Reading through some of the commentary about the Tamarin announcement, I came across a very dismissive post on the Atlanta ColdFusion User Group mailing list from Adam Churvis that Ben Forta has already replied to. To be honest, I'm not really surprised by Adam's wild claims, given his love of Microsoft technology as well as his close relationship with New Atlanta. However, as I followed the responses to his original post, I was surprised by this:

It may be hard to swallow, but nothing about you or what you do is of any importance to them whatsoever.

Adam thinks that you, dear ColdFusion developer, are of no importance to Adobe. As a ColdFusion developer, I find that really insulting!

Adam, dude, what are you smoking these days?

Adobe has repeatedly stated that one of the key aspects of the Macromedia acquisition was the great developer community that Macromedia had built up. Yup, Adobe wanted and valued the developer community - that means you, dear ColdFusion developer. The adobe.com website is powered by ColdFusion now: after due consideration of how best to reconcile the two company's websites, the decision was that the ColdFusion-powered "Dylan" platform was the best choice going forward. The recent launch of Acrobat Connect - what powers the trial signup and terms of service management? ColdFusion. Adobe's enterprise IT team are hiring ColdFusion developers to rewrite Java applications so that they are easier to maintain.

And then there's Scorpio. I think this is going to be the most significant release of ColdFusion ever. There's a lot of time, money and intellectual sweat going into this release.

And finally there's Flex. I think everyone's got the message that Adobe thinks Flex is very important. And what is Adobe pushing as the best back end for Flex? ColdFusion. A free update to ColdFusion (MX 7.0.2) provided the tightest integration with Flex available for any language and there has been a slew of ColdFusion + Flex integration articles and presentations recently.

In what universe could anyone seriously believe that Adobe thinks ColdFusion is "not important"?

Hi Sean,

I should most likely not say anything, as I am a real newbie with ColdFusion. I think that adobe would not have continued with ColdFusion if they did not care about the product,and the people developing with ColdFusion.

I can tell you from experience that adobe not only cares about developers, but as well as helping people just starting out with the product. I have contacted the support team there asking for help with their products, and I was always treated to help from a friendly person!

Furthermore, ColdFusion MX 7 comes with enough tutorials to help people get up to speed quickly, and if nobody cared about you, why make it easy to use?

Finally, if adobe did not are about ColdFusion why work on a new product? Working on the next release is to give the developers more features, I guess that is the point of making new releases.

Well that is just my 2 cents.

Adobe may want to push CF as the preferred backend for Flex, but you and I both know that if they want Flex to have any chance of widespread adoption there'd better be PHP and Pyhon and Ruby and Java and, above all, .NET backends as well.

Of a truth he is not heads up to what is coming in CF! Just consider that one of the biggest promtional features of Office 2007 was to be the inclusion of PDF output. (Interpretation... PDF is big) Scorpio has been publically talked up that it will have some amazing new support in that line. Now that is just one feature that it turns out Microsoft will not have, that CF does have. It's a big deal at Microsoft and he still doesn't get it.

I heard Plum was a good platform from some corners of the ColdFusion world. Yet, it seems like that was the end of his love for the language. Perhaps if he looks at doing CF he should look at CF5, eh?

Thanks for this Sean. I too was very shocked by Adam's comments, and think they couldn't be further off-base. While at CFUnited I had the opportunity to sit down with Tim Buntel for a while. It was very obvious, during our conversation, that Adobe was investing a great deal in the CF development community, and that Adobe was very excited about the things to come.

Sean,

Although not eloquently stated, I think there is a modicum of truth to what Adam said. He is correct in stating that there are much, much larger forces in places that dictate the direction of Adobe and it's product above and beyond the yells of the developer community.

I can't imagine that Adobe disregards developer voices across the board, but how much a role they play on a macro level in the direction of products and services is a fair question.

On the subject of CF8, I hope to GOD that the "time, money and intellectual sweat" being put to good use. I did not get a chance to get to MAX this year, but have attended several other years. MAX is usually a time to drop some "feature bombs" on the community, and I was troubled to see that the big "new" features were image manipulation and server monitoring. Not that these aren't worth investing in the upgrade for, but it's no where near past years when structs were introduced, CFCs came alive and the Event Gateways appeared.

Any more news on CFMX8 features besides the two that got covered at MAX?

I think Adam's point was that decisions within Adobe (or any public company) are driven by shareholders and quarterly profits. Adobe shareholders are not necessarily Adobe customers and they may not have the best interests of customers in mind. I think both of those points are valid. Companies change all the time and those changes aren't necessarily in the best interests of current customers (or partners or employees). They change because the owners (shareholders) think they can make more profit doing something else.

Moving beyond that, CF is a profitable product with a stable base. I don't expect to see Adobe wash its' hands of it.

