ComputerWorld says ColdFusion is dead!
This paragraph is taken from a Computerworld article today that I saw on DIGG.
This once-popular Web programming language -- released in the mid-1990s by Allaire Corp. (which was later purchased by Macromedia Inc., which itself was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.) -- has since been superseded by other development platforms, including Microsoft Corp.'s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages. Debates continue over whether ColdFusion is as robust and scalable as its competitors, but nevertheless, premiums paid for ColdFusion programmers have dropped way off, according to Foote. "It was really popular at one time, but the market is now crowded with other products," he says.
Apple ran throught this about ten years ago with the Apple is dead, and Mac is Dead. Of course now Apple is stronger than they have ever been. As far as I am concerned this is another example of tech journalism going down hill.
It is also an example of Adobe not doing its job in marketing ColdFusion.
Look for more about this on my blog.
I agree that ColdFusion is not dead - because it is still being sold and used.
However, COBOL is also not dead by the same standard.
Apple was said to be dead and came back - this is true - but Apple is a company, not a product. Nobody is saying Adobe is dead!
IMHO The bigger and more successful the company is that owns ColdFusion, and the more its popularity declines, the less likely that company will be to maintain the product. Of course, if Adobe want to stay in this market segment and have no other means to do it, that may be a strategic reason to keep ColdFusion on life-support. But revenues must be falling steadily. It seems more likely that in that case Adobe would adopt some other technology base that had better traction and prospects like Ruby, Python or Java - all older than CF. Then they could concentrate on their core competency - visual design technologies - and layer it on top.
Flash and Dreamweaver are the reason Adobe bought Macromedia of course. Not Cold Fusion.
But without even entering the whole licensing cost debate, in terms of pure performance, Coldufsion is dog slow compared to Java or .Net, developer community is much, much smaller than PHP, and the CFML abstraction, which has always been its #1 attracting feature, makes writing object-oriented, clean code feel unnatural compared to Ruby, C#, .Net. Yes, you can write CFScript, but who the heck would want to specialize in a proprietary language?
Anyway, I could give you tens of case studies about projects rewritten from CF to other platforms, not one doing the opposite.
At this point Coldfusion's death is only a matter of time IMO. I would strongly advise any CF programmer to learn a different framework (RoR seems to be the big buzz, PHP the safest best), unless you're excited by the prospect of spending your time maintaining legacy apps.
I am sorry you do not see the point in a product that is easier to use that all of the languages you mentioned in your comments. You also said ColdFusion is slow and suggested that ColdFusion developers learn Ruby on Rails. Ruby and PHP both operate in Pcode which is much slower than code compiled into bytecode. Obviously you have not used ColdFusion since version 5. ColdFusion used to compile into pcode, but now compiles into bytecode.
I highly suggest you stop being so closed minded and give ColdFusion 8 a try. I happen to like using Java, C#, PHP, but all of these languages have all had "this language is dead" articles written about them as well. It does not mean they should stop being used.
Thus is another reason why CFis dead - the silly arguments that CF folk use to justify it. CF is not at all simpler than all the other languages mentioned, Ruby, for example, is far far simpler than CFML. It's just plain silly to say that CFML, which is programmin langauges like any other, si somehow simpler. Not true, best to say that CF, asa a scripting language, is simpler than a strongly typed language. And Ruby, PHP etc are all scripting languages with ALL of teh same concepts a CFML.
I guess it comes down to opinion on how easy a language is to use and learn. I judge a language's ease of use on how easy the language is to learn, and how many lines of code it takes to do certain operations. For instance how many lines of code does it take to query a database and display the results on a web page. This can be done with two tags or two lines of code in ColdFusion.
I consider Ruby to be one of the easier languages to learn of the popular scripting languages. Compared to Perl, Ruby is certainly easier to learn and use.
Most Ruby developers seem to use rails, which uses the active record pattern for querying databases. Rails is a framework where a lot of the heavy lifting is done for you.
Ruby suffers from a lot of the problems of other scripting languages like Perl and Python. For instance there is a lot of punctuation in these languages. And I would like to find out who thought it would be a good idea to extend a class with greater than symbol.
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