A bit closer to home this time.

My family’s company back home has been running a ColdFusion-powered site that I wrote for them yyeeeeaaarrrsss ago. My sister, who is now running the marketing department, wants to do an overhaul of the site, because it has been yyeeeeaaarrrsss since the first version.

Obviously, I’m not available to help them out full time – y’know, being four states away with a wife and two kids and all – and she’s found it impossible to find anyone with ColdFusion skills back in Pittsburgh. She’s made the decision to use PHP as the technology for the new site.

Kinda speaks for itself there.

Weird that I’ve been a small time evangelist for ColdFusion all these years and recently all I’ve been hearing about is how people are deciding to not use it any more.

What’s going on?

Was speaking with a friend back home today who works for a very large financial institution. They currently have a major investment in the Adobe stack of technologies, including ColdFusion. However, the decision was recently made – as usual, at a business level – to become a Microsoft shop.

One of the critical elements in this was the fact that ColdFusion developers, specifically highly talented ones that can architect enterprise level applications, simply did not exist in the marketplace. There are too few of them, and they are all currently employed, and the cost of developing someone of this caliber was simply too high and would take too long.

I’ve read far too many times in the past 12 years about how Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe does not make the appropriate efforts to get the ColdFusion development platform into the hands of kids early, when they are learning development, so that when these kids coming out of college enter the workforce they know Microsoft or Java technologies, or both, and then may possibly, occasionally, touch upon a couple of features of the ColdFusion platform years later.

The result is more and more business decision makers not even considering it as an option. Technology aside here people, look at it from a business perspective. Ok, fine, ColdFusion is a great platform. It has lots of features and is easy to learn.

So what?

I need to hire 9 people right now who have vast, deep experience in building mission critical applications that perform at the highest level, scale with the organization and the user base, and are extensible so that we can keep making it better.

Having gone through this process many times myself… I’m sorry but ColdFusion doesn’t cut it. I love the platform, I love the people, and the community, but if I got funding to build a major application or system, and needed a large, experienced development team, I would not choose ColdFusion.

Now, once the system got off the ground and the underlying architecture was solid and we needed to start expanding the system, making sub-projects from it, then sure I’d consider hiring a few ColdFusion developers because you can build applications very quickly with and perform some integrations more easily.

Bottom line is that, while I’m sad to see another promising ColdFusion shop being slowly dismantled over the next two years, I can’t say I disagree with the decision.

It sucks.