Over at Appli­ca­tion Gen­er­a­tion, Forta Blog and at An Architect’s View, there’s yet another iter­a­tion of the “long term via­bil­ity of Cold­Fu­sion” dis­cus­sions going on. Peter Bell, Ben Forta and Sean Cor­field are all smart cook­ies, and more than ade­quately elo­quent on the sub­ject mat­ter. That said, here’s my $0.02.

  • Adobe spent a lot of money acquir­ing Macro­me­dia and the good­will that went with its devel­oper com­mu­nity. Macro­me­dia before did the same thing when they acquired Allaire. Dump­ing CF, or any other of the “Macro­me­dia” apps is prob­a­bly too expen­sive a propo­si­tion to be seri­ously considered.
  • The “Cold­Fu­sion will go Open Source” idea is spec­u­la­tive at best and more likely sim­ply spu­ri­ous. There’s no buzz about it, except amongst those with poten­tial alter­nate agendas.
  • Despite the fact that CF has never had ade­quate, or even decent mar­ket­ing it has a sig­nif­i­cant installed user base that want to keep it.
  • Adobe con­tinue to do the Cold­Fu­sion name a great dis­ser­vice by fail­ing to make it a major, viable alter­na­tive to Java, .NET, RoR, PHP or insertflavorofthemonthplatformhere.
  • The net entry cost for Cold­Fu­sion is under US$5000 for hard­ware and soft­ware. That’s cheap. Even cheaper if you out­source your host­ing — Host­MySite will do the job for you for less than $US20/​month. Devel­oper licenses are free, so devel­op­ment cost is effec­tively nil plus devel­oper time.

I’m preach­ing to the choir here, as CF users, we all know how good it is and how easy to develop with it is as a platform.

Read the arti­cles linked above for deeper insight. Then, put pres­sure on Adobe to make Cold­Fu­sion a seri­ous viable alter­na­tive to the big play­ers. Then, and only then, will ColdFusion’s future be assured.