Ok, so I’ve purposely chosen an ambiguous title – in this post I’m going to discuss why I think ColdFusion isn’t going anywhere. It’s not going to be a ‘ColdFusion is dead’ post because that’s simply not true – but I think I can say that it’s not going anywhere and will provide evidence to back that claim up.

Remember, I am a ColdFusion programmer – I spend pretty much 100% of my working day coding ColdFusion – we have invested time/effort and money into ColdFusion so I, as much as the next person want ColdFusion to be going somewhere.

I was going to start by discussing the results of my recent survey asking when did you start coding in ColdFusion but I’m not. Instead I’m going to turn my attention to the ColdFusion Evangelism Kit.

On page 2 it states 500,000 Developers and cites EDC 2007 Global Developer Population and Demographics Report as the source. Now costing around $16,000 this is not something I’m ever likely to get my hands on but that’s not the point – it’s the figure that is important. A few Google searches reveals that the figure of 500,000 has been banded around for quite sometime now, in fact the earliest reference I can find is back to CFUN (aka CFUnited) from 2000 in a talk named CF Programming Philosophy and quite aptly the content is still very relevant today (although I’m not sure who wrote this). The point though is a reference to the number of ColdFusion developers that Allaire claims there were 500,000. The year 2000 was in-between Allaire’s release of CF 4.5 in November 1999 and Macromedia’s release of CF 5 in June 2001. So if Allaire reckoned there were 500,000 developers in 2000 yet the EDC data from 2007 claims there are 500,000 developers 7 years later then something is clearly wrong. Since Macromedia bought Allaire in 2001 the releases of ColdFusion 5 through to the current version ColdFusion 8 have (according to the the data available) added no more developers – hence my post title “ColdFusion isn’t going anywhere”.

The more worrying fact is that another report (also by EDC) projected that the global developer population would see an increase of 46% between 2005 and 2009 so why has none of this growth not been seen in ColdFusion developer numbers?

I’m not disputing that ColdFusion has attracted new developers over the years but equally developers have stopped using ColdFusion and shifted to other technologies so the net effect is that ColdFusion hasn’t seen any growth in developer numbers and this is my cause for concern.

Returning to my survey of ColdFusion developers – incidentally, my sample set was obtained from posting on my blog, via aggregators, Twitter, ColdFusionCommunity.org – and whilst a sample size of 432 is relatively small, 59% responded that they’ve been using ColdFusion for 8+ years (this holds true even after a second push of the survey where I doubled the sample size but the percentage hasn’t changed). The people that have responded are ‘real’ people – I’m not working to extrapolated numbers as the results of the EDC survey will be – can anyone reading this confirm they actually took part in the EDC survey? Am I really supposed to believe that the number of people that really do ‘care’ about ColdFusion, that read blogs, twitter etc is really this small? Now that does really concern me! Perhaps they think “oh another bloody survey” and ignore it, maybe – but if they do that to my survey then they’ll do it to other surveys so the data from EDC is equally open to misinterpretation.

Returning to the link previously referenced (CF Programming Philosophy) which asked ‘where are all the people?’ and ‘why are there people out there who are not helping grow the community’ it appears that ColdFusion is finding itself now (or still) in exactly the same position as it was almost 9 years ago – people are certainly using the product, if it was dead then it would have been discontinued long ago but it’s user base appears not to be growing and ‘growth’ is a key characteristic of something to be considered alive.

I’m not sure of the solution though, I’m excited where Railo is going with the open source engine but still providing ‘commercial’ add-ons/features. I know it’s been spoken about before but perhaps now is the time where Adobe needs to go too, release a ‘core’ version of their product to compete with the likes of PHP, Python, Rails (i.e. free) and then sell features/add-ons as commercial products, in which case I’d imagine a whole ecosystem would evolve of companies offering third party add-ons – much like the case of ASP.NET, PHP etc etc. Arguably who is responsible for growing the CF community? As long as Adobe is making sales then they’ll be happy – do they care about growing the community if sales are growing? Are they waiting to see how much the free offering from Railo impacts their sales before making a decision – as surely if there’s a free alternative to ColdFusion out there then that should grow the community too? Have the likes of OpenBD and Railo done anything to further expand CF to new shores?

Thoughts anyone? But if you say “I don’t care if you are right, you are just such a self-righteous dickhead” then I will delete your comment! :)

My quest to gauge the length of time ColdFusion developers have been developing in ColdFusion has got me exploring all avenues as to how to obtain figures that actually mean something – it seems that I don’t actually have to!

Take for example those adverts on TV for various female products for eyelashes, lipsticks and shampoos – it seems that it’s enough to sample 100 women to claim that their product is the nations favourite!

TV viewing stats are another area that intrigued me – claims that 7 million people watched last nights EastEnders- where does that figure come from?

