On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Adrocknaphobia <[email protected]> wrote: > So, 3 years later, our community for all intensive purposes seems to > be shrinking (we have more CF jobs than developers).
But didn't you hold up the Evans Data Corp analysis, as recently as CFUnited 2010, to show that the number of CF developers has been increasing over recent years? According to those numbers, the community doubled from 400k to 800k since the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia (and had gone from 250k to 400k in the year prior to the Adobe acquisition): http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu/brainstorm/files/2009/06/cf_dev_pop_increase.jpg Are you now saying that the numbers have decreased since 2008 (the last year shown in that graph)? The ColdFusion Evangelist Kit (last updated March 18, 2010) on the Adobe site includes the EDC numbers and states: * 12,000+ companies (20% increase since 2007) * 778,000 developers * 1,089,000 applications * 350+ user groups * 11,000 downloads per month Those seem pretty health numbers to me - are you now saying those numbers aren't accurate? Railo's mailing list has just under 900 developers and the download statistics indicate 2,500 - 3,000 downloads a months. Unless Adobe's downloads have dropped to 8,000 downloads per month since March 18, 2010, doesn't that indicate that more people than ever are downloading a CFML engine which would mean the market is growing, not shrinking? And this doesn't include an OpenBD numbers. > On top of losing CFML > developers, we now have a large amount a fragmentation. What do you see as fragmentation? I see open source projects deliberately supporting all three major engines so code portability can be maintained. I see Adobe and Railo both sponsoring conferences, helping the community reach more developers. I see a lot of developers using multiple CFML engines rather than using some other technology for projects where they couldn't afford Adobe ColdFusion. Using CFML for all projects is better than using PHP for some projects, yes? > It would seem that > anything Adobe does in the CFML space is directly combated by the "Open CF" > movement. I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "Open CF movement" nor what you think is being "directly combated". Can you provide some specific examples of something Adobe has done that has been "directly combated"? Do you feel that JBoss or Apache Geronimo are destroying IBM (WebSphere) or Oracle (WebLogic, Oracle AS) or that the OpenJDK project is harming the proprietary JVM vendors? > This is an honest and genuine question: Are CFML developers better off today > than they were 3 years ago? Well, the economy has hurt a lot of people in all walks of life so that might have to be factored into any answers - but I'll be interested to see what people say about this. > PS. Sorry to make this all about money, but that's one of the realities we > have to face about our current ecosystem. Have you read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"? Just curious. -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://getrailo.com/ An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ "If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:341749 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
