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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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“… considered by many to be long since dead”
- you know, i’ve heard this from time-to-time but am rarely, if ever, given any “evidence” of this. if anything, over the past few years, i’ve seen the ColdFusion community to be a growing, vibrant and diverse community of bright people who desire to use a technology to deliver rich internet applications to their clients. in addition, ColdFusion has been noted to have a much shorter learning curve than many of the other available technologies and yet delivers a more dynamic and powerful feature-set (integrated pdf support, ability to run on nearly any platform, ajax features, etc.), especially when paired with Flex and Flash … not to mention it’s support for .NET integration too (in my opinion anyway).
Comment by Steve Withington — Monday, 8 December 2008 @ 11:03 pm
@Steve I myself have been one to speculate on the death of ColdFusion. I think it is partly to do with the fact that I haven’t a clue on the usage rate or adoption of ColdFusion. Also, the sheer age CF is certainly grounds to speculate on its forthcoming demise, but has actually managed to evolve and stay relevant; no small feat to be sure.
Thanks for the article. As a user of many technologies, CF still has a special place, and indeed does compare well to other technologies for many tasks.
Comment by Scott Arbeitman — Tuesday, 9 December 2008 @ 3:17 am
@Scott: You might be surprised to hear there are over a half million ColdFusion developer’s worldwide and that number is growing. ColdFusion is going through a bit of a renaissance under Adobe and the future looks bright. For more information on the ColdFusion market and just why it’s managed to thrive for so long, check out the ColdFusion Evangelism Kit on Adobe.com.
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/pdfs/adobecoldfusionevangelismkit.pdf
Comment by Adam Lehman — Tuesday, 9 December 2008 @ 10:56 pm
As some other shrewd person noticed in Jason’s post about the recent layoffs - buried inside his resume was:
“Product revenue increased 50% Year over Year with 84% Quarter over Quarter at release”]
Dying? I don’t think so!
Comment by JohnB — Wednesday, 10 December 2008 @ 11:54 am
As a long time developer who has worked with CF for the past 9 years. I have often tried to get away from CF (did work in Java, JEE, and a little in .NET) only to find myself in the position of coming back to it. Every time I have thought that CF was dying (if not already dead) I get a very lucrative offer to starting developing in it once again. I have worked in JEE and although it is a very flexible and powerful set of technologies I do find it to be overkill or flat out overly complex for many of the applications I have worked on. On my current project we use CFMX 7 (we will go to CF 8 or 9 next year) and with the complexity of the application I work on, I could not imagine writing this application using Struts, JSF, Spring, etc. The fact that we use both Win and Unix servers makes .NET not viable, and the newer web languages such as Ruby on Rails, Groovy, etc. are a little too new for our IT department (i.e. no skills in the technologies and concern over support). I have found that CF can do many things all by itself at best and at worst is a partner tool to C#, VB.NET, Java, Flex, etc. I hope that Adobe keeps evolving CF which helps me stay employed.
Comment by James — Wednesday, 10 December 2008 @ 10:14 pm
I think if anything CF is in a huge upswing, and when combined with flex, auto crud code generation, and soon built in orm the rapid development will get even more rapid. I love how it makes the basic tasks that add up to 90%+ of your code much simpler so you are left to do the real application code, it comes with so many features out of the box that you would have to install lots of different packages/libraries/plugins to get with other languages which takes time and resourses to test and debug and ensure they play nice with one another, cf is all tested together, so you don’t need to worry about conflicts, and I don’t know about you but I hate installing stuff on my production server for a single client which is often needed with other languages to add new features, with cf that is rarely necessary. But on the other had cf can work with practically any technology available, java, .net, com objects, web services, event gateways, ajax, flex/amf/air, and if you are on the beta for 9 you know that the future looks VERY bright.
Comment by David Maggard — Thursday, 11 December 2008 @ 8:58 am
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.
On another note…
Coldfusion Rules Ok
Comment by Sargent Major — Wednesday, 17 December 2008 @ 12:18 pm
[...] 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 [...]
Pingback by Monochrome Blog - Comments on the future of ColdFusion — Wednesday, 17 December 2008 @ 12:46 pm