State of the CF Union 2023 Survey Results 8. – Wrap up

no, it's really good 🙂

As part of a large organization, it's tough to tell whether I should answer questions for my department or the whole org.

Please add CFDynamics to the list of hosting providers. We serve lots of customers and have great staff. We are not "in your face" so we get overlooked.

Seeing Flex in the list of langs/frameworks is interesting. Flash is completely dead at this point. Nobody should be doing Flex anymore, right?

Thank you for taking the time to query the CF community with this "State of the CF" questionnaire.

Though CFML has many positives (whether Lucee or ACF), a huge downside seems to be the isolation in which CF and the community exists when you want to plug into the popular tools that the rest of the world is using. No server SDKs, no support....it's always roll your own. Examples: https://stripe.com/docs/libraries, https://developers.klaviyo.com/en/docs/sdk_overview, https://developer.paypal.com/braintree/docs/start/overview

Thank you for helping to keep the CF alive!

It's long!

Biggest frustration continues to be adoption. From WebApper's ColdFusion 2023 article:

"The Offramp Remains"
"A few ColdFusion stalwarts bristled at our article about leaving CF altogether. Truth be told, it’s been one of our most popular posts, which speaks volumes about market sentiment. Although we still actively host, maintain, and support many ColdFusion and Lucee systems, we expect to see increasingly fewer new projects using CFML in any form. The numbers don’t lie — so we’re focusing on starting new projects using cloud native, which doesn’t apply to CFML. We’ll keep engines running, applying the Strangler Pattern where possible and building new systems using APIs & microservices."

Bootstrapped a successful SaaS startup from scratch thanks to CFWheels! Love Ortus but Wheels wins thanks to it's user-friendliness, I see Coldbox as a tool for the super genius devs that can easily absorb hyper complex documentation. CFWheels gets out of the way and gives you the simplest ORM and Form helpers out of the box with great plugins.

It is a shame people do not understand good things are obtained with hard work, which must be rewarded. CF may be considered an expensive solution, but the benefits of using it pay it all off.

I am a great supporter of CFML using Coldbox and Lucee server. If only they could make my life easier:
1 - by providing updated templates for elixir, VueJS and InertiaJS that are compatible with Vue3 and do not include Quick ORM and H2 SQL powered Testbox by default. Re-working the existing templates to achieve this simple objective is a major pain point.
2 - an easier and more cost effective deployment path to AWS AMI based instances.

Both Adobe and Lucee have promised us serverless solutions yet we hear nothing at all from them.

way too long, this survey

Thanks for keeping the survey going, great questions that have stimulated me to look at some new tools this year. Cheers, Matt

The silence and lack of participation in the ACF alpha and beta programs is deafening. A great portion of the sparse participation is even from people who rarely or no longer code in CFML. I have been in every beta for the past several releases and this decline in participation has gotten progressively worse, but this one is remarkably morgue-like every time I login.

Also, the lack of language improvements is just sad. I realize that Adobe caters to a different crowd, but there is basically not a single improvement to the core language - whether a tidying up past architectual decision gaffes or providing new "language" functionality/syntactic-sugar/whatever.

This release seems to be about a few large bolt-on technologies that I'm sure will appeal to some (not me) but as it stands I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would get even a little bit excited about, let alone pay to upgrade to, this version?

What a complete let down.

Please. We need a dedicated CFML IDE for even more fun!

Great questions!

CF is Alive and Well. I've been using it in since version 1.5

Thank you for doing this!

Keep up the good work!

This is actually a good survey. Learnt a lot from taking the survey itself. Great work!

Keep up the great work on this survey and keep pushing CF.

Would love to see more CFML support in serverless with AMIs, Lambda & Load Balancing.

CFML is my happy place. It strikes the right balance of power and simplicity. It boggles my mind why a wider audience doesn't see this.