It turns out that in the UK BARB (Broadcasters audience research board) are behind these figures. Out of the 25+ millions homes here in the UK, 5100 homes make up the reporting panel - a mere 0.02% of UK homes!!!! Monitoring is automatic by a device connected to TVs, PVRs, VCRs etc which registers what is being watch and household members use a  ‘peoplemeter’ to register when they are in a particular room – on a daily basis around 11300 make up the sample size. So what happens next, well there’s no specifics but I imagine the sample set is extrapolated up to the known population of the UK (just under 61 million in July 2008) – so therefore a mere 0.018% of the population produce the viewing figures for the entire nation. Viewing statistics are then available after a nightly data retrieval from the device and made available on the BARB website.

I had no idea that the sample set was so small – used to produce a figure so highly regarded but I guess that’s the whole thinking behind ‘statistics’ and random selection of parties to obtain a true picture.

The quest continues….

I’ve been running a poll for almost a week now located here – it is simply one question and requires a mere 3 clicks – one to click the link above, one to select an option and one to click the vote button. At the moment I’m showing 254 responses, that’s a mere 0.05% of the alleged 500,000 ColdFusion developers in the world – that’s pretty poor - to get even 1% would require 5000 votes! I’ve blogged about it, twittered it and put a link in the ColdFusion Support forums – I need to reach more of the community.

So I’m asking you, if you haven’t responded already please do so, if you run a user group please include the link in your mailings, if you know a developer that lives under a rock and doesn’t read blogs, forums or twitter then please send the link to them…..unless there are only 254 ColdFusion developers remaining ;)

I think the subject line says it all - [poll id="2"]

Let me prefix this entry that a typical day for me involves me spending 60% of my time in Windows, 30% in Mac OS (Yep, I’ve paid my share of the Apple Tax) and 10% of my time in Ubuntu - I use ALL of the current operating systems so I’m pretty open minded when it comes to OS choice, oh and not forgetting my iPhone. Sure I sit there hitting refresh in my browser during Apple events, just as I sit there doing the same when MS hold such events – but I’m not firmly in either camp.

In all fairness to Vista I seem to have been one of the lucky ones (if you believe what most people will lead you to believe) I have a laptop (Dell XPS1530, Centrino Duo, 4Gb RAM) that came with Windows Vista installed and for exactly the year that I’ve been running Vista have not had any bad experiences. Sure UAC is damn annoying but when it comes to hardware support etc I’ve not had any real issues and I wouldn’t hesitate to advise anyone to buy a PC with Vista installed. I’ve had family asking me about Vista and if they should buy a PC but just like the Mujave experiment revealed their fears were unfounded and after a while enjoyed their experiences with Vista.

On Saturday I took the plunge and installed Windows 7 on a new hard drive to have a ‘true experience’. If you’ve ever tried a previous Windows beta you’ll immediately notice the difference – what Microsoft have delivered is a pretty polished release, installing in under 20 minutes followed by a single reboot after Windows Update to fix the mp3 problem and to install updated NVidia drivers.

It’s a beta but not as we know it – what’s made it to this release are classed as complete - Microsoft even go as far to label it ‘feature complete’ but I don’t think that’s quite the case as there are a number of features still missing. This is not the usual half baked mismatch of OS’s that MS have previously delivered in their beta’s. It is ‘the beta’ of Windows 7, there will be a release candidate then the product will go Gold – the beta expires 1st August, the time between the previous private build of Windows 7 was 3 months so working to those time scales the release candidate will be around early April putting the expected release somewhere around the middle of 2009. Microsoft cannot afford another publicity disaster like Vista, failing to deliver so many features, the delays and then launching post holiday season in January 2007 missing the Christmas sales oh and the ‘Vista Capable’ debacle so don’t be surprised if Microsoft actually meet or even exceed expectations with the delivery of Windows 7. They certainly won’t be able to beat the Q1 expected delivery of Apple’s Snow Leopard so will have to take second place on that front.

Microsoft term it a ‘minor release’ in that it DOES NOT require a full rewrite of drivers – Vista drivers will/do work. There’s an argument that it looks like Vista, yep – it does! In fact it looks very much like Windows!!! Stop the themes service on XP and that will look like Window 2000, which looks like Windows ME, which looks like Windows 95. This is very much like how Apple’s Leopard looks like Tiger and why Snow Leopard will probably look like Leopard – speaking of Apple – where are their public beta’s of OS X? In fact, the only public beta of OS X was almost 7 years ago. Let’s not forget here, that if you took the number of combinations of PC hardware that are available on Dell website today – you probably have more than the total number of hardware solutions Apple have ever produced so for Apple to deliver an OS that works flawlessly on all their hardware is probably not too hard – for Microsoft that’s just not possible.

Should I expect to run the latest OS from any software manufacturer on hardware that’s more than a few years old, I don’t think so – I want to have the best experience so I expect to run it on new hardware and not to be running an OS that has had to make sