> Anyway, these are the reasons i think the trends tell > me ColdFusion is either a dead duck of soon to be a dead > duck at least in Sydney anyway. I dont know about other
When it comes to usergroups and conferences, and even the kinds of companies that use ColdFusion, it has a lot to do with the culture around it. PHP, Perl, Python, Lisp, C, Ruby, ASP.Net, Groovy, and most other languages are free to use and deploy for whatever you want. ColdFusion is not (yes, we have Railo but it hasn't gained a lot of traction yet). This one fact alone causes a lot of new developers to choose other technology over ColdFusion. ColdFusion was originally made for Windows, a commercial product which requires licenses. It wasn't born of the open source culture like many languages were. Many developers see ColdFusion as a language that is used within companies who feel like they need to pay for licensing and support. Those companies aren't sexy and the more "social" developers aren't generally drawn to them. ColdFusion is associated with a closed-source culture and set of ideas. This is obvious when you look at any large-scale off-the-shelf CF app (shopping carts, forums, CMS systems and the like). Other languages are open and you can do whatever you want with them and there are healthy communities with lots of free and open source applications you can deploy. With ColdFusion you have to be concerned about which license you have, how many you have, and where you deploy it. Just yesterday Adobe had an e-seminar about using "ColdFusion in the Cloud" and they spent the first 20 minutes talking about licensing and what was and wasn't a cloud and how you should have your legal team get in touch with Adobe's legal team if you had concerns. That's not sexy to developers. It turns them off and they run over to Ruby where they can just do what they need to do without worrying about whether they have the right number of CPU licenses or what their costs are going to look like if they need to scale to a dozen servers. If anything is going to kill ColdFusion, THAT, in my opinion is what will do it in. I'm not saying it's evil to charge for software or that Adobe is doing something wrong, far from it, but for a new developer it's like a choice between an iPhone (and now Android) or a Blackberry. iPhones are sexy with lots of free apps. Blackberry is for corporate snobs who are addicted to checking their e-mail. As a developer, you have to decide which culture do you want to be a part of. If you want the large usergroups with new developers fawning over the technology, ColdFusion is probably not right for you. If you want stability and a chance to work in larger companies with a corporate culture, or a government organization with lots of structure and rules then you'll have better chances. That is primarily where ColdFusion lives. Of course anyone can pull out examples of cool companies that use ColdFusion (I'd like to think I work for one, but we could use any language and be just as successful), or of large companies that don't, but the fact remains that the culture around the ColdFusion platform is inherently different from platforms born of the open source movement. -Justin ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Want to reach the ColdFusion community with something they want? Let them know on the House of Fusion mailing lists Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:329915 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
