Below are the results for the 2015 State of the CF Union survey. See how you compare with other CFML developers. Discover what most developers use for tools, languages, databases, and development methods.
Can you help? If you are on a ColdFusion list, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google group please share the survey so that we can get a more complete picture of the current State of the CF Union. Thanks!
1. What version of CFML Engine do you use? (Check all that apply)
2. Comment:
I am a firm believer that this language has a very undeserved bad reputation. I won't say that there aren't warts, but it always amuses me when people talk about how their language of choice needs to implement X, and it's been a part of ColdFusion for years. I think one of the strongest features of ColdFusion has always been that it's easy to pick up and quickly be productive, but one of the biggest problems with it is that it is so easy to pick up. Every language lets you write crappy code, but for some reason, it just seems to be unforgivable in CF. I'm glad to see that there are still people innovating with the language, I just wish Adobe would figure out what to do with it and really get behind it.
plan to move to lucee
Lucee in dev – currently migrating production servers from Railo to Lucee
Switching over from Railo.
We run several servers
Looking to move from ACF to Railo for enterprise applications
Testing Lucee – not yet in production limited use of Adobe CF9&10 Railo 4.x still in use in many production environments.
CF11 being deployed this year
all my local ACF instances are developer edition, our cloud servers are Railo 4.x, probably Luceee soon, our customers are all over the map.
Testing CF 11.Will move in the next 6 months. Railo running MURA CMS.
Planning upgrade to CF11 in the next 3 months.
In the middle of an upgrade from CF9 to CF10
Would love to move to the latest and greatest… also wouldn't mind giving Railo or Lucee a shot, but it's not likely that my company will change which CFML engine they're running (other than bumping a version).
have a single standard copy of CF11, but still using 10
Moving to CF 11 in the next few months
CFML is dead
Although we have created many monogamous ColdFusion with MS SQL, MySQL, or Access databases we have had to rely on .NET or other backend engines to power complex logic.
In process of migrating CF 9 server to CF 11
When invoking webservices with basic authorisation jquery is much faster
On 9.0.2, upgrading to 11 by mid year for Java security reasons.
Upgrade from CF9 to CF10 was tough. CF10 was very buggy, but finally became stable. We've already purchased CF11 upgrades but have not installed them yet.
We are in the process of migrating from CF8 to CF11 for our apps server. We are using Railo 4 with Mura 6 for our CMS server.
Been needing to upgrade for a while now, would be looking probably at 10.
Should be eliminating CF9 in next few weeks. (Moving apps to Lucee)
We are currently using CF9 and CF10, upgrade to CF11 is already scheduled.
helloo world
We have legacy applications running on BlueDragon.net and some on OpenBluedragon. We are migrating everything else and all new work to Lucee.
I'm staying with CFML and will focus on using Lucee along with the Mura CMS. — Go Mura! 🙂
The dev tools in CFML are not keeping up.
Lucee is CFML's only hope.
Ants never sleep.
Currently migrating from Railo to Lucee
Will soon be moving away from ACF and going to Lucee
The end user is becoming more enterprise level applications (govt, banking, education) and less consumer public site based.
Using Railo 4.0 / Lucee in preference to ACF these days
will never use another non-FOSS product for dev again. period.
Move from CF9 over a year ago
Cf9 are legacy systems, newer systems are in railo, slowly transitioning to lucee
We have 100% secure and stable CF8 installations after years of work and tinkering. It does what the business requires. No business advantage to upgrade until we refresh our hardware.
Mainly still CF8 for production, planning on moving everything to Lucee in the next 12 months.
I'm only answering for “in production, in my day job”, not out of hours stuff. The wording of this survey is poor.
Will be moving to lucee
CF 9 is the last version of Adobe CF I will use – all future projects and web sites will be on Lucee
Currently using 9 and will soon be testing 11 to make sure there are no issues before moving to it.
Leaving CF for GOlang and some Node development.
Hello? Yes this is Patrick.
We are Trying to decide if we should switch to Lucee or go with CF11 Adobe has to much time between releases.
