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.
I think CF sells are more important than developers / user groups pressure. Adobe/CF is a commercial solution and they want to sell it. When this happens, there will be no problem at all.
But I believe, we also need to discuss CFML as a open source platform with or without Adobe. I think when Adobe decide to stop CF support, there would be some other solutions where we can use CFML because of it’s power. I mean I don’t see any problem about future of CFML (not CF itself).
@Oguz: You’ve heard of BlueDragon, yes ? That’s one of the reasons not to be afraid, and why CFML the language is already ‘out there’.
Bluedragon, Ralio etc. etc.
The main power is the community power which we do not have on CF community yet. As CF community we are still marginal and too closed to the open source world.
I mean we need some more time.