Forta.com - Blog

Comments

Of course dynamic languages are important. Now I even can't imagine how we can build our future without such languages

# Posted By Journalist | 4/17/07 3:16 PM

Really, I am not surprised that ColdFusion was omitted from this list. Too many people discredit this language and just write it off based on illegitimate theories about it...This is one of the areas that really upsets me about this language, nobody gives it the fair chance it deserves to be up there with the rest.

# Posted By Derek P. | 4/17/07 5:06 PM

I had an interesting conversation with a PHP developer last night. He is doing Flex development and showed up in our #CFFlex channel (DalNet irc). He knew very little about ColdFusion. I have done years of PHP so I was happy to enlighten him about CF. What I discovered is that most of these guys don't even take an interest in ColdFusion because it isn't open source, in other words, they don't want to pay for their IDE, application server, web server, database server, etc.

So it seems that CF loses a lot to to "free" platforms. They won't even take into consideration that CF may be faster or easier. To them, they don't want to justify the costs associated. So the biggest bash that these folks have to offer is that CF isn't open source (when we really know they mean it isn't free). It doesn't matter that you have access to the entire underlying Java architecture or that its so much easier to develop with. It may have them thinking that CF is more powerful than they thought, but since it's going to cost them out of pocket to learn they don't want anything to do with it.

I think what's needed is a "How to develop CF applications for free" guide. If some of these developers knew they could develop apps for free using CF Dev edition (or Railo, or another CF server) in conjunction with CFEclipse, maybe we would see a surge in the number of CF developers. I think the hump we would still need to get over is how they can sell the CF platform to their clients.

# Posted By TJ Downes | 4/17/07 5:39 PM

Or they could go back to the Allaire days and release a free light edition of the server, thats what got me started =)

# Posted By Justice | 4/17/07 5:58 PM

Of course the could use the "Developer Edition" to develop against for free, along with free IDEs such as CFEclipse. Of course, the argument could also be made ... you get what you pay for.

# Posted By KEVIN BENORE | 4/17/07 6:03 PM

@TJ. ColdFusion is sort of caught in the middle between three camps: The OSS guys you mentioned, the Microsoft .NET crowd which is also "free-as-in-beer" if you're on Windows, and the full-bore Java/J2EE "Enterprise" crowd. Any way you look at it, it's an awkward place to be.

Secondarily, as server prices have come down (a decent dual-processor rack box can be had for roughly $2K) CF, and especially CF Enterprise, can be a rather significant portion of the budget.

# Posted By HML | 4/17/07 8:16 PM

Someone really had to take TIOBE to task. I've never seen such credibilty given to such a fundamentally flawed listing. Leaving aside ColdFusion for the moment - there is simply no way a google search can account for the nillions of lines of COBOL code that sits on legacy systems. Contrary to popular opinion, this code was NOT converted after Y2K - it is simply too expensive. I'm not saying that COBOL's position on the list is incorrect, I'm saying that TIOBE has no scientific method of verifying its position. Worse yet, they present this list as a scientific evaluation.

David

# Posted By David | 4/17/07 10:09 PM

No problem.
We know how much time we save with CF......and when scorpio will be released we will go even faster and much better than now.....
Php is Free.....ok better or who doesn´t want his life easier.

# Posted By Andrea | 4/17/07 10:51 PM

I have for a long time believed that CF needs to go open-source in order to compete. As a previous commenter mentioned, most people use "open-source" as a synonym of "free".

With that in mind I'm delighted by the prospect of the Smith Project's free and (soon-to-be) open-source ColdFusion engine (http://www.smithproject.org/).

# Posted By Fred B | 4/18/07 9:22 AM

As a user if CF since v1.5 when it came bundled with the O'Reily Web Site server software (and yes I still have the box, disc and manuals), I find myself having to defend our use of it more often than ever. So far our CF team has never had a requirement from users that we could not solve using CF as tool to get the job done. I really think some people in decision positions look for single solutions these days versus foundations they can build/grow as technology goes. I feel CF does this - it works with ajax, flex, xml, [insert buzzword] - right now where I work is in the middle of a big BI/BW dashboard project/process across all our business units - today we build all our charts/graphs with CF while others use BusinessObjects - we did a cost for the last year and we spent 10K on two CF 7 Ent upgrades plus two flex dev lic while the folks using BO spent over 100K on maint and user licenses - so right now I am stuck defending CF simply in my mind because it is CHEAP people think it is non-enterprise. I am now doing demo after demo to folks on how we use CF to business reporting. I find it amazing how where I work likes to spend money on what I see as single use software versus building foundations that can grow and stand the test of time.

# Posted By randy | 4/19/07 9:35 AM

Randy - I hear you loud and clear! When the obvious doesn't work, try a different tact - may I suggest you read Hal Halms article in Fusion Authority. I've had alot of success with is, maybe you will too.
http://www.fusionauthority.com/Views/4649-A-New-Vi...

It's only been a little over a year since Adobe acquired MM, and I don't know what they're doing differently, but I've seen an explosion of ColdFusion in my area. I'm really looking forward to the Scorpio tour!

Cheers,

Davo

# Posted By David | 4/20/07 10:49 AM

dave,

Yes I have read that article and like what it says and try to use some of its concepts.

I just sat in an 1.5 hour sales pitch from a company selling us a system to track our packages and notify is when they are delivered something we do today in CF with feeds from the major commercial carriers BUT our mgt has no clue what we do or can do with good requirements, good people and CF.

What I get frustrated with is the focus on the front end of things like using Crystal or BO to build/develop reports when in reality reports need to be built with solid data and structured correct in good cubes and tables then that data should be OPEN so users can access it for end user consumption as they see fit - be it CF, PHP, ASP, JSP, BO, rails, perl etc etc

Oh well its friday and not raining for once!

# Posted By randy | 4/20/07 1:44 PM

Randy,
You must live in the northeast too! Yes! Sunshine, at last!

If there's one thing I've learned recently, it's presentation sells. If you want to sell a concept or product, go heavy on the front end, and skip the back end talk. Sad, but true. I learned that with Flex - never sold a product on menagement so quickly!

Cheers,

Davo

# Posted By David | 4/23/07 11:48 AM

Just to let you know.. most serious OSS developers do really care about the difference between free and open source..

# Posted By Evert | 4/30/07 2:53 PM

[Add Comment]

InfoWorld On Dynamic Languages, But They Missed One