“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.

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.

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.

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.

If you’re in any of the sessions we’re in, please pop over and say “hello”!

The change means that websites need to have their VAT rate calculations updated to reflect the new value on sales from Dec 1st – but remember that it is a temporary change so will need to be changed back or a mechanism put in place to do it for you.

Unfortunately this change comes into place in under 5 working days which doesn’t leave you much time to update/test existing applications. If you find yourself in a position that you’re unable to update your application’s in Flex or ColdFusion VAT rate then Monochrome can help so get in touch.

In this current climate of change and uncertainty your website can be your most important asset in increasing your exposure and revenue stream. Monochrome can assist in the design, development and deployment of rich user experiences that have a significant impact to your online presence. Let Monochrome bring your site to life!

The videos are:

MAX 2008: Adobe kicks off Day 1 in San Francisco keynote highlights

MAX 2008: From Adobe Flash Catalyst to Adobe CS4, Day 2

What was your geek-out moment of the day?

Day 1

Day 2

Interviews/demo with MAX Award Winners

AKQA - The Happiness Factory

NASDAQ Market Replay

We’re pretty psyched about the stuff coming out of Adobe at the moment, so we’re finding it really hard to wait for MAX in Milan in a couple of weeks!  See you there!

We’ve all heard about Silverlight & WPF technology and the pros and cons related, this new dynamic drive from Microsoft to utilise the UX delivery for their major product stack is proving to be an exciting ride for Monochrome.  Since joining the MS eco-system we’ve worked on a number of enterprise level opportunities to deliver applications in WPF & Silverlight – How?  Well we’ve identified the benefits of working with other MS partners who’s services compliment our own, it’s called the Design, Develop, Deliver methodology.  The basic principal behind this approach is to expand our ‘new business’ horizon by offering ‘more value’ to prospective customers.  Of course, one of the great benefits of building partner relations is you can share opportunities increasing your pipeline by 30-40% overnight….fantastic!

Anyway, Microsoft visited Monochrome last week to spend the day filming our business in full operation to demonstrate to other partners out there how exciting the fast developing market that is Rich Internet.  Myself & Niklas Richardson (Monochrome’s Technical Director) were asked to do an interview piece to discuss specifically UX (User Experience) and the benefits of using the Design, Develop, Deliver approach….all very interesting.  The video is yet to be released but there’s photo’s on our blog.

Monochrome are always open to discussing partner opportunities with other organisations, if you want to chat drop me an email or give me a call – my details can be found here.

I’m a PC!

However, something we’re also seeing is that the players are currently suited to different areas, Flash being very good for the public sites (video being No 1) and Silverlight being very good for Intranet based applications where Microsoft technology is used as the back end.

So, with player penetration it’s worth considering the following:  Is the player penetration at all important when you are looking at an intranet application with a closed user audience?  Do you need to worry about the percentage of the internet that has your runtime installed if you can go round and install it on all your users machines for them anyway?

Not really.

This raises another interesting thing, which is that of internal approval.  We are now finding that for those environments where neither Flash (in a new enough version) or Silverlight are present, companies are generally more willing to take on Silverlight due to the vendor - it’s a product that comes from a company they already have a relationship with, and also one that can be pushed out via Windows Update and the like.  It’s a sys-admins dream come true.

So, at the end of the day it seems that Flash vs Silverlight is definitely a case of best tool for the job.  If you are building a public facing site of some kind, use the Flash platform.  However, if you’re in a closed environment and MS are already in place - go with Silverlight / WPF.  These choices will just make your life easier.

PS:  Incidentally, we still come across lots of businesses who haven’t broken free of IE6, a seven year old browser yet (!) due to some internal policy - this goes to show how hard it can sometimes be bringing in a third party plugin to help with RIA’s.