(This is part II of the State of The CF Union report. You can read Part I of the State of the CF Union Survey 2016 here.
Table of Contents
Types of Deployments Being Used
Types of Deployments Being Used
We are still seeing the cloud growing in importance this year, but it is still play catch up. The In-house deployment got the most votes with 58%. Second spot is managed servers, while third is VPS. The Amazon EC2 is being used by 21% of voters, while 16% use shared hosting.
Used for Building REST APIs
Among the survey participants, 30% said they don't use REST at all. There are 22% who use home-grown, while Taffy.io got 15% of the votes. ColdBox REST got 13% votes and 4% votes for FW/1 REST. The rest of the participants say they don't use CFML for REST APIs.
CF Team Size
Over half of CFers work in organizations with 2-10 other ColdFusion developers. With the rest in larger groups. If you work on CF alone in your company I recommend reaching out to other CF developers at conferences or online via the Slack channel or FB/LI groups.
Company Size
ColdFusion continues to be used in all sizes of organization. Ranging in size from one person shops, mid-sized companies to Fortune 500 companies, universities and government departments.
Comments
We received 68 write in comments from the survey participants. Thanks for those and for everyone taking the time to fill out the survey! Here are some of them below. There is a mix of joy of using CF, concern over declining us, happiness about the rise of open source Lucee CFML and some suggestions for improving the survey next year (we are listening!).
“We love CF and have no plans to move off it. We have yet to find anything faster for app development. For us the fact that it's ‘tag' based, I guess you'd say and not a scripting language per se, is an advantage over developing in more ‘modern', script or language based environments. We're a small company; we need to be able to be quick on our feet, and CF lets us do that.”
“We're testing our apps w/ CF 12 pre-release.”
“Keep CF alive! We love it!”
“Lately it seems that some of the traditional anti cf bias that we hear from older developers is not as strong with younger developers.”
“Some general observations. Adobe either needs to invest more in Coldfusion or kill it off. We seem to be in a state of limbo with an understaffed Adobe CF development and product team that seems to be out of touch with the developer community.”
“Still using and love ColdFusion. Easy and fast development to deploy a myriad of web solutions easily.”
“I use CF10 for work and Lucee for my personal projects. I no longer use cfquery and instead use stored procedures called via the cfscript syntax exclusively.”
“Lucee for testing code and CF 8 for an old production system.”
“Migrating to Lucee as servers are replaced. Adobe CF is no longer cost-effective.”
“I use whichever version the client has. I run CF11.”
“Lucee saved CFML”Lucee saved CFML”
“Lucee all the way now”Lucee all the way now”
“We will be updating to CF 11 (or 12 if it comes out before I get around to the upgrade).”
“Moved to Lucee after working with ColdFusion for a while. Much prefer Lucee.”
“Lucee 5 is my prefered”
“Switched everything to Lucee and never looked back”
“Switched all our Railo servers to lucee”
“All CFML servers are now in maintenance mode. Upgrades are only made for security and compliance requirements. No new CFML development is taking place.”
“I keep hearing that CF is going away…that's stressful considering all the things we've created, but it seems the company wants to move to other platforms, like ASP.net. I'm not an administrator, so our server and cfml engine is a guess.”
“Please make cf popular, unsecure feeling while working.”
“Still an awesome language, with some awesome people developing in it, just shame there's too few of us”
“Based on Gartner research indicating ColdFusion is at the “Dusk of Obsolescence,” Boeing Information Technology declared the ColdFusion product as “Legacy” for web application development. No new application development for ColdFusion technology is authorized. Where the heck is Adobe and why aren’t they working with the Boeing Company to overturn this?”
“We are very happy with Coldfusion, and it helps us accelerate development in many ways. Just want to make sure it stays around.”
“It takes a bit of effort to find ColdFusion on the Adobe website! And it is misunderstood by many who simply hate it and don't even know why… I say get it out of Adobe's hands and into some other company that can appreciate the beauty of it and remarket/rebrand it to compete head on against .Net, PHP, et al.”
“This Survey is good information to what we should know about in CF-world. Great!”
“Thanks for “supporting”/caring about CF!”
“What about next time we include some questions to capture: – people's enthusiasm for CFML; eg. why do you prefer using CFML – what the state of people's projects are; are you maintaining, migrating from/to or building new apps in CFML – people's involvement in OS; eg. are you using or contributing to CFML related OS projects”
“You forgot continuous integration.”
“I didn't notice any mention of the CFML Slack group, but this has been an indispensable help for me since it was started. Being able to interact with so many key people within the CF community has been a breath of fresh air and I feel that I am pushing myself to be a better CF developer as a result of this.”
“I think ColdFusion is still relevant, but the gap between developers and the CF Dev team is getting wider and because that, seems like more people are moving from CF to Lucee or away from CF all together. The use of Slack Channel has helped bring the devs together and we have Anit from Adobe to try to bring us all together. Looking forward to how Raijin turns out and how we can influence the next version of CF.”
Full Survey data
You can check out the full details of the survey results and any write in answers and comments in the State of the CF Union survey 2016 – partial results page.
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.
