I fear that a large part of our stagnant growth is the fact that CF is mostly used in larger corporate settings where the developers tend to be older, have less time on their hands (b/c of family) and generally have less ambition to excel further.

The last part of that statement is a bit presumptuous and obviously not true for all situations, but realistically I’m amazed at how many people simple treat their career as a day job and nothing more. I am one of the few at my office that actually try to keep up with whats going on outside of the vacuum and am constantly looking to improve. Many of the folks I work with rely upon my company to push them to increase their skill set through paid training, etc… very few actually do any reading or learning outside of the office.

As an aside, I myself have migrated towards working more with Java on the regular day to day. The majority of the design and building that I perform during the day is with Java, hibernate, spring, some JSP/JSF, etc.. Its really only on my side projects and outside ventures that I use CF entirely (with some Java sprinkle of course).

I still consider CF to be the best web application language out there hands down. I don’t think that it’s going away anytime soon and I think projects like Railo and BD are helping further it’s acceptance into the younger, open source generation of developers. I think we as a community however need to figure out a better way to remove the negative stigma that seems to permeate from larger development communities.

http://www.webbschofield.com/index.cfm/2008/9/15/ColdFusion-Evangelism-Kit

“Matt -

the 500k number is refernced in the kit as sourced from Evans. The precise wording should be “over 10k companies” – this is data we have internally at Adobe via customers we work with directly and through the channel. CF has a sweet spot in large enterprise companies, at the departmental level – as well as in gov’t agencies. There are some co’s / agencies like this that have 15 to 200 CF developers, *worldwide*. Many of the CF developers are scattered amongst different departments within the same company. This is the most typical scenario for CF. Not too long ago, we did an analysis of the number of units of CF shipped and compared that with what we knew to be the average number of developers associated with the units and found the data similar to what Evans claims.

Kristen”

So, in Adobe’s eyes, there are 50 developers per shipped unit of ColdFusion.

Rubbish

Section Releases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdFusion

1. During its last full year before the acquisition by Macromedia, Allaire revenue was about $100M.

2. When Macromedia reported server division sales separately, it appears that ColdFusion revenue had declined to about $50M/year prior to the Adobe acquisition, or about half of what it was under Allaire.

3. Adode does not report server sales separately, so it’s impossible to know what ColdFusion sales have been under Adobe.

Some questions:

a) Are the above number accurate? If not, what are the real numbers?

b) When Adam says “ColdFusion sales are growing” does he mean from the lows experienced during Macromedia’s reign, or from the high’s experienced by Allaire?

c) Are ColdFusion sales revenues today more or less than they were under Allaire?

It seems that Adobe could answer the “ColdFusion is dying” critics simply and directly by providing sales figures. Why don’t they?

There are many reasons that the poll can be thrown out as inaccurate and I wouldn’t base a major decision on it, but it is an interesting data point.

Although there were CF jobs around, they were really not that challenging, and the market seemed to be headed more towards Flex whereas I’m more interested in scaling and complex business problems. Having worked in those types of environments as well as having a Computer Science background, I find that I have more in common with the average Java developer as well because we share an understanding of general concepts like threading, memory/disk scheduling, algorithms, state machines, etc.

I like ColdFusion and am stoked that there are some open source versions of it now (I mean I still read CF blogs despite being away for so long), but I don’t think it’s gaining many new developers. Mainly the ones who have already been doing it for quite awhile are the ones still doing ColdFusion.

One way to look at what future platforms are going to be like is to see what startups are doing. I think I have a pretty good overview on what people are using, and it tends to be RoR, PHP, or agile Java (ie.. Spring, Hibernate, maybe Grails).

I have seen only a very small amount “hot” technology startups using ColdFusion since the early 2000’s. CF 5 was really CF’s heyday as far as startups are concerned. Right around CF 6 is when PHP really started to get some momentum.

I look forward to whatever platform will supplant Java (no, Ruby on Rails is not it.. if you have done any development in Java for large platforms you know why) and look forward to learning it, but in the meantime Java development is what is best for me personally. I think ColdFusion has a good niche and is a good mature product which is going to be around for a long time, but I think people who want to pick up a new web language/platform are going to opt for PHP, RoR, or maybe even Django instead because they are “sexier” and don’t have any legacy pre-conceived notions about them.

Anyhow, that’s just my opinion. I’m a pragmatist and not really a fan boy of any particular technology (I can tell you a billion things I hate about Java if you ask me) because they all suck in one way or another, so don’t take what I’m saying as an attack or anything.

and an interview with Jeremy Allaire in JAVA magazine August 2000 here again, 500,000