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?
24 Responses for "Another ColdFusion Death"
Too bad the things you’re hearing aren’t matching up with Adobe’s figures on ColdFusion’s growth. Up from 250k developers in 2004 to over 800k this year?
It seems people only see the short sighted benefit to PHP: developers are a dime-a-dozen, hosting is much cheaper when compared to ColdFusion hosting. However, the fact that their site has been running without issue for years speaks volumes for the stability you gain with a well thought out and developed ColdFusion application.
Just my 2 cents
I think the CMS market is pretty overwhelmed at this stage and “free” PHP solutions are so ridiculously common it’s not funny. Business which I do with CF in the past 2 years has never dealt with CMS but more business solutions. CF is really good as a service provider with a great range of tools out of the box (AMF, PDF Generation, Email, Web services, LDAP …to state a few). To be honest I can’t really compete with cheap PHP/CMS developers… but then again I don’t want too.
Saying this I reckon CF is moving towards more of a provider of services for front end AJAX/Flex/Flash clients. Which is really where I see server side tech moving to.
Adobe’s figures don’t seem to add up. I bet they’re quoting the accumulative number of CF downloads rather than the actual number of CURRENT developers. BIG difference. This is misleading because on the one hand if someone had bought a copy 2, 4 or 8 years ago that does not imply they are still using it. (Several of my clients have stopped using CF over time – no reflection of my work I hasten to add!)
If someone downloads CF it doesn’t mean they are a new developer. I downloaded CF8 several times over 2 years for different reasons and some people download it just to see what CF is about – a potential developer, not an actual one.
If there are 800K developers then why is it the same 50 or so people that blog about CF or comment to CF related blogs? Do you believe that only 0.006% of CF developers bother commenting to blogs? Even participation in discussion groups would reflect a point-zero-something representation of developers according to Adobe’s figures.
I’m not talking CF down (it is a powerful, impressive product that I use all the time) but it worries me if Adobe believe their own figures then they clearly don’t see the very limited marketing of CF as a problem. CF has never been strongly marketing by them and I blame that for the lack of fresh CF developer talent.
Steve, I can’t believe your sister couldn’t find a CF developer in a city of 312K people, ranking 25th in the US for jobs within the urban core and is 6th in job density. (Thank you Wikipedia)
@Gary: I knew she would have a hard time. I mean, ColdFusion has always has pathetically poor penetration in Pittsburgh (one of the major reasons I left the city). Even back when I ran the user group, our attendance was usually less than 6 people and we never, ever got support from Macromedia.
But the fact that she couldn’t find anyone – and she’s been looking for 4 months now with a single bite – is quite disheartening.
@Andy: I’m in the same boat as Gary on those numbers. Number of developers is an easily manipulated number. It could very well mean “number of downloads”, or “number of people who have said they have used it”.
My opinion is obviously colored by my own experiences, and everywhere I’ve ever worked, consulted or lived, it has been an uphill battle to get ColdFusion recognized as the solid, enterprise level application suite that it is.
Seriously, this many years later and we’re still having the same, tired conversations about how ColdFusion is marketed, how many people use it, why people poo-poo it, why it isn’t taken seriously…
Isn’t the definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results? How many people see ColdFusion advocates as insane?
@Brent: I agree… my sister agrees, but you missed the main reason of her decision.
I could prove to you that a BMW car is vastly superior to a Honda Accord in terms of performance, handling, details, gas mileage, and resale value. The obvious choice is a BMW. However, the nearest dealer is 1000 miles away and he won’t return your phone calls.
Which car do you buy?
The 778k developer number comes from a 3rd-party research firm, Evans Data Group. It’s from the same annual report that details the number of Java, PHP, .NET developers worldwide (not CF or Adobe specific).
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/evangelism_kit/
@Gary_F: You are right. Our internal numbers at Adobe based on sales/downloads don’t match up to EDG… our internal numbers are higher!
-Adam Lehman
ColdFusion Product Manager
While it’s great to see more ColdFusion developers out there (in numbers), it still far lags in comparision to the other languages out there. Some of the other languages do have one large advantage that helps their number of developers: price. .NET, PHP, Ruby etc… can be had for free. Hopefully the release of some of the other open source CFML engines will help the ColdFusion community as a whole.
From my experience, most companies (at least the bigger ones) eat up whatever the analysts write. So it was great to see positive coverage by Gartner…
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=165146
While we all know the value of CF, we need more material like this to help back us up.
I think Ross Philips above nailed it. I think CMS is where all the action is right now; and PHP absolutely dominates that space. We can argue about CF based CMSs, both pay and free; but they probably make up a percent of the CMS utilization out there.
I bet your sister isn’t looking for a PHP developer so much as somebody who can get a basic WordPress / Joomla / Drupal / ??? environment set up.
It sounds to me like it’s simply the market in Pittsburgh: it never really was a CF place, your family’s company used CF only because of you, and now you’re not available.