Apps that are running on Railo 3 -4 won't be moved to Lucee as they are large unstable codebases and will remain as they are mainly out of fear. We're embarking on a large and significant app/platform and will be running Lucee all the way.
We are moving from CFMX to CF10.
All new development is being done under Lucee
Java server-side code and libraries integrated
I have plans to use Lucee on some projects in 2015 but have not started them yet. These will not be projects using Lucee instead of Adobe CF, but in addition to Adobe CF.
Please make CF Standard Free so that the CF can grow. Sure leave a fee for enterprise, but please let people start using CF like they do PHP or .NET or Java, etc.
Considering lucee
our shop maintains legacy sites for clients; no new CF development
Using CF8 in production, CF9 at home, upgrading to CF10 at office eventually
I use CF 10 at the day job, Lucee for private work – have Windows servers at home on dev network, use Linux/Lucee with off site hosting
In the process of moving from ACF to Lucee
I'm generally Lucee all the way now. Honestly, the only reason why I still use ACF is when clients get shaky over what they consider unknown tech. It's silly but I legit have a client who refused to keep the site going unless it ran ACF as the cfml engine.
Our CF8 usage is all but gone and I hesitated to even check the box — but technically we “use” it still.
CF 11 not in production yet but hopefully it will be soon.
All new cf development (which is minimal) will be on Lucee
We have moved to Railo and now Lucee due to the cost of CF from Adobe.
We're NOT using Railo or Lucee in production. We had just started looking at moving to Railo about 7 months ago, then, the whole Lucee deal broke and now management is way too nervous to consider it for production use.
Main testing and live servers are cf10. My local dev is cf9 as I just haven't upgraded yet but other devs are on cf10 We have 1 cf7 server that we have not upgraded as it was running apps that have slowly been getting redeveloped or become obsolete.
we are currently moving cf9 apps to Railo
company switching to .net
I wish we could upgrade, but the cost is too much for Enterprise. May look into Railo
3. What type of CFML Engine are you running? (Check all that apply)
4. What CF Server OS are you using? (Check all that apply)
Other
unix
Solaris
none
Mac for dev work, windows and linux for production
Raspberry Pi
WAR
Likely migration to Linux this year
I have plans to build some small Intranet things in Linux soon, but have not yet started. I have used Linux for CF in previous years, depending on the client.
UNIX/Solaris
5. What OS do you run on your laptop/PC? (Check all that apply)
Other
MacBook Pro with Windows Server in a VirtualBox VM for dev.
VM of Linux
Linux via Vagrant/VM's on Windows 8.1
6. What browsers/client platforms do you support in your apps? (Check all that apply)
Other
IE9 and above only
(comment: limited mobile support)
Mobile is next. Just starting to work with Bootstrap.
Any that support HTML
Honestly I try to be fairly responsive to all browsers.
All our apps work on mobile but have not been specifically developed to mobile
Sort of
Chrome
7. Databases you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
AWS Aurora (testing)
ArangoDB
Cache
Redis
UniVerse
neo4j
Caché
IBM Universe
Casssandra
Derby, HSQLDB
Neo4j
Memcache
ProvideX (Sage 100 ERP)
Influx ElasticSearch
OrientDB
redbrick
Elastic
8. What code frameworks do you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
Normal cfml , others not Coldfusion
Konstruk
Taffy
we use a pre-release version of fusebox for the majority of legacy code. New development is moving toward a zero-framework REST API.
home grown
Fusebox1 & 4
Will likely be refactoring my apps with either FW/1 or Coldbox
NodeJS isnt a framework. It's a platform. How about Angular? Knockout? Do much modern application dev?
WTF? NodeJS isn't a framework, it's an application server like CF
CF's built-in framework (application.cfc/.cfm)
Ruby on Rails
CMS – PresideCMS
Taffy
Mura
custom
JustMVC
CMS-Xindi
rolled our own
CMF
Homegrown
Coldspring, MXUnit
“None” was checked because I still have some legacy apps being worked on that do not use an MVC framework.
Custom
Neptune
Will be moving to ColdBox within 1 year
Taffy
9. What JavaScript libraries do you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
Not as many as I probably should.
Prototype
ReactJS
EasyUI
We do have some YUI and Dojo in older app areas that we are working to refactor away.
openlayers
Prototype
bootstrap
Prototype
jQuery Mobile, possibly looking into React.js
half of these are frameworks and not libraries
prototype
MooTools
JumpStart
jQuery UI
Prototype.js
My own collection
Spry. wow, eh?
learning Angular
Reactjs
Dev Express
prototype
Aurelia
Reactjs
jQueryUI
Bootstrap.js, DataTables.js
React
reactjs
95% of js is custom but have used a little jQuery
Looking into Facebook's ReactJS
10. What CSS frameworks do you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
Fluid Baseline Grid
(comment: company has done some Bootstrap projects, but our product doesn't use it itself)
I use what comes with jQueryUI
LESS? SASS?
purecss.io
jQuery Mobile
skel
PureCSS
Custom/home grown
YAML
w/ Sass
Semantec
Homegrown loosely based on Bootstrap
htmlkickstart
Yahoo Pure
purecss
Homegrown
Google Material
gumby
semantic-ui
SASS
Gumby
Pure
11. What CFC dependance injection frameworks do you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
Will likely start using DI/1 or WireBox when I refactor.
LightWire
own
Dont know much about these
12. Which persistence frameworks do you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
home grown ODM
CFWheels Model
in-house orm for mongodb
PresideCMS Object Framework
DataMgr
cachebox
ORMs are evil
Dont know much about these
“None” was checked because I also use 2 “home grown” ORM frameworks on certain projects.
CFWheels ORM
CFWheels ORM
Home grown
DAO lib https://github.com/abramadams/dao
13. What testing and mocking frameworks do you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
home grown
custom
TinyTest (https://github.com/bennadel/TinyTest)
Casper, mocha, chai
Jenkins, nightwatch.js
nightwatch
Harness auto-generated test harnesses
JUnit, TestNG, Spock
Dont know much about these
RocketUnit
We are going to be looking into testbox
14. What CF features do you use for code reuse? (Check all that apply)
Other
CFModule
CFC is the only one being used for new development at this time.
good architecture
15. What do you use for source code control? (Check all that apply)
Other
Subversion
HP TeamSite
AccuRev
Dreamweaver Sync with occassional directory archiving
Serena
QVC/QWin
Fossil
Vault
dropbox versioning
BeanStalk
MKS Integrity
Windows Previous Versions
onedrive
Crushplan
Aldon
Gitlab
EMC filesystem snapshots
GitLab
dropbox
PTC Integrity http://www.ptc.com/application-lifecycle-management/integrity
Gitlab
Gitlab, Stash
Home spun code depoyment system
TFS
PVCS
I also use other source control providers that were not listed (Unfuddle hosts MORE of my projects than anything else does).
Seapine
Plastic
Custom
Sourcegear Vault
AWS CodeCommit
GitLab
SmartGit
GitLab
Borland StarTea
Only one developer uses git, me. I have to check in bosses changes for him because git is “too hard”. Want my job?
IBM ClearCase
16. What tools/IDEs do you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
PineGrow web designer
WinMerge
Atom
It might be worthwhile to include options for ColdFusion builder one, two, and three
Vim
vim
CommandBox
atom.io
PHPStorm
Atom
Vim
LightTable
Atom
Atom
joe
Vim
ActiveState Komodo
AtomIDE
Atom, Editpad Pro
Atom.io
EditPad
1st Page 2000
Atom
Excel
17. What Browser Dev Tools do you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
WebDeveloper plugin (Chrome, Firefox)
Web Developer toolbar
BrowserStack
Firefox Developer Edition
Firefox Developer Edition
Mostly Firefox
Chrome Batarang
18. How many years have you used CFML Engine?
19. How many years have you used OO?
20. Other languages/environments you use? (Check all that apply)
Other
Scala
Golang
Go
Drupal
Mendix
Pick Basic
C#
Bash
Go
Swift
LINGO
GOlang
Delphi
PowerBuilder
powershell
LESS, SASS, HTML5
C#
lots of those, but none are current
C, Assembler
21. How many CF developers at your organization?
Other
not sure
0
I'm assuming this selection is the one for 21-30 people
0
Unknown
Probably more out in the field.
None, I support COTS and older CF apps
Varies depending on the client
22. How many total employees at your organization?
23. How often do you attend Adobe User Group meetings?
24. Which conferences do you attend? (Check all that apply)
Other
CouchDB, ALPHA ANYWHERE
I used to attend Central PA CFUG and CFUnited
I enjoyed CFUnited
FOSS4G
FluentConf
(comment: haven't been to any in a long time)
Goverment employee – they no longer let us go to conferences! 🙁
Last one was the last CFUnited held in Bethesda
none since CFunited
haven't attended in 4 years
MongoDB Days
JavaOne
Wait
Don't regularly attend anything right now
Mainly Product/Agile conferences. And SotR ended in 2014
Local user group
Open CF Summit (defunct)
DrupalCorn
Nebraska Code Conference
RE:Invent (Amazon Web Services)
GopherCon
devnexus
I *used to* attend CF.Objective()
Used to go to CFUnited – none since
ng-conf
Stir Trek
Gopher Con this year. JS Conf.
Drupalcon
Cascadia.js
No longer attend
Depends on funding
many otters, less CF atm.
ng-conf
I did attend CFUnited once.
Not every year, but try to get to SOTR when we can
SenchaCon
CFUnited, when it was still there
None in Mexico
25. What type of mobile development frameworks are you using?
26. What are your current CFML Engine challenges? (Check all that apply)
Other
Charting
missing null support
Poor product development and focus. ColdFusion is not keeping up with modern application development patterns. Adobe is far to focused on things that don't matter for real platform development.
CFXML handlng large xml strings
Integrated Interaction with AWS components/services
too easy to write horrible, awful code that runs in spite of itself
web service issues
PDF rendering times too long
no good CF IDE meaning Homesite worked great, but it's no longer available.
designing and bulding good software in any language is hard!
I work for a major university phasing out cfm and freelance for a couple of non-profits, one of which is moving to another web designer using wordpress/php…
Adobe Support is abysmal
All code being migrated to Java/JSP
Hoping Lucee will resolve a lot of the issues
Fear of losing CR Report Builder! We have a huge investment in it.
Lack of online ecosystem like Rails has
Java security in older versions. Finding sufficiently skilled ColdFusion devs
cf's community is too small and inactive its a dead language
CF too expensive
bad OO in CF
Closed Community – difficult to get involved in developer community projects.
ORM implementation not great, debugging terrible, bad optimization
I checked the OO option, but not for me–fire candidates and colleagues.
Only using CFML to support “legacy” apps. Have moved to Python
Toxic, pushy, rude community members drive away new people or silence existing ones.
lack of innovation on core technology, poor connector and tuning options, poor performance monitoring
bad pdf's tie threads and crash server
Dreamweaver dropping support for CF
We need a package manager to allow the ColdFusion tools to be tailor to the needs of the app. I do this with NodeJS, it would be great to be able to do it in ColdFuison. This will help with performance, scalability and even security because the less functionality the less security holes.
AngularJS/Grails preferred; CFML good for views and controllers in past, but AngularJS more powerful and Grails preferred for building RESTful APIs
CF is bloated
tooling, code quality, infosec scanners, etc.
Maintenance of CF by Adobe
CF fell behind the curve. Example: NoSQL support like Cassandra or AWS and so much more. Even things like OAuth2 are hard now in CF. Open source never really took off in the community
No time to refactor aging framework
small community, few FOSS modules, patchy tooling
Other platforms are just more popular now.. e..g drupal with large community contributed modules
Slow reinit times, time wasting waiting on compiling CFML; auto-boxing and blackbox of CF methods (esp. numerical types where sometimes 1!=1 because 1 is 1.00000000000000001)
Timeouts that dont timeout…killing hung processes
our tech/client focus is now Kentico CMS (non-CF)
screw cool, I been at CF since before it was uncool 🙂
Recent (9+) versions of Adobe CF lacking in quality.
PDF compatibility issues
I only checked performance, scaling and JVM issues because I'm the person that clients from around the world come to to resolve those issues.
testing
Not specific to CFML, but developing good architectural solutions is an ongoing challenge for me
Complete lack of competency by the Adobe CF team. They are not in touch to what web developers need.
Lack of CF OS projects, libraries and off the shelf apps
Needing to move to Lucee due to expense of upgrading to cf11
I LOVE CF, but am tired of hearing that it's “going away” (usually from people who don't use it)
management want to switch to java
Licensing on VM platforms for ACF, using Lucee instead!!!
27. What caching solutions are you using?
28. What miscellaneous frameworks/tools are you using?
29. What monitoring tools are you using?
30. What types of deployments do you use?
31. Any additional comments?
Adobe has made it difficult to become an independent learner and has made it difficult to acquire the necessary tools cheaply to learn CF
Please do a better job marketing CF! I don't think anyone knows there are open source alternatives like Railo and Mura for CMS.
The so called “CF evagelists” have done a lot of damage against CF, because instead of listening to the CF commmunity and inform – press Adobe managers to the direction of what the CF developers suggest, they do the opposite, trying to push the CF community to what Adobe say, even if they are bullshits. I remind you how much the “evagelists” pushed the CF developers to … the “Flash paradise”, how many millions of hour the CF developers spent to learn and deploy Flash in their applications, and how sudden Adobe and “evagelists” forgot Flash… letting the CF developers with the losses of investing thousands of hours in their stupid Flash technology. Now all pretend Flash has never existed… Now that Adobe moved CF production to India, the CF lovers – evagelists one by one love Javascript now, and screw the simplicity of the tag based CF code trying to make it look like …javascript (cfscript etc). And they do it, now that the tag based HTML (v.5) is hot again and CF could gain from the similarity of its tag based code. Why CF after 20 years history, and being in version 11, still has so bad, and stupid documentation;;;; Why CF evagelists don't make this point the main objective for CF future;;; Does it has to do with the fact that they write books about CF, so a rich and complete documentation would lower their sales;;;; Does it sound like “CF evagelists” or “CF competitors”;;;
I will most likely do zero ColdFusion development post 2014.
Boy it would be nice if we could turn on “strong typing” for new projects
Well done on the survey quality!
Website: argustechnology.com
Adobe are killing ColdFusion and need to turn it around quick. The first thing they can do is stop developing 3 separate products (Brackets, CF Builder, Dreamweaver) and make it all ONE product in Dreamweaver that does design and development really well. This is what we want and need and this is what will sell ColdFusion to people who aren't interested in it.
I like fusion reactor
Thank you for working with CF
Love ColdFusion .. just wish Adobe would support it more … CF-11 bugs are annoying
Much of my work is on a huge application that's part ancient, part more modern, ancient parts are a drag.
I've been using coldfusion since 1999/2000 for work and for free-lance work. Content management systems tend to use php and as I prepare to retire, some of my projects are going to be adapted to php cmt platforms… ugh… I have to help with the transition even though I hate cmts…
Thanks for doing this – I assume you aren't going to misuse the email/mail/phone information I provided in 31 above?
Would like to know what ColdFusion based Content Management Systems people use.
Thanks for doing this. Invaluable information for the CF community.
CFML is dead. Government? Ya. Small business? Ya. Enterprise? No. Serious startups? No. Java, Scala or Groovy with Angular. That is the current serious development platform.
Adobe needs to add more to giving ColdFusion more front end development options, as well as, keep what they have current.
Keep up the good work!
There are still CF developers outside the US, you know!
We run a small-time enterprise CF environment, but will be expanding to .NET with our new Asian team and will be considering new platform introductions including Ruby on Rails and Sharepoint, among others. CF, however, will probably never leave our environment due to the large amount of legacy code intertwined in our company.
We love Cold Fusion – great language to learn on, and great language to go deep into.
I'd like to see you include a question on bug tracking, I am always curious to see what others do. We current use BugLog (CF app) as well as BugSnag (for JS errors)
Please don't give out my phone number or email. Thanks.
I really love ColdFusion and have no plans to switch or move to any other languages.
I'm not handing over my details to a survey that thinks nodeJS is a cf framework and angularJS is a library
working to learn new technology so that our ACF and Lucee servers can go away:(
Have been with CF for a long time, still think it is good, but it has definitely lost its competitive edge against other technologies such as .NET, it's a lot easier to find those developers than it is to find CF developers, and they are coding just as fast and reliably as we ever did with CF 10 years ago.
Giving free software to colleges would help educate students about CF's positive sides. We won't need to spend as much time on boarding. Although really it isn't very long compared to most languages. Fix ORM, it should be a great feature but it's not friendly to work with.
Plan to discontinue use if cf on future projects. There tools that are equal or better. Cf devs are difficult to hire
I've used CF since 4.5, but I think it's getting near time to move on… 🙁
Adobe needs to know do better marketing for CF and the world to market it a product is not just US. Also they need to re-consider the pricing model.
Would have liked to see questions about devops and CI, e.g., vagrant, docker, Jenkins.
I LOVE CF
Flex is a mobile development framework – not on your list in Q25. It's for compiling much more than just swf's now.
Used to attend user group meetings, but the group folded and no one picked it up. Have sporadically attended other non-Adobe UG meetings.
Wish there were more CF Conferences. CF United ended, CF Objective changes to dev Objective, CF track pulled from ADOBE MAX, not sure if Adobe CF Summit will happen this year (haven't heard yet). How about someone organizing a CF conference in a desired travel location that will hopefully make it highly attended (because people will make it double as a vacation). Why can;t Adobe just add it as a track to MAX. The development and design of sites overlap so shouldn't the conferences.
Thanks for doing this.
I recently left a CF position after being there 7 years. They struggled for months to find a replacement. My boss there says they will be converting to another language. In my current position I'm being trained in Rails and they are hoping to convert the old CF apps to Rails.
CF is an incredible language that is appropriate for use from an easy Proof of Concept all the way up to enterprise level load-balanced servers taking thousands of hits an hour.
every year, people start the same old chant that cold fusion is dying, when in fact it's just the customer base that is changing. people are not using cold fusion for a small public web sites anymore, it is being used for large government, banking, and industrial enterprise applications a lot more. there are plenty of jobs, but they do not want people who are constantly jumping ship to the latest technology and I only have a couple of years of experience in each one
Looking foward to Lucee 5
Web development has changed, the back-end used to be more prevalent and so we needed to pack it with lots of functionality. That's change now that we can finally build cross-browser rich internet applications using HTML5 and so the back end needs to become more modular. That's what makes NodeJS very attractive tool now days. It is the only back-end platform that allows you to minimize and tailor based on need what you will endup deploying to the server. There is currently no rival for NodeJS in that arena, it would be great for ColdFusion to gain back traction by offering something that would help make ColdFusion deployments LEANer.
More European cf conferences please!
moving away from cf
CF continues to be a rewarding career path choice.
I believe Adobe need to rebrand and relaunch CF but focus on it being a modern scripted language rather than a tag based language. Fresh blood is badly needed, the pool of young talent is pretty much non-existing.
You probably should have proof-read & test-run your questions before putting the survey live.
Worklight for mobile, now know as mobile first from IBM.
We do a lot of CF work for Adobe. But that has ended. Going forward CF is not the tool of choice. Mainly because of lack of open source success and trouble hiring developers.
Interested in CF in Cloud Servers instead of dedicated hardware
I love coldfusion although I don't think Adobe is being the best steward of it. It goes to the fact that the new “Brackets” Development IDE supports PHP and not CF. Adobe is the reason that the industry thinks CF is legacy. When in fact CF leverages JAVA and all the great things it can do. PHP doesn't have that. So I hope we can change that perception CF is dead.
