In “Is it dead?”, you quote an opinionated article and a blog post. In “Is it dying?”, you state “ColdFusion has zero mind share”, as if that is a fact. If that is a fact, then please provide references to that data. You also state “It’s not modern, it’s not exciting”, which is, again, an opinion. Others feel just the opposite. An opinion, by nature, is neither right nor wrong. It is not a fact, and should not be made to appear as fact.

Way to ignore the main point I’m making: that the opportunity cost of teaching people a proprietary, commercial application server solution in an age when application servers are commoditized is a disservice. I stand firmly by that assertion.

I have nothing against Coldfusion on a technical level. However, it’s the last technology I would recommend an aspiring developer to learn when there are far too many interesting and relevant open alternatives.

PS. People who don’t agree with you are not necessarily ignorant. Read the post again, understand the main argument and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Ignorance truly makes you say stupid stuff. You obviously do not know anything about ColdFusion today. That’s why you are getting fact checked left and right. I am sure it wasn’t your intention to look foolish, but maybe a bit of research could have save you the embarrassment. What worries me though is that you are ultimately dangerous. I mean you could be hurting the very young developer you are supposedly trying to protect. ColdFusion is a wonderful language and it has a very short learning curve. It makes development a pleasure, by allowing you to concentrate on solutions rather than the language. I would not call it easy, I think it’s clever. A lot of intelligence goes into making ColdFusion easy to use and this is what is often wrongfully underestimated by the narrow minded.

Those of us who love it see behind that apparent simplicity. In fact, I think, ColdFusion most impressive features is what it don’t make us do. It is a tagged language and using a tag will create objects, instantiate them, and add properties to them all in one line of code. Tell me that’s not cool? Want to do AJAX? No problem a few tags could generate most of the functionality you will ever need. Want to do some FLEX? No matter what you say there is not better back-end technology for FLEX than ColdFusion. Want to create a modern Object Oriented Web application using a the MVC design pattern? No problem ColdFusion has a variety of frameworks that give you more than just plain MVC. I am talking IoC, AOP, Factory, Builder, Prototype, Singletons, Adapter, Decorator, Facade, Proxy, Observer, etc. Plus a wealth of great features like ORM (some will even generate CRUD code for you), i18n, CFUnit (for Unit -Testing), et cetera.

Just for the record there are plenty of sites that use ColdFusion. Check this out (http://www.forta.com/CF/using/list.cfm?categ_id=17). And by the way ColdFusion lives in the cloud, yet another thing you got wrong. Again a bit of research could have safe face. If you don’t believe me just Google “ColdFusion cloud”.

Hope this helped,
Miguel Ulloa

You absoulutely have no idea what you are talking about.
ColdFusion is the backbone of our entire enterprise. It is
awesome to work with. We can rapidly develop applications and get them into production. WE HAVE NO PLAN IN DROPPING IT. AT ALL!

Many of the current fads, such as Rails, are anti-SQL and want to replace SQL with object databases or wrappers that look like object databases. Objects already lost the database fight because they cannot take advantage of set theory, but the hanger-on’s keep pushing it out of stubbornness or purity obsessions.

I suspect that someday a decent desktop-like GUI-over-the-web open standard will appear so that we don’t have to work with the e-brochure approach of hypertext markup-based technologies and buggy, version-sensitive JavaScript libraries. That will be the game changer. Until then, I’ve seen nothing that is a noticeable improvement over CF.

I also wanted to shout out to Ray C. and Stephan R. who also posted here in support of CF. Aral, across the pond in Canada, CF is actually taught is an introductory language of choice for up and coming computer progammers as a way to teach them the basics of programming. Believe it or not, when applying OOP and computer logic principles to CF, it can make a great framework for developing minds. With that toolset, they can readily see why 2 lines of CF can equal up to 10 lines in .NET code or 20 lines in J2EE code (which makes developers wonder why waste your time creating so many lines of code).

I do acknowledge though that CF is not a direct precursor to RIAs, but it is a “parent”. RIAs (in the Allaire/MM/Adobe world) are descendent of the Rich Applications visualized in Flash with the ease of coding of CF-type markup. If you happened to take a look at the Adobe curriculum, they espouse it as such. Indeed, many of the Flex tags related to charting, formatting and validation have their roots in CF. Equally noted (if you were around at that time) Flash 4 briefly had coding roots in VB with (at that time) Basic syntax that involved commands like “add” and “if..then”.

So before you espouse a language as essentially dead, take a look at the wider audience. You’d be surprised that in spite of your tunnel like vision, CF has a niche in the programming environment, like .NET, J2EE, and even PHP.