Top 6 Things I learned Interviewing CIO’s about Adobe ColdFusion

In this article, we’ll answer these key questions:

1. How does ColdFusion make your job and life easier?
2. Will it help you do more with less?
3. Will CF outlive its competition?
4. How will ColdFusion help you become a more efficient CIO?
5. What ColdFusion features will help you meet your project deadlines or even finish early?
6. Why should CF be your logical choice?

I’ve chatted with many CIOs and decision-makers about ColdFusion. I wanted to understand their relationship with the platform and their hopes for its future. So I asked them a simple question.

“What’s your wishlist for ColdFusion?”

I was under the impression I could guess their answers. They’d probably want a speedier program. More time-saving shortcuts. Stuff like that.

Turns out I was wrong. After my interviews with the CIOs, I learned:

• how the platform has evolved
• what innovations CIOs want in future versions of ColdFusion
• development and programming challenges CIOs face

 

CIOs want a development platform that’s stable, forward-looking, easy-to-use, and offers a deep pool of talented developers. ColdFusion already has many of those traits, and is working on attaining the rest.

In this article, we’ll answer these key questions:

1. How does CF make your job and life easier?
2. Will it help you do more with less?
3. Will CF outlive its competition?
4. How will ColdFusion help you become a more efficient CIO?
5. What ColdFusion features will help you meet your project deadlines or even finish early?
6. Why should CF be your logical choice?

You’ll see how ColdFusion handles these issues thanks to Adobe’s continued investment in making the RAD machine even better.

What makes a CIO’s job easier? Simplicity!

Back in the bad old days, a CIO’s job went well beyond concerns over code, developers, hackers, and app development. CIOs spent more time dissecting specs: processor speeds, RAM, working memory, and server capacity.

Those days are disappearing. The cloud looms large over everything we do. ColdFusion is ready to integrate, and you’re all welcoming the change!

No more servers!

ColdFusion’s evolving interface handles the nuts and bolts of servers. This practice plays well with the cloud computing revolution. 

“The big play going forward is where we stop thinking of ourselves,” said Ashish Garg, from Adobe. “Where altogether, you just think about the problem that you want to solve and the necessary infrastructure to manage the life cycle of it, to run it, to do everything is provisioned automatically by the cloud vendors.”

It leaves CIOs free to focus on the task at hand: innovating and executing. You can run multiple containers in a cloud without worrying about your server crashing.

Make CF cloud-agnostic!

AWS? Azure? Google? Who cares! 

Whatever cloud provider you use, CF should handle it with ease.

Future iterations of ColdFusion will include portability among cloud providers, so the user experience doesn’t change for developers regardless of who hosts their data.

Can you do more with less?

More of the CIO’s grunt work is being outsourced, not only in terms of manpower but technological expenses. 

Servers, for example, are switching from a capital expense (a one-time expenditure for a server) to an operating expense — a renewable service now outsourced to cloud computing firms. Server-less operations lower the up-front cost of launching a new project or company while shifting the high cost of maintaining and upgrading servers to another company.

Rakshith Naresh, Adobe ColdFusion Product Manager, said CF will be ready to adapt these innovations.

Listen to the full interview with Rakshith about the future of ColdFusion here

CIO's using CF know this. They’re just spoiled so they sometimes forget. ColdFusion has been offering cost-cutting efficiency for years.

“That's what ColdFusion delivers,” Ashish said. “So even after 24 years, ColdFusion has been delivering on that promise again and again. And that's why so many CIOs around the world trust ColdFusion.”

Newer versions have more features that increase the versatility and amount of code a developer can write. Over time, this will lower technical debt. 

What makes ColdFusion last?

Programming languages often have a short shelf life. And even out in the wild, developers can drop them en masse. In fact, 14 programming languages have come and gone in the last two years alone, according to Ashish, who researched the life cycles of languages. CIOs worry if they’re investing in the right language.

CFML keeps chugging along at 24 years and counting. Adobe wants to make sure everyone knows it’s staying alive and modern. The company’s continued investment of both cash and energy in CF, and the community’s strength will keep CF alive.

“I try and educate my customers that Adobe’s commitment to this product is that you shouldn't be questioning because we come up with these releases every two years,” Janmeja.

Make CF the obvious choice for young developers

Any language can always use more developers. Encourage them to join the CF community! Championing ColdFusion helps fight the perception that CF is “dead.” In the long run, you’ll help create a better environment for both users and developers.

It’ll also depend on the talent pool of potential hires when you need to find a CF developer.

Adobe offers certification programs, partnerships, and summits for young developers to help grow the pool of expert CFML developers. I’ve also made a list of resources to help your team learn CF.

Follow “Learn CF in a week,” to get existing developers to add CFML to their toolbox. Focus on a course curriculum for colleges and high schools that incorporates CF.

According to Ashish, a survey showed that 94% of CIOs couldn’t find developers with cloud skills. ColdFusion’s cloud integration could change that.

The demanding role of CIO can take a toll on someone. Between the rigorous schedule, unexpected obstacles, and increasing need for efficiency, your development platform and programming language shouldn’t constrict your company or IT team.
ColdFusion has a CIO’s wishlist in mind. Its growing list of features and tools mean you can devote more time innovating and less time to problem-solving.

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.