The biggest challenge for CFers is the mindset. I worked mostly in service companies giving services to some of the largest US MNCs but everywhere management thinks CF is an old platform and they want to migrate to other technologies.
Switching to Lucee as it feels more vibrant than ACF.
CF cli command interpreter would be interesting. Fast CF compile times would help A LOT
Honestly I think Adobe would gain a lot if there was strong company level encouragement for Adobe web projects to be built with CF. Railo consulting apps are built using Railo CF. Most of Microsoft's apps are built using .NET. Adobe being more willing to “drink their own champagne” would not only enhance the perception that CF is a viable option, but it'd also give Adobe lots of immediate in-house feedback on which new features people need to built cutting edge web apps. Perhaps there'd be some merit in rebranding Adobe CF. Railo basically just did that with Lucee and gained a bit of buzz. Internet Explorer is now being “morphed” into Spartan (okay not exactly, but you see my point). Would there be anything to gain by taking the CF stack, removing some legacy components, and renaming it something else? Just an idea.
CF is fantastic, nothing else out there compares. You have to make people know its alive. Everyone i talk to thinks its ancient and doesn't really exist anymore or not updated. Make standard free so people will use it in the organization. Memory is always an issue.
It has been a year since Ive done CF full time. Im currently rewriting a Coldfusion app to .net (c#) at work. There are only 1 or 2 people (including me) that know CF. I still keep up with what is going on in the CFML world though.
I sometimes miss CF but our company now concentrates on custom ASP.NET solutions w CMS, at scale unsuitable for CF.
I'm still very new at this, spent most of my career in QA. Please weight my responses appropriately compared to experienced developers.
Cheers for doing this. While I'm not using ACF as much and more of Lucee, I do want to see CFML thrive in general. Adobes methods of putting CF out there seem lacking these days. The initiatives sound enticing, but how much is actually being accomplished when they can't even fix critical bugs in a timely manner. I will say though, the bug turnarounds have been faster. Not elegant (like the ?: op) but faster.
Long may coldfusion live.
Deployment: – Rackspace – Swisscom Cloud (OpenStack/CloudFoundry) Cool, thx fort the survey! Cheers, Roland
Lucee is the future of CFML, though that future is not bright.
Still using CF just wish the Enterprise engine from Adobe wasn't so much. however, Railo and Lucee are very good.
Go CF!
I don't attend CF User Group meetings because there isn't a User Group near where I live.
Further info for Challenges question: CF “dying”/legacy There is a perception in parts of the organisation that CF is out of date tech and this has been driven by our digital team (content editors and social media) with little real understanding of web technologies. Hiring CF developers I didn't want to tick this, as it's not an actual problem for us. Being a small team, we've always been able to hire when we needed to. Based on the number of developers reducing year on year though, the business had taken the decision to look to a move to .net or java. This keeps being delayed as there is no other business case to do it and plenty of new work to keep doing, but it still could happen eventually. I'd say our biggest problem, however, has been our own reticence to push ourselves forward and shout about our own expertise, assuming the work would speak for us. We've seen a digital team that have a great reputation internally but, genuinely, very little to show for it (and a lot of big mistakes), have their word taken over our expertise and over a decade of websites and applications running with very few problems. This has really given us a wake-up call. We need to be better at promoting ourselves for our expertise to be taken as THE company expertise in these matters.
The Box products from Ortus Solutions, Inc., like ColdBox, CommandBox, etc., are a driving force for ColdFusion, advancing CFML, keeping it relevant in an age where most people feel that ColdFusion is now really dead. The Lucee fork of Railo has the potential to evolve CFML far beyond what Adobe seems to be willing to do. However, the business where I work will not convert from ACF until Lucee proves its backwards compatibility, plus with new features developers have wanted for years. There's too much legacy code that has to run, and is running on ACF, to risk converting to Lucee right now.
Thanks!
A lot of the answers to these questions don't make any sense. This survey was poorly designed.
Thanks for doing the survey. Pretty down over the current state of CF but happy about the enhanced level of enthusiasm I am seeing over Lucee
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
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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
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Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.
