If ColdFusion is dead, it’s Adobe that killed it.

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

(Or, ‘Controvertial ColdFusion post #34124′)

I’ve been using ColdFusion happily for the last 6 years. I can honestly say that if it weren’t for the ease of learning ColdFusion, and the instant gratification to be gained from rapidly developing apps that interact with databases, I’d have never found my way into backend development.

Like any language however, ColdFusion is not without its problems. We can compare functionality until the proverbial cattle return to their domiciles, but what I’d like to talk about is the culture of elitism that surrounds ColdFusion.

‘Elitism?!’ I hear you cry, ‘But ColdFusion is so easy to pick up, and the community is so friendly and welcoming! That’s hardly elitist, is it?’.

Yes. You’re right… but what I’m concerned with is the difficulty ColdFusion developers face in the environment in which they work. Adobe have done a very good job of making ColdFusion inaccessible to the masses by focussing on enterprise clients, inadvertently turning ColdFusion into quite an exclusive club.
Don’t believe me? Reel off the names of some well known ColdFusion celebrities… Ray Camden, Ben Nadel, Ben Forta, Et al. I’ll bet if you’re a ColdFusion developer, you’ll know who those people are. You’ll have read their blog posts, be aware of projects they’ve done. You’ll probably be able to list 10 more without too much trouble…
Well, you shouldn’t be able to do that – because the list should be huge. If we were talking about PHP, there’d be maybe 5,000 people in that list. In ColdFusion there’s maybe 20.

Let me explain…
I’m a freelance web developer, who happens to favour ColdFusion as my back end language of choice. It should be as simple as deciding which language is right for the task, or which you feel most comfortable using, but with ColdFusion there’s more to consider.
First and foremost, I have to think about hosting the websites I create. If I were a PHP developer, I’d have the pick of pretty much any host you can think of. Hundreds of thousands of web hosting companies the world over and every single one of them offer PHP as standard with all their packages, right? For us ColdFusion developers though, it’s a much tougher choice. We have to find hosting companies that specifically cater to ColdFusion developers. Not an easy task. I’ve had accounts with ColdFusion hosting companies both here and in the US, and in my experience they’ve nearly all been so unreliable as to be detrimental to my business and reputation. It’s an issue we all face and I’ve had numerous conversations with other ColdFusion developers on the subject; finding a reliable ColdFusion hosting company is difficult. It’s a case of getting what you pay for, and a reliable CF host costs far more than a reliable PHP host, because a CF license is expensive for a hosting company to invest in.

CFML Developer = Part time sysadmin

The conclusion most of us come to eventually, is that it’s far easier to host our sites ourselves, getting a dedicated server or VPS with a reliable host, and installing ColdFusion onto it.
Now, aside from the huge cost of a ColdFusion licence, what this means for us is that nearly every ColdFusion developer has to have a sideline as a sysadmin. I’ve learned from experience that being a good sysadmin is a full time job on its own. This means there are a bunch of novice sysadmins out there, running their own servers through necessity – novice sysadmins mean insecure systems. Before you know it, we have ‘ColdFusion is insecure‘ rumours floating about the web. Just what we need.

What this also means is less choice for our clients. With every new client, I have to have the same conversation: “I need to let you know that if you take up my services, we will need to move your site to another hosting company, or host the site on my own servers“. This isn’t so much of a problem for enterprise clients, but at my end of the scale, speaking to small companies with even smaller budgets and a knowledge of how the web works that is even smaller still, these words are strange and daunting and often a dealbreaker.

Most of my clients have never heard of ColdFusion. They’ve never heard of PHP either, but wheras with a PHP developer they could continue to live in blissful ignorance, with a ColdFusion based solution they will quickly learn that ColdFusion requires a hefty licence fee or at least more expensive hosting.

The situation gets worse too, because apparently ColdFusion cannot reliably be run in a shared hosting environment. “What?? That’s ridiculous!!!” Yes it is, and I would never have thought it were it not for a conversation I was having recently with Andy Allan of Fuzzy Orange. (We all know who he is too, right? See? CF… good if you want to be famous, bad if you want an easy life.) All this time I was thinking that most CF hosting companies were complete morons, incapable of offering a reliable service, but in fact it seems that they’re at a disadvantage right from the beginning because CF Enterprise sandboxing has numerous problems that plague the everyday plight of the sysadmin.

Now, it’s my contention that if this is the case, it should be a huge priority for Adobe, but apparently it’s not.

