State of the CF Union 2020 Survey (Final Results)

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I would develop in CF as a hobby or do more sidework, including pushing clients to CF, if hosting was affordable.

Moving to Lucee ASAP due to Adobe aggression. Eventually away from CF entirely due to difficulty in finding experienced talent.

Fyi - Some of the questions didn't apply. I am currently retired and developing on my own. I have switched to using Lucee and MySQL due to cost. Using Visual Studio Code as my IDE due to cost. I am not a fan of Adobe's insistence that we have to use the cloud for development. I am working towards providing small business an alternative to using the cloud and using open source in order to control costs.

We as CFML developers need to provide to our clients and businesses an alternative to using Adobe or other languages.

We are in the process of migrating from CF to .NET core. After having more than 10 years of experience, its difficult to give up that experience but as a CF developer I need to think of my future. I was in the job hunt for 4 months and luckily I was able to get a job. My new company (yet to join) is hiring me due to I am having experience in .net core, so they can migrate from CF.

My job hunt was not that great at all. Most of the jobs are in east course and most of them are govt jobs. They are not even 5 jobs in California (Whole state), Texas(Tech companies moving here), New York, Seattle or Chicago where other languages have plenty of jobs available. I really wish CF do well, it served me very well.

Thank you for creating this survey.

I love cf. But my company is now stuck on a vicious cycle where a) they have not been able to afford to keep up the licensing that they would need, leading to a massive outdated codebase and performance issues so b) all the non cf developers speak of it with derision because of this. I try to remind them when performance issues arise that maybe this wouldn't be an issue if we weren't on such an old version, but the funds are not there.

How well both ACF and Lucee handle serverless/lambda will determine how much of a future CFML has going forward.

Doing my first major project on Lucee after 21 years as solely a ACF developer. If Lucee had much better error messages and logs as good as ACF it would quadruple in market share. Seems like only Java developers find them adequate. But developers don't like to waste time on such stuff sadly.

You killed yourself by making the servers too expensive.

Make the servers WAY cheaper (read: 95%) and you have a chance of competing against .Net core, python, Ruby and PHP.

Otherwise, just watch your business slowly die (as you have for the past 15 years).

Honestly, what do you have to lose at this point?

If not for Lucee we would be off CFML faster than you can blink an eye. We just principally don't believe in paying for a programming language. Period. Even if ACF cost $20 per year we would be out. For us, there's really nothing any CFML engine does (or could do) that can justify ANY cost. We can do everything just as quickly and easily in Python, Node, Ruby, etc. So while we enjoy programming in CFML, we wouldn't lose a bit of sleep flipping the switch to something else. So as long as there is a current/maintained FOSS engine, we will continue to program in CFML.

Thank you for continuing to do this.

You need to fix the question about source control, it doesn't list Git, only git hosting services, but does list other source control software, like Mercurial, SVN and CVS, plus it lists things that are not source control, like Beyond Compare and zip files. I would suggest splitting this into two questions next year, one for the source control system used and one for the source control hosting service used.

none

I use Lucee at home now, CF11/CF2018 at working (we're migrating slowly)

I think it's great, but I'm growing tired of fighting against all the weird negativity around it. I hope Lucee can change the view of CFML.

I don't mind being contacted about any of my answers, but I don't think any answer I've given is particularly interesting!

Thanks for doing the survey.

Try to give chances for CF freelancer. Because we can easy find a other language free lancer dev. But CF won't. So if small level dev get a chance like me 🙂 then we increase the CF dev count. Getting projects it too difficult. Thank you.

Still i am a developer, so i just did the survey based what i have used till now

What happened to all the Books? Where is the EdX, Udemy and Coursera courses? Why isn't there a dev version of the API Manager? Why isn't their full type-ahead in CFSCRIPT block in CFBuilder like in Visual Studio and Sublime Text -

Thank you,

I have enjoyed a few of your youtube casts (eg with Nolan) - it would be even better if you were able to show some coding in your videos too (ie the actual code you're discussing). thanks very much.

Too many companies (this one included) seem "eager" to switch to .NET yet don't really understand what they're getting themselves into. If there was a truly GOOD comparison of CF vs. Dot Net, it might help.

We need a quality Linting tool and a live debugger.

I think it is really sad that Adobe does a terrible job of marketing this super powerful and easy to use solution especially to startups and educational institutions... This would both fan the flames of the solution being more mainstream and hopefully create a larger community of entry level programmers to feed other dev teams around the world as needed.

ColdFusion is past its prime and is no longer applicable. Only work in it to support legacy systems. It doesn’t have the architecture and open source nature to support modern microservices architecture. It still assumes monolith big server running lots of apps instead of lots of small applications independent in code base running in containers or as independent compiled applications running behind reverse proxy. It also doesn’t have default tooling like test framework for unit testing (TDD).

I think the CF/Lucee community really needs a MAJOR tech vendor or platform to embrace CF and promote it as a great solution. Otherwise, it is going to continue to be seen as a back end legacy platform.

Thanks for Lucee! Kudos to the team!

It would be nice to be able to rank the choices in questions 40 and 41 and I think it would give you more insight.

Seriously, you need to address the pricing and the grow the community. No one wants to pay those prices for the features in Enterprise. Sure, my company uses ACF, i need to use Lucee because its too expensive for hosting or a license of enterprise.

Everyone thinks its old, not sure why because python, php are all just as old. People don't want to use CF because they think its old. It's hard for me to keep the company positive on it even though it works.

Adobe is not doing a good enough job showing IT that CF is NOT OLD, NOT DYING. I know you try to bust the myth, but it isn't working.