I was just speaking with a VC worried about that fact that one of his portfolio companies used CF and asking whether they should port to Java or .NET. After explaining the business benefits of a dynamically typed language, I said he could join the "cool kids" and port to Ruby or Python, but for a start up, CF, Ruby and Python (to me) are the obvious choices. And with the underlying Java server and the ability to port parts of the model to Java if required as they stabilize (plus the very cool RAD tags) I think CF is still often the best choice.

I do think that Adobe is committed to ColdFusion. It will be interesting how they work with perceptions in the wider community as part of the Scorpio release. There needs to be more outreach and clear "whycoldfusion.com" style resources making the business and technical case, as I don't think CF is in immediate danger from Adobe management, but I think it has a fight on its hands to stay relevant in the 36-72 month window and beyond.

I like the recent debate on what CF is and to me as long as it continues to be acceptable for OO development and continues to innovate in speed and ease of development for less technical users (and more tecnical users who are just in a rush!) it will be in a strong place, but I don't think we should underestimate the difficulty of ColdFusion staying viable in the long term. Hal pointed out a lot of this at cf.objective() and as a community I think we need to continue to support Adobe in innovating to continue to keep CF as a compelling language choice for RAD web development.

Some more thoughts on the longer term viability of ColdFusion:

http://www.pbell.com/index.cfm/2006/11/11/The-Longer-Term-Viability-of-ColdFusion

I completely agree Sean! I have been developing ColdFusion apps exclusively for over 8 years now and I remember feeling that ColdFusion was going to just "fade away" about 4 or 5 years ago. It seemed the job market was drying up and things were just looking a bit down in the community.

But the tides seem to have shifted. The last couple years have been some of the most fun for me and I feel that community is really starting to mature and help push ColdFusion to the next level. Never in 8 years have I seen the kind of support for ColdFusion that Im seeing now. There seem to be more open jobs. The language is progressing very well. New features are coming along and the opens-source community in ColdFusion is really growing! Look at the number of mature frameworks that are available now as opposed to 4 years ago!

@Alex, did you miss the posts about the .NET integration? Including the ability to create and manipulate .NET objects from non-Windows servers?

There are also several conferences between now and the date given for Scorpio's release so you can expect more features to be shown off at those.

Macromedia / Adobe doesn't usually show off pre-release features so far in advance of a product launch so don't judge Scorpio on what little you've seen at MAX (as anyone on the prerelease program would tell you... if they were allowed to, that is).

For the time being, I certainly can't see CF going away. I'm getting a fair amount of work on the platform, and that's in Australia, where the awareness profile of CF has always been very poor (and remains so - Adobe REALLY need to make a Purple Cow of the product here).

That said, for CF and Flex to grow, CF needs to remain the preferred choice for integration with Flex and Flex MUST have strong support for the major (and less so) platforms - .NET, PHP, Ruby even.

Peter's post (above) is excellent and addresses the issue without raving.

Sean, one of the biggest gripes I've had with MM, and now Adobe, is how little they invest in marketing & promotion of ColdFusion. You have an application server that feature for feature is on par with most any other server out there but seems to be the red-headed stepchild of the lot. As you mentioned, Flex is important and from the outside looking in, it appears that CF is just kept around to compliment Flex. While I don't agree with Adam's assessment, I can see how someone would get the impression that CF is NOT important. The investment in Scorpio may be substantial but there has to be a better effort within Adobe to promote ColdFusion as the choice for building scalable web apps. MM failed miserably at that and it appears that Adobe is following suit.

I use ColdFusion EVERY DAY and the last thing that I want is to see it open sourced and/or die off. I like the comfort of having a big corp behind the tool that I use. While I truly believe that *you* and several others at Adobe are dedicated to CF, I truly wish the marketing department showed the same level of commitment as you guys.

Rey...

A lot of comments relate to how ColdFusion complements Flex, and one can see, from Adobe's point of view, why they want Flex to succeed.

But tying CF to Flex is a double-edged sword, as it assumes that the rest of the world wants Flex, that users want even heavier/slower-to-download "rich" applications, and that developers want to tie themselves and their web applications to proprietary Flash-based systems, and that they're going to want to move to the "best" platform that supports Flex.

There's an awful lot of assumptions in that paragraph, and again, it seems that Adobe is moving developmental resources away from supporting web-standard HTML/XML/CSS/JS systems to Adobe's own technologies.

I have a strong background in Microsoft development tools, after getting my MCSD and MCDBA I started looking at alternative development tools and technologies. Coldfusion with its long and stable history is a fantastic platform. I actually went on and earned the Advanced Coldfusion Developers Certification because I was so impressed with the product (I would not invest my time or money studying if I didnt think it was a great product with a great future). Where I work we are looking at moving from ASP.NET to Coldfusion. We find developer productivity higher in Coldfusion than in ASP.NET and because it is tag based we find it easier for HTML web designers to use. I work in the government sector and we dont have the time to rewrite our applications every time a new version of .NET is released or each time Microsoft decides there is a better way to do data access (RDO, DAO, ADO, ADO.NET, etc&) Adobe has a great chance to capitalize on disgruntled Microsoft developers; FLEX & Coldfusion are incredible tools a generation or two ahead of Microsofts XAML technology. Adobe needs to promote it better in the trade magazines that the decision makers (CEOs and CIOs) read.

