A rally cry for ColdFusion
March 25, 2010 · Chris Peters
I've seen people comment that Adobe needs to promote and advertise ColdFusion more heavily. I think that this is a problem.
These are exciting times for ColdFusion. We have open source alternatives. Adobe just released their first shot at an official ColdFusion IDE, and they’ve even included Flash Builder in the package for free.
I’ve seen people comment that Adobe needs to promote and advertise ColdFusion more heavily. I think that this is a problem. While they are responsible for advertising and promotion to a degree, we must acknowledge that they’ve invested a lot into creating great tools for us to use and take some of the responsibility into our own hands.
I argue that we as the developer community need to do the advertising. We need to be building great projects and make it irresistible for others to give CFML a shot. Consider what WordPress does for PHP. I heard this comment a couple days ago from a coworker that does not develop web applications for a living: “I really like WordPress. This year, I’m hoping to learn more about PHP so I can do a better job at customizing my blog.” That’s where it all starts.
I really like Blue River Group’s approach with their Mura CMS consulting. If the client doesn’t have a ColdFusion license (or the budget to buy one), Blue River informs the client that they have a free J2EE app they can deploy it on (namely Railo). I can’t remember if I heard this on a CFConversations or CFHour() podcast. Sorry guys.
The point is that Blue River has created a beautiful application that is creating demand for CFML. The rest of us need to be doing this. I’d argue that this is harder than building a framework, and we have plenty of those. That work has been done. It’s time to get on to the applications, websites, and web services, the stuff that people care about. It’s time to meet consumers’ desires to have great technology at their fingertips, not feed our desire to be pious about our usage of CFCs (though that is still important to a degree, don’t get me wrong).
So I will ask. What are you working on to get us there? What can you start today or this weekend? ColdFusion’s fate is in our hands.
