ColdFusion CAN make a comeback

Posted At : January 9, 2008 10:50 AM
Related Categories: ColdFusion

Over the last year, I have been involved in a lot of debates about ways to improve ColdFusion's market share. One common argument I heard from people was this: "ColdFusion is old news, and can never make a comeback in such a crowded market. People can't be convinced to change away from their preferred platform." Well, I think that's just rubbish, and here's some evidence that I'm right.

Apparently Python has been making a comeback, and has become pretty popular. Some of the old programmers at my job have been talking about using Python for server scripting tasks, and Tiobe has called Python the Pragramming language of 2007. The interesting thing is that Python is older than ColdFusion, and it has had a reputation of being for beginners (same as ColdFusion). According to Wikipedia, Python was first released in 1991.

So, I say that if Python can become popular again after all these years, there's nothing stopping ColdFusion from doing it. That's IF Adobe can make it happen with good market positioning and product pricing.

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LOL. We're waiting for COBOL...

Python does seem cool. The Zope project always intrigued me.

Guess the question is WHY it's enjoying a comeback? It is open source, free, and has several good IDEs (unlike CF).
# Posted By Jim Priest | 1/9/08 11:22 AM
Look at this and cringe: http://www.diveintopython.org/http_web_services/in...
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 1/9/08 11:52 AM
From reading articles and blog posts it sounds like dynamic languages are making a come back due primarily to Test Driven Development. Scripting languages and dynamic languages do not have the stigma they once had if there is sufficient test coverage.
# Posted By Kris Brixon | 1/9/08 12:46 PM
Brian, I'm not sure why we should "cringe". Drop someone who doesn't know CF in the middle of an article discussing webservices and XML parsing and I expect they'd have the same reaction.
# Posted By Michael Long | 1/9/08 1:37 PM
I'm assuming you have to be kidding, because opening a file or calling a web service in ColdFusion is about 3 lines of code. And that doesn't even touch on XML parsing (http://www.diveintopython.org/xml_processing/index...).

Python might be cool, I don't know, I don't use it. But if these examples are any indication, it takes a whole lot of work to do what CF gives you out of the box.
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 1/9/08 1:52 PM
I know people will yell and scream, but I don't see CF making in roads into any space while it remains Tag based and not OO.

If you keep CF as is and add full <CFSCRIPT support and a bit more OO, then the people from all the other languages might consider it again.

No one writing ECMA style scripting is going to move to a TAG based language in a hurry, to much yuck factor.

ColdFusion also like to be different, why is a component not a class for example, it make no sense to be different. Look at the competitors.

PHP - Script and OO
.NET Script and OO
Java Script and OO

CF Tags and Kinda OO

But Adobe maintains that CF is different and people don't want script and OO. But all the developers who still use CF that I know do.
# Posted By Dale Fraser | 1/9/08 3:59 PM
What you have to understand is that the people who want script-based and OO features in CF are an extremely small minority of the total CF developer base. Forta himself said that the vast majority of customers that he talks to have never even used a CFC before. They use CF because it makes common tasks brain-dead easy. That's it. They couldn't care less if it's called a component or a class.

The end result is that CF will remain tag-based, if not forever, then for a looooong time.

As an aside, I'd be interested to hear why you think PHP is "more OO" than CF. What does PHP's OO implementation do that CF's does not?
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 1/9/08 4:15 PM
another example of an old(er) language making a comeback is Ruby. First released in 1995, all it took was a good framework (Rails) from a sexy web company (37Signals) to make it popular.
# Posted By duncan | 1/10/08 12:39 AM
@Dale - you lost me there. You want ColdFusion to go all script and OO. Um...then it won't be ColdFusion. That's like saying, "I would really love this apple if it were only a orange." If you want a orange, then go get an orange...
# Posted By Brian Rinaldi | 1/10/08 5:31 AM
I am confused a little by the premise of this blog post because for something to make a comeback it had to go away in the first place. Personally I don't think CF went anywhere if anything it is more heavily used now than ever before and is absolutely well rooted in large Enterprise environments. That is quite amazing when you consider that ever since CF came out it had to be purchased and that Microsoft launched its own onslaught with ASP. As a thought point, Netscape just recently disappeared totally. Are there some articles somewhere showing that CF is diminishing in usage?

I also concur with Brian in that the vast majority of CF installs I have come across are non-OO and sadly those I have come across where pure OO was attempted with CF were not very inspiring and typically totally confusing.
# Posted By Mike Brunt | 1/10/08 7:47 AM
@Mike,

I have heard from other early web developers that CF was "all the rage" in the first couple of years that it was out, simply because all the other options at the time were extremely difficult to use. But I wasn't a web developer back then, so I don't know this from personal knowledge.

But even if CF doesn't make a "comeback", the main point of this post is that CF CAN make a large market share grab, if things are handled properly.
# Posted By Jake Munson | 1/10/08 10:28 AM
@Brian

I want them to support full <CFSCRIPT so that if you don't want to write tags, then you don't have to.

That will apease me and anyone else out there who doesn't like writing tag code, which is big % of all developers out there.

When ever I have tried to convert a Java person to CF, they imediatly bawk at the tag syntax and lack of OO.

So why can't CF be both?
# Posted By Dale Fraser | 1/10/08 3:43 PM
@Dale,
How much more OO can you make coldfusion? What exactly is it missing that would make it more OO?
# Posted By CooLJJ | 2/11/08 8:53 AM
i love coldfusion and (as a full-time java developer @ csc) i prefer it to java. its meant to do web applications and it does a great job at it.

personally, i don't care if Coldfusion gets more OO features or not. i don't agree that it should compete with other OO scripting languages and the whole effort to get it recognized as a "real language" is foolhardy. theres always haters who don't know and never used it or tried it out a little but they like their language better.

the real way CF "can make a comeback" is to focus on performance improvements (such as the threading features of CF8, or Bluedragon)

my two cents
# Posted By realgt | 2/14/08 12:29 PM
@Brian,

Sure, writing a service from scratch with Python would be daunting. But the same would go with ColdFusion. I wouldn't want to write a web application using Python only either. I would use something like Django or TurboGears.

Here is the PyAMF module which lets Django talk to ActionScript:
First, define a gateway:
# yourproject/yourapp/amfgateway.py
from pyamf.remoting.gateway.django import DjangoGateway

def echo(data):
return data

echoGateway = DjangoGateway({'echo': echo}) # could include other functions as well

Then create a url for it:
# yourproject/urls.py

urlpatterns = patterns('',
# AMF Remoting Gateway
(r'^gateway/', 'yourproject.yourapp.amfgateway.echoGateway'),
)
# Posted By Jeff Self | 3/20/08 6:15 AM
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