@Michael, yes, you're making a lot of assumptions there :)

Adobe is also supporting CSS and AJAX and other "web-standard" systems very heavily if you look across the product line - look at the focus on CSS and validation in Dreamweaver as well as the Spry framework, not to mention the AJAX integration toolkits that have been released. Then there's the recent contribution of source code to Mozilla to help create better JavaScript / ECMAScript runtimes.

Why would you assume ColdFusion won't follow the company direction in that area (as well as the "pure" Flex RIA direction)?

@Rey, what would you like to see in terms of promotion? Give me some realistic, concrete examples of appropriate ColdFusion marketing...

@Marc, that's good feedback - thanx!

Sean, I would like to see an increase in print & web ad spending for ColdFusion in major trade publications & developer sites. I'm not sure how much clearer to make it. The last print ad that I saw for CF was in the first issue of Fusion Authority. Wow, lets put an ad out about CF in a magazine for people that already use CF. Who was the genius that came up with that????

Why isn't there a CF ad in Web Developer (UK import), Software Development, ComputerWorld, or CIO? Notice how I listed mags that ran the gamut from developer to decision-maker.

Why aren't there any CF ads on sites such Red Herring or SitePoint? Oh, wait I did notice the nice Macromedia Studio 8 ad that Adobe is running on SitePoint so I guess in a roundabout way, CF is in there. And I sure see quite a number of those nifty flash-based Flex ads floating around. I mean its great to know that I can go to Adobe's site and learn how to make "My Business Flow with Adobe Acrobat". I guess I'll use that to build my intranet as well. :)

You're a sharp guy Sean so I think its fairly obvious what I'm asking for. And I think alot of other folks would like the same. Tell your marketing & sales teams to give some much-deserved attention to ColdFusion.

Here's some simple questions to ask them.

How much of the advertising budget is allocated to Flex vs. CF? Where & how are they targeting their CF budget? What demographic are they targeting?

Then go ask the sales team the same but switch out the word "advertising" for "sales". Also ask:

Whats their plan for converting shops from .Net, PHP, etc to CF? Do they even have a plan for that? How many shops have they converted in the last quarter? What's their actual win ratio when competing against other technologies? What is the sales quota they have to meet for the various product lines and where does CF fall into there vs the other products?

Again Sean, I truly believe that you care about CF. You've shown that over and over. But I interpret a product's worth to a company by how they promote it and I don't see a great effort being done to promote CF.

Hi Sean,

I was looking at the CF product page (something that, like most CF developers, I don't do very often).

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/

The tag line hits the key differentiators, which are speed and simplicity of development:

"Create powerful Internet applications faster and more easily than ever before"

I'd like to see more content about why speed matters, how any language can scale, and how CF allows you to take advantage of Java runtime while creating applications more quickly. I'd like to see some kind of comparison matrix with other language choices, and I'd like to see creative that clearly creates the emotional experience of the speed and ease in the same way as the Mac ads tell their story visually (ignoring the rumors that everyone loves the PC guy more).

Once there was a visual, a tagline, a short compelling story and a trackable call to action, I'd like to see regular full-page color inserts in publications that technical decision makers read. I don't have a sense of the marketing budget, but there are tech media buyers out there with agencies that could pick an appropriate portfolio of publications and a schedule frequency to get the story across.

Budget should be for continual immersion - one full page per issue indefinitely running the campaign until the marketing department is sick of it, and then a little more. Most marketing departments pull campaigns too early because they (with their overexposure to it) get sick of it before it has even penetrated the consciousness of most of the market.

I understand Adobe might only choose to run so much print, depending on the budget (Id much prefer they continually put a full page in even one small publication than blowing everything on one-off launch shots across the spectrum). But there is where the fun could start.

Adobe sells creative products to creative people. Id love to see some viral/linkbait style creative that would get some buzz. Weve all seen the Rails video (and Joes wild blog video). Maybe it is time someone did a send up of that  perhaps building an entire web app in 30 seconds while playing the ukulele and making a perfect soufflé? Id love to see some off the wall creative that creates a personal relationship with CF and makes people want to give it a go. I think the product has a great position, a great story, great reference customers and is part of a great company. It is also not in a safe place, which is good. Not only can it afford to be a little edgy  I dont think it can afford NOT to be edgy. Id like to see ColdFusion as just a little less plain. Its got a cool story to tell and I wish itd shout a little just to let the rest of the world know how deeply cool it can be.

Well, you asked for specific ideas. If you want a publication list, Id need a monthly insertion budget and if you wanted creative Id need some money and to bring a couple of my marketing guys along, but I think this gives an idea of what I think Adobe could be doing. And if it was edgy enough, they could do it REALLY CHEAPLY. I dont know enough about the company to know if such a campaign would fly internally, but if anyone ever wanted another voice to support such an approach they should just drop me an email :->

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