The big picture

ColdFusion is less used than PHP and ASP. That’s a fact. I’ve heard a million arguments about enterprise users and fortune 500 companies, etc. We as a community are constantly battling against the ‘Coldfusion is Dead’ bullshit and frankly, I’m with you guys. It’s very much alive, very much out there and being used all over the place… great, but you can’t deny that PHP is the most widely used back end language.

This has a knock-on effect for us. It makes it more difficult to sell ColdFusion as a solution to clients. It’s easy for our competition to mis-inform. I’ve lost clients to PHP because of higher hosting costs, I’ve even lost a client to an SEO cowboy who claimed that ColdFusion was ‘Bad for SEO’.  The fact is that ColdFusion is less known and less used than the free alternatives, and we as a community are constantly trying to raise awareness, spread the word and in many cases, defend our beloved language.

How exactly can we make ColdFusion more prevalent when so few hosting companies offer it as an option? How can we encourage new developers towards CFML, when they’ll also need to learn about how to set up and manage servers in order to use it reliably?
The answer I usually hear is that if there’s enough demand for ColdFusion, then bigger hosting companies will offer it as a service. But that’s a chicken / egg argument. How will the demand grow, unless it’s there as an option for the masses? How many PHP developers began their learning solely because they needed to update or configure a PHP app they were using such as WordPress or PHPBB. Why are there no real CF ‘killer apps’ like WordPress and PHPBB?

The way I see it, CF will remain mostly at enterprise level, behind the scenes, until such time as it comes as standard with many, many more hosting packages. And this won’t happen as long as it’ll cause a support headache for the big hosting companies. We can all argue about the price of CF, but that’s not really the concern for the big hosts, they can get bulk discounts anyway… their problem is that if they offer CF in a shared hosting environment, they will have reliability problems, and will eventually have someone like me announcing to the world that they’re a bunch of useless wankers.

Railo to the rescue!

Sure, I know there are a lot of people out there who will tell me that Railo is the answer to all of this. It’s free, it’s fast, it’s open source and the community are great. I agree on all counts, and indeed I’m now offering reliable hosting to my clients with my own servers running  Railo. Brilliant.
But it’s not the answer to everything.

Firstly, Railo has only really come into its own, at least in my opinion, over the last year. About 18 months ago I tried to make the move to Railo and there were just too many bugs and inconsistencies for it to be a viable solution. It simply wasn’t capable of running my apps, or at least not without some serious reworking of a lot of functionality. V3.1.2.001 has changed all that, and it’s now able to handle damn near everything I throw at it – but it still contains bugs. The Railo community are great and bugs, once identified, are fixed quickly – but this means that I as a developer have to spend some of my time testing & reporting. Sometimes I run into a brick wall with something I’m working on, and have to wait for a fix from the Railo team before I can move forward with it. That’s fine, it’s the nature of open source and I’m very happy to be contributing to the project, finding issues in a live real-world environment – but it’s still unpaid man-hours that I wouldn’t have to deal with, were I using Adobe ColdFusion.

Secondly, while there are community members out there doing great work on installer projects, posting tutorials and the like, there’s still a much steeper learning curve in the setup of Railo compared to ColdFusion. What you’re rewarded with is a much faster CFML engine, Railo’s lighting fast compared to ACF, but the point I’ve been making throughout this post rant is that I don’t want to be a sysadmin, I don’t want to have to learn about application servers and web servers, I just want to code bloody CFML!

What’s the answer?

Hell, I don’t know… but it occurs to me that the CF community is fighting a constant war against misinformation, defending CFML to clients and colleagues alike. The community as a whole seems to want to raise awareness of ColdFusion, and if indeed this is the case, then I think Adobe needs to take a serious look at who they’re aiming at.
As Andy pointed out, most of Adobe’s CF customers are enterprise, so they may not see hosting companies as a big sales generator… but it never will be be unless the sandboxing issues are resolved. Meanwhile, it’s people like us who suffer. This isn’t a concern if you’re a CF developer working in a bluechip traded company with a huge IT budget, but if you’re a freelance developer with a love of ColdFusion, this should matter to you and I think it’s time Adobe looked at the big picture – A lack of reliable CF hosts is a barrier to entry, which means less CF developers in the wild, and a harder time for those already out there.

Filed under: ColdFusion, Railo, Servers, Website Development.

17 Comments

  1. Andy Allan

    Sep 15th, 2010
    11:27 am

    One thing that didn’t come up in our conversation is that hosting companies are offered a HUGE discount on Enterprise license pricing. The hosting company still needs to invest by purchasing X number of licenses, but their license fee isn’t anywhere near as expensive as you’d imagine.

