We have run the State of the ColdFusion Union Surveys for nearly 10 years now. This year was particularly inspiring. And interesting results too.
And special thanks to Brad Wood who helped me edit the survey questions and reviewed the results with me in two webinars. We have summarized all the ColdFusion analysis and commentary in this 72-page report. Highlights include:
- It's nice to see the ColdFusion 9 numbers finally shrinking.
- Lucee 5 is actually more popular than CF 10 or CF 2016.
- Reasons to have your laptop on Linux.
- What is the most popular framework? There's a lot of people still using a custom homegrown framework or they don't use a framework at all.
- Surprisingly ORM isn't an incredibly popular option in the ColdFusion community.
- What exactly is mocking and why should you be using it?
- Who wants to go through thousands of lines of codes just because you upgraded the server? How to avoid.
- IDEs and tools are always a good place for a healthy discussion among developers. And CFers are no exception.
- Most CFers are using Chrome and only fire up Firefox when Chrome is feeling sick for the week.
- The average age of web-based technologies is actually around 22 to 23 years. If you look at Java, Ruby, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, which is like 45 years old, the average language being used to write web applications is actually a bit older than ColdFusion. We're below average, but that's not to detract from the fact that the language is very mature. Food for thought.
- Who are the “darker dark matter” CFers that don't even go to conferences but they're still coding in ColdFusion?
- What aspects of ColdFusion are keeping you or your company from using it?
- Many ColdFusion developers aren't aware of the modern tooling and resources available. We give details on what you might be missing
- The difficulty of finding CF developers + the radical solution!
The whole report is available for download here
And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.
Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.
What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.
And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.
You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.
All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.
Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.
No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next
ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist
Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.
√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production
√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading
√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF
√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!
Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.
