A year ago, I challenged the community to evangelize ColdFusion and convert new developers from other technologies. It was part of a blog post that examined and rebuffed several common arguments that often arise within the community as to why ColdFusion is not more popular. Most of those arguments focus on what people think Adobe should do to make ColdFusion more popular. A lot has happened in the last year since that blog post so I want to revisit the arguments and see where we stand today.

ColdFusion needs to be taught in schools. I argued that many programmers don't use the languages they learn in school and, of course, almost all CFers are using a language they learned after leaving school! In 2008, Adobe announced that ColdFusion 8 would be made available for free to all students and faculty for teaching purposes and Adobe also committed to working on course curriculum materials to help push ColdFusion into schools. It'll be interesting to see how successful this is but it will take several years before we can judge the results. +1 to Adobe.

ColdFusion needs to be free and/or open source. I argued that cost was a bit of a red herring because folks need to look at "total cost of ownership". See the ColdFusion Evangelist Kit Adobe have produced for more information on that. So what about "free and/or open source"? Well, Open BlueDragon was released as open source in 2008, based on BlueDragon 7 so it's a solid, well-established product. Railo released their 3.0 Community Edition which is free for production use and it's also very full-featured (and very fast). Railo will be releasing their product as open source in early 2009, under the jboss.org umbrella, part of the Red Hat group. So now you have both free and open source options. Oh, and there's also free hosting now for ColdFusion! +1 to OpenBD and Railo.

Adobe needs to provide more ColdFusion evangelists. I argued that other popular technologies (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Groovy/Grails, Python etc) have no paid evangelists, just the community. The economy makes it hard for any company to support extensive evangelism and makes it almost impossible to increase the amount of paid evangelism. At MAX, Adobe talked about their drive to support and increase the user group community however and launched an official hub for their rapidly growing number of user groups. They also provided the ColdFusion Evangelist Kit (mentioned above) to help every community member become a better evangelist. +1 to Adobe.

And what's your challenge for 2009?

Same as 2008 - convert a non-CF developer to CF. Just one. C'mon, you have 349 days left. If all of you - all 500,000 of you - convert just one developer this year, we'll double the community. You believe in ColdFusion - make someone else believe in it too!

Not everyone that uses CF "believes" in it. I use CF, and find it acceptable, because it's the language of choice with my employer.

That employer would never have chosen CF if the choice was made today, but it was made a decade ago, and by now the momentum of thousands of websites we're running on CF, and our dozens of employees skilled in CF means that switching languages wouldn't be worth it.

CF is ok. Not particularily bad, not particularily good. It's got some ugly warts that destroy a lot. My main wish would be that the warts would get fixed.

Come now, it's 2009. It's about time we got serialization and deserialization. And that appeared in CF8. Just a pity, don't you think, that it's still broken; deserializing objects that contain arrays or dates are broken. It's a plain bug. It was reported in the beta-cycle of CF8. It's still not fixed.

Annoying. And there's around half a dozen stupid bugs of this variety.

Add in a sub-par parser, and what you get is mediocre at best. It's nice and all, that we can now do <cfset mystruct = {'foo':3}> but why the hell doesn't that work in ANY other context where you might use a struct ? Inexusable. Especially since all competitors I can even think of has had this from day one.

(why can't I do somefunction({'foo':3}) ?)

I'm going to take that challenge Sean. I actually told my staff a couple weeks ago that its my goal to turn more people onto CF. I'll have to think of how I can keep track of this. You think I'm joking?

In 2008 Full Sail University, where I work on the IT development team, launched a new Web Design and Development bachelor degree program that will teach PHP and ColdFusion side by side. I thought that was nice since we built fullsail.edu with CF. Unfortunately I don't know of other universities teaching CF.

ColdFusion is in the difficult position of being an expensive product that isn't clearly superior to competing free products, such as PHP, ASP.NET and J2EE. (Ok, you need to buy a Windows license if you want to use ASP.NET, but many organizations are going to do that anyway.)

Unlike other platforms, ColdFusion requires evangelism because, ultimately, ColdFusion advocates need to convince their boss to buy a software package that costs as much as the server that ColdFusion runs on. PHP and ASP.NET developers can just start coding.

I am a CF-Developer since 8 years. So i have to watch the community and the history of coldfusion. I compare it with the "competition" of coldfusion. Adobe takes a lot of money for the Application Server. But which Benefit get the Developer? PHP has no Evangalist only a Community. Thats right. There is no company behind PHP. What are the great changes in the World of (Adobe) Coldfusion: Allaire -> Macromedia -> Adobe. We wanted to be a Macromedia Partner for seven years ago. A contributor of Macromedia did promise that Macromedia contact us. But nobody calls us. We were over 15 Developers. Our Clients big Players in Austria. Coldfusion was the best alternative when i started with Webdevolpment. But now? If you start with java, there are Referenz-Projects, Referenzlibaries, Best-Practics. You get SW-Architects with certificates. If you start with dotNET you have Microsoft in every Country. You can get a lot of support from Microsoft and the most is free. What's about the IDE? Eclipse is Great. Mark Drew is Great. CF-Eclipse is nice. But the best CF-IDE! What's about Frameworks? The most Frameworks are good work but copies of JAVA-Framework. That's not the Problem. But good Java-Frameworks are supported from Sun. I changed my Application from Adobe-CF to Railo-Cf. Because i get / got the support that i Need. Fast! I don't want convince somebody with words. Actions speak louder than words! I didn't see great actions in the past time. (Adobe for CF-Developer). But i saw great action from Gert Franz and his Team at Railo! They are present in the Community, they are present at CF-Meetings etc. That is the feeling for "we do - to you - with you". Sorry, for my English :-)

I'm with you Peter. I don't think anything has gotten me as excited about the future of CFML as working with Railo and Gert's team. I just wanted to make sure my software would run on it...a year later I've moved a number of clients onto Railo and I'm always telling other developers about it, with invariably their response after checking it being "this is way cool!". There are so many things in Railo that we always wanted CF to do, even seemingly small things, code shortcuts, lots of settings to tweak on a per-site basis, etc. Nothing against Adobe....there are always going to be companies at the enterprise level in particular that want to deal with a large company and I expect it will always be the primary force behind the CFML language. But for growth and life for the community, I can see Railo making a really big contribution going forward. Its exposure to the Java community through JBoss.org will certainly draw interest.

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