF to have some truth behind them. And Mr Forta saying they will get a new Product Manager cannot be factual as a Reduntacy is different from a layoff/sacking etc, they legally cannot replace him.

‘Sargent Major’ ”

So, in short, ColdFusion is not going anywhere anytime soon, it’s properly here to stay.  ColdFusion 9 is in the works, alongside the new IDE, Bolt, and Adobe have already published a timeline about the future of CF over the next two years or so.  OK, so CF doesn’t have a specific product manager at the moment, but a replacement will be forthcoming - it just takes time to fill the slot.  Jason is a pretty hard act to follow.

As for current usage, there are plenty of people out there using ColdFusion, at Monochrome we find ourselves meeting up with new groups of people who use ColdFusion nearly every day.  It would seem that ColdFusion developers, on the most part, keep themselves to themselves, not being nearly as noisy as some other communities out there such as the PHP or Rails guys.

So worse case scenario, let’s say ColdFusion is dead (which I will say now in simple clear language - it’s not), what’s the big problem?  We already have alternatives available.  Open Bluedragon is out and about in the wild and some people are using that quite happily, but if that doesn’t quite float your boat, there’s always good old Railo from Switzerland which will be open sourced under the LGPL early next year.   Let’s say Adobe does bin ColdFusion (as in the product) what’s the big issue?  No-one will turn up and take the existing product away from you, and your CFML skills won’t be lost into the ether.  You’ll be good for at least a few years.

With regard to the redundancy law, I’m pretty sure the US is a lot more slack on this than the UK  where we are not allowed to re-fill the slot for six months.

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My Scrum presentation from Max Europe 2008
by Neil Middleton 2:33 pm Tuesday, 9 December 2008.

As promised, here’s my presentation slides from MAX Europe last week.

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Why Monochrome use ColdFusion
by Neil Middleton 10:45 pm Monday, 8 December 2008.

We are increasingly being asked by customers of ours what back-end technology we use for our applications.  Why this is we aren’t entirely sure, but it would appear that people are doing their homework a little more than they used to before asking or agencies such as Monochrome to pitch for their work - a good thing.

So, when asked the above question, we always say ColdFusion, mainly due to the fact that CF is our development tool of choice.  Now, a lot of developers out there would question this - why are we using a costly proprietary technology that considered may be considered by many to be long since dead.  Why are we using a technology that many consider to be well past it’s sell-by date?

Well, in essence, simplicity.  We use ColdFusion because it enables us to do a wide plethora of things without needing to look at any other tools - it’s a veritable toolbox of things that we web developers need day to day.  It gives us image manipulation, it gives us PDF capabilities, and with the upcoming ColdFusion 9 next year, it gives us Hibernate, the ORM tool, out of the box.  All of this is wrapped up in a tool that allows us to make use of the Java platform, whilst writing code in an incredibly simple to learn tag based format.  I have had experience of other web developers converting to coding effectively and productively in CFML in a matter of days.  From the point of view of Rich Internet Applications, ColdFusion gives us unparalleled support for things like AMF,  the native transport protocol for the Flash player, enabling us to have full speed native transport with Flash out of the box with no additional changes to the code - a great winner for productivity.

Day to day we find ourselves dealing with CFML every day.  Unlike some of the many individuals out there who claim to be an agency, Monochrome have a team where every single member is versed in CFML and has many years of experience - four of the team have 45-odd years experience between them, which makes us one of the most, if not THE most experienced CFML shop in the UK.  You name it, we’ve most probably done it.  We’ve also taken this to the point that Monochrome form half of the management committee of the UK ColdFusion User Group based in London and have done since 1999.

So what about the alternatives to ColdFusion?  Well, I’ve spent a large chunk of time over the last year or so looking into what else is out there (as is the pragmatic thing to do), and have reviewed lots of alternatives including Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, Groovy & Grails, PHP as well as a couple of others.  As yet, I’ve not found anything that lets us build our applications as quickly and easily as ColdFusion does, although Ruby on Rails is definitely a strong contender with it’s productivity gains and neat packaging.

So, moving forward, what’s happening with ColdFusion?  Well, Adobe are currently in the process of developing ColdFusion 9 which people were given some sneak peeks of at the recent Adobe MAX conferences, and to sit alongside this is the new ColdFusion eclipse based IDE - Bolt.  Railo is also out there, a free and open source up-coming alternative to ColdFusion looking to support much of the same functionality.  So, going forward the future for CFML is looking rosy, and we at Monochrome are more than happy with that.

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UKCFUG - Max De-brief
by Niklas Richardson 12:50 pm .

Like we did last year, we will be providing a UKCFUG meetup to cover stuff from Max Milan.

The session will be held at Design UK on Tuesday December the 9th at 7pm. The agenda is as follows:

7.15 - 8.15 : Max De-Brief
8.15 - 8.30 : Break
8.30 - 9.30 : Live Doc’s
9.30 - Late : Pub

Max De-Brief
Will will try and cover all the Announcements from MAX and of course what we can from the sneak peak sessions. In Addition we will try and cover some of the session we go to.

Live Doc’s
This session is a free form question / answer session about anything to do general web development, ColdFusion, or the Adobe stack in general. Note that questions must be taken prior to the event so please submit them to neil [at] monochrome [dot] co [dot] uk or hand them to us on the night.

Where:
Design UK, 10 Warwick Street, London, W1B 5LZ
When:
Tuesday December 9th 2008 7pm - 9.30pm
Directions:
Nearest Tube - Piccadilly Circus

If you wish to attend please email us at neil [at] monochrome [dot] co [dot] uk with name and numbers.

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Monochrome coming to you from MAX Milan 2008
by Neil Middleton 1:57 pm Wednesday, 3 December 2008.

Well, here we are sat in one of the latter sessions of this years Adobe MAX Milan conference and it’s been an interesting time.  There’s been a huge amount of networking going on, as well as a fairly decent lack of some proper sleep.  With over 1400 people present it’s been a good event overall.

So, what have Monochrome been up to over the last few days? Well, as you can see from our Flickr Stream we’ve been very busy - only really getting the change to visit a couple of sessions so far.  First up was the first Keynote which was talking about the general direction that Adobe are headed - which in short is multi-platform, multi-device flash with a big emphasis on great design and interaction.  As always, the content was pretty much the same as the US version of MAX.

Yesterday we had the second keynote, which for us techies is the fun one.  This is where we get to see all the new and exciting technologies that Adobe have on offer, which this year included Flash Catalyst (the artist (tool) previously known as “Thermo”), ColdFusion Bolt (the new IDE for CFML) and Alchemy, a tool that allows you to effectively cross-compile C and C++ code into good old ActionScript 3.0 and run it in the Flash player. Demo’ed for this was Quake 1, PDF rendering and export as PNG - all of which are not currently possible in Flash Player 10 natively.

Later on in the day we saw the sneak peeks, which was “won” by “Infinite Images” a PhotoSynth like tool, but with a fair dose of craziness ladled in for good measure - it’s something that’s hard to describe, and you really need to see for yourself. Jason Delmore from Adobe also demoed a server side ActionScript server.

Last night, everyone was bussed off to the Peltona in central Milan - which is what appeared to be a swimming pool with an elevated floor filled with crazy Europeans dancing to crazy European dance music - although there was a good dose of Run DMC just before the end.

Today, we’re in wind down mode - no keynotes of anything like that, just lots of interesting sessions.  How we’ll end up tonight I don’t yet know - but if we get more than four hours sleep we’ll be doing better than normal.

Overall, it’s been great so far (although the venues organisation is a bit off in places) and we’ve been hooking up with a great bunch of people - Mike Jones of FlashGen.com, Jason Delmore and Claude Englebert of Adobe, James Whittaker of Refreshingapps.com, Howard and Baines, Big Mad Kev, Sarah Paton from Academy Class, Chris Kent of Tribal DDB, Straker, the Adobe Platform Evangelists, plus loads of others that I haven’t mentioned.

So, next year is alledgedly Amsterdam - which will probably mean less sleep, more fun and another great conference for 2009.

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