Well, I guess the other factor would be the economy. Until banks start lending to businesses again, a lot of businesses probably aren’t going to be looking to invest a lot of money into the type of infrastructure where we’d be participating. If they aren’t already using CF, they probably won’t move in that direction; if they don’t already have someone on the payroll (or on their short list of contractors) who knows CF, they probably aren’t going to work in it.
We’re not a majority, probably never will be, and in this market, we probably won’t be increasing our share. It doesn’t mean that CF is dying any more than me finding a contract to work in classic ASP means that classic ASP is making a comeback.
No, really, that did just happen … the contract, that is, obviously not the comeback. It was from a client who didn’t have IT personnel on site and wanted to make changes to the site: they weren’t going to pay me to rewrite it in CF (although OMG some of this code is terrible, not from being in ASP but because it was done at various points in time by various developers without guidance or notes or anything), even though there are other things they want to do down the road that could be done much more easily in CF.
Indy isn’t a huge CF market either, but there are quite a few places that use it … there just aren’t as many openings because there are enough CF developers around here that, well, we fill the openings when we find them. :)
I’m not in Pittsburgh, but I’m not too far away in Cleveland… and I never heard about your sister looking for a CF developer in these parts. If she didn’t mind someone who lives in the Browns’ hometown, I could have done the work.
The figure reflecting the current CF developer headcount came not from Adobe nor from Adobe’s own research but from Evans Data, which is a reputable market research company targeting software development issues.
I think there’s more than one issue at play here. As CF has gained more marketshare, salaries have gone up. Since CF’s main playground is in the corporate environment where people don’t mind paying for a good product, it only follows that strong professionals would ask for higher salaries. That, in turn, makes it harder to find small-time operations to find local resources for the kinds of rates they’re willing to pay. It’s easy to find a PHP pimplebearer who will work for $10/hour… the platform is free, the server is free, and they have no friends. It just works.
Incidentally, Evans recently did another survey which ranked ColdFusion 4th out of 8 as an application server and development platform, behind WebSphere, Geronimo, Windows Server, and ahead of JBoss, GlassFish WebLogic and Netweaver.
Funny thing: CF runs on most all of those, save Windows Server, where it runs on, well, the rest of those. And the things the study had to say about CF were pretty remarkable… they called out support as one of CF’s primary strengths and gave it an edge over PHP and Ruby because of the level of integration it provides. Not bad for an application being ranked against application servers. I wonder if they even knew they were actually ranking JRun as well? ;)
Hi Steve, please could you email james[at]james[hyphen]brooks[dot]net so that I could ask you a few questions please?
Thanks,
James
Too little, too late that Adobe’s expanding CFscript?
[...] close by pointing out another mournful blog post about CFML which tells the story of a web site being redeveloped in PHP because of a lack of available CFML [...]
Steve, I’m still in Pittsburgh – still working for the same company I have been. There is still some CFML left in Pittsburgh. I went to the CFUG this past year, there was 8-10 people. When Adam Lehman came through, the number shot up (cuz he’s a rockstar).
I’m not sure I’d count your family business as a “death” – Were they looking for free software to begin with? Is there anything software package close to what you built in CFML?
With 2 open source CFML engines on the market, in addition to the new CF9, I think you’re going to start seeing some additional growth.
Heya Todd. MY sister actually spent over 3 months looking for a local ColdFusion candidate. I have no idea which avenues she used, but she said she didn’t get a single bite. With an existing investment in it, she wanted to continue with ColdFusion, but chose PHP because she easily found resources that would do the work.
Could she have searched harder? Possibly. However, since I don’t know what process she used, I can’t comment either way.
The project is an overhaul of their public-facing website. It isn’t a CMS app or anything she could get out of the box. I wrote a custom application underlying the website that allows her to import XML files, images, and plain text docs, and then convert them into a standard template for the product catalog.
There’s other functionality as well, but she definitely couldn’t find a quick replacement by trolling the open source software marketplace.
[...] close by pointing out another mournful blog post about CFML which tells the story of a web site being redeveloped in PHP because of a lack of available CFML [...]
Steve if its not too late to pull it out we can save it here in Pittsburgh. I have 4 developers. You and I go way back to the old CFUG meetings back in the Strip District when free pizza and BEER was the draw to the meetings.
I honestly don’t know how many articles i’ve read about coldfusion is dead? type of thing. i’ve seen some cases where people were surely using it to generate traffic. i Definitly consider myself fascinated with CF. My advice about getting coldfusion development help is that the world has become a very very small place. i through my eclipse interface assign tasks to several coldfusion developers on the opposite side of the world.
Carey, I’m certainly not asserting that ColdFusion as a platform is dead. I’m not that ignorant. I was expressing my dismay over a few people that I know moving away from it.
I believe Adobe’s figures. I bet there are thousands of Indian, Chinese and other non native English speaking developers using Coldfusion to develop that maybe don’t feel confident enough to post in English forums. Think about it… Coldfusion is a very good product that’s getting better with every update AND Adobe own it as well as a load of other very cool web development tools. Why shouldn’t it gain momentum?
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