Message To SitePoint Editor Regarding Column Inaccuracies

I am writing regarding your August 2nd column, and your comments in your "What To Learn?" section. I quote:

"... and even the relatively stagnant ColdFusion have plenty of power to offer with a gentle learning curve up front."

You are correct about the gentle learning curve, but can you clarify "relatively stagnant"? Just to be clear, the Webster definition of stagnant is "not advancing or developing". ColdFusion was first released in 1995, ColdFusion MX 7 was released in 2005, 7.0.1 later that same year, and 7.0.2 in June of 2006. In addition, the ColdFusion team is hard at work on the 8th major version of ColdFusion (currently codenamed "Scorpio"), to be released in 2007. Obviously, we are both advancing and developing ColdFusion, and so the term "stagnant" is utterly inappropriate. As such, I must request that you update and correct your statement.

In addition, just in case you were unaware of this:

"But more heavyweight platforms like Java and ASP.NET can open the door to more complex and esoteric applications, not to mention higher salaries"

Yes, Java is heavyweight, I agree. But did you know that ColdFusion is a Java application, it runs on standard J2EE servers (like IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, and our own JRun), all the runtime services are native Java, and it actually code-gens Java source and compiles down to Java bytecode (in fact, you can deploy your ColdFusion application as Java bytecode without needing the CFML source on the server)? ColdFusion is Java, no more or less so than if you had written your code in Java or JSP directly. So yes, Java is indeed heavyweight, and ColdFusion is as capable and heavyweight as the server it is running on.

Sincerely.

--- Ben