  2. Andy Allan

    Sep 15th, 2010
    2:38 pm

    HostMediaUK have just made available their ColdFusion packages, which range from free through to £20 per month.

  3. Ben Nadel

    Sep 15th, 2010
    7:26 pm

    I’ve been trying to attend non-CF related meetups lately and part of that is the fun of spreading the good word about ColdFusion. The reaction I get the most often when I tell people I am a ColdFusion developer is, “People still use ColdFusion?”

    Hopefully I can do my part to help get the word out.

    I know that a lot of what you’re saying has more to do with the support ecosystem for ColdFusion devs… but we can work on both ends.

  4. Raymond Camden

    Sep 15th, 2010
    11:57 pm

    Personally I’m tired of the “There are more PHP hosts” and “There are more PHP OS apps” arguments. By that logic every platform should just wrap things up, close up shop, and we should all be using PHP. This isn’t a popularity contest. CF continues to grow but will most likely never surpass PHP in total # of sites, developers, but that certainly isn’t a complete failure on the part of Adobe.

    If I’m being successful, which means deploying applications to my clients, then I’m not going to be concerned if I’m using the #1 popular language.

    “Why are there no real CF ‘killer apps’ like WordPress and PHPBB?”

    Again – who cares? There are many successful OS CF apps. As successful as WordPress? No. I agree with you there. That doesn’t mean CF/OS is dead. It’s got room to grow – and has grown – over time. More CFers need to get involved, thats for sure, and something we as a community need to improve on.

    I guess I’m arguing the same point again. But I think it’s important to focus on the fact that we can deliver results to our clients today – despite not being as popular as PHP, and maybe we should focus more on that and less on “Size Matters” type arguments. 😉

  5. a CF fan

    Oct 29th, 2010
    8:45 am

    Hi all,
    I can’t agree with the post that “Adobe did”, what Adobe did is that
    it gave huge impression for ColdFusion to public, as ColdFusion is a competent
    server-scripting tool like asp.net,php etc.
    I can see a very huge demand for CF in here in India. Because most of the outsourcing jobs are coming to here. All the big MNC’c here are
    putting the same title in jobsites like “Very Urgent need for CF developers”
    They are ready to give huge pay/hikes also. Even my php friends started studying Cf tutorials also to get an entry to Cf-world because of this hot situation. And this all happened is after the recession for the past one year…

    CF is getting huge muscles by customers, and Adobe(along with all Cf evangelists) is the blood for its growth…

    Thanks

  6. James Plesk

    Jan 14th, 2011
    12:30 am

    I’ve been coding in CF for over ten years. So many times I’ve heard that ASP and PHP are going to swallow up the web and create a revolution in online technologies. The first part is kinda true, the second part is well… nothing much has changed.

    Personally I find it easier now that CF is an Adobe product, as my (Govt) dept has a licence agreement for all Adobe products which means a big discount on software , plus brand recognition makes it easier to explain to non-tech people where I’m coming from.

    I admit I don’t do many outside projects that involve moving the client to CF hosting, as it’s too much hassle. I have 4 CF hosting servers and if they client can’t be located there, it’s unlikely to happen.

    In the end, I ignore techies and go straight to management (which is what MS have been doing for zonks, and getting away with it). Management are back-end agnostic, they just want reliable,user friendly web apps. The cost of CF server software is nothing compared to wages.

  7. Mark Cadle

    Aug 25th, 2011
    4:47 am

    This argument is worn out as you stated in your title. I think what most people miss is the enterprise capabilities for VERY low cost in CF. Sure, PHP is great for people who want to run WordPress or PHPBB, but companies need more than that and thats where CF fills the bill. CF is not the ideal platform for your typical website, I give you that, but CF is the ideal platform for businesses. ( I think I already said that).

    This is why. Take what all you can do with CF and price it out to get the libraries for .NET, ASP, or PHP – that is where the cost starts to add up. PDF rendering/reading, Excel reading/writing, multi-datasource reporting (a la Business Objects), ability to use Crystal Reports (BO), encryption libraries, geez what else can it do. I am sure Ray can jump in here, but my point is a lot of the other popular “free” alternatives do not offer these libraries built-in. You have to go buy them and some can fetch very hefty pricing. There are some free libraries out there, but more oft than not (in my experience at least) companies want to pay someone so they can hold the feet to the fire when it goes wrong.

    Having said all of that, I found this blog post because I was actually working on integrating CF into WordPress. So, I am not biased. I do use both. :o)

  8. StillNovice

    Mar 13th, 2012
    3:52 pm

    “PHP” who cares, I have created a Picture gallery In CF which is far far better than PHP and i bet nobody in PHP can beat it

  9. zack b

    Mar 13th, 2012
    6:14 pm

    I beg your pardon, but is anyone here a software engineer? Why on earth would anyone in their right mind use CF in these days and times! Go learn something useful

  10. n-smith

    May 14th, 2012
    7:49 pm

    What about the open source and FREE CF engines. If CF wants to survive, I think support for Railo and Open BlueDragon has to be the way forward. It integrates nicely into any Java enterprise server and does virtually everything, if not more than the Adobe CF can do. Adobe are killing CF. Try finding the product even on their homepage? They are not interested in it, one bit!

  11. Martin Parry

    Jun 3rd, 2012
    5:32 am

    * Zak b – You’re a poop! I bet you still code in Pascal!
    * Ben N – People are arses – I even have a PHP/Designer that hand crafts his CSS and code using fricken notepad – WTF!
    * James Plesk – ASP/.NET – OVER complex
    *.* – Perhaps if Adobe made the core (not developer version) free as a foundation to selling the rest of their products then perhaps takeup may be better – Saying that, I would like to start working on some comparisons for coldfusion.com.au where we have PHP vs .NET vs CF so people can actually see how much better the code looks and how much easier it is to create. Anyone fancying submitting some? pop me an email martin@incubate.com.au

  12. Al Serize

    Jun 27th, 2012
    6:18 pm

    The selling point of PHP is that it’s always been known as FREE and although it takes a lot of more work to build something in PHP, the fact that it’s free calls attention from both new developers and startups. This is why there are more PHP developers than ASP, Coldfusion, Ruby, .net, etc. With more PHP developers out there, you will find a lot of applications being built in PHP and more awareness of what PHP is. It’s difficult for some people to understand that they have to pay for a server side scripting engine. Now, the CFML community is also at fault for not being as active as the PHP community, save Ben Nadel attending non-CF related meetups (JK Ben… I appreciate your blog, it has save me a lot of time), we should be doing more things like: https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1004580

  13. Steven

    Sep 14th, 2012
    2:42 am

    Coldfusion is still around and happy and kicking pretty well.

  14. scott fort systems

    Aug 9th, 2013
    11:57 pm

    I think the above post is right on. Adobe really needs to step up and make CF available and accessible (pricing, etc…)

    We love CF and need to hire more top flight programmers who love CF.

  15. cf lover

    Apr 30th, 2014
    6:52 pm

    I love cf , i’m doing some research who using cf , i found fuge big list (many banks, financial , university, powerful web application etc )

    I hope coldfusion wil really rock … please try to use coldfusion it 100 times better that PHP or .NET

  16. theox

    Apr 8th, 2015
    7:39 pm

    kinda late to the party here but, here’ my two cents:
    1- CFML as a language is specialized for data driven websites.
    2- CF as a server (the collection of jars and compilers, etc) is specialized for data driven website
    3- CFML as a language is specialized to run on a CF server.

    My point is, CF and CFML are very much have pigeonholed themselves to a very, very specific market. This might have been fine 10 years ago but today the computing market is not what CF/CFML was intended for.

    THIS IS THE PROBLEM.

    How to fix it? It’s the same advice you give to a single friend. Put yourself out there.

  17. theox

    Apr 8th, 2015
    8:08 pm

    CFML deux proposal:

    1- runs on android, iPhone, etc.
    2- runs embedded, or on “any” architecture
    3- runs standalone for sysadmins, DBAs, scripters, etc.
    4- runs on any virtual machine, any runtime
    5- runs on a hybrid app/dba server, that runs on all the above
    5b- comes as a complete server, like LAMP
    6- keeps on running on things it runs on now
    7- there is a baseline compatibility between all the above
    8- CFML slows evolving
    9- becomes RPM,YUM etc compatible
    10- becomes playstore, itunes, etc friendly
    11- open source versions of all the above should be forked to try all the above and iterate development in a RAD lifecycle, a la RedHat.
    12- All major releases should coincide with major releases of hardware and major OSs

About

Simian Enterprises is the trading name of Gary Stanton, a freelance web developer working by the sea in Brighton, UK. Gary's been creating websites since 1996 and still loves it. Read more

Contact

Gary Stanton

Email:

Tel:
01273 775522

Twitter

No public Twitter messages.

Delicious Feed

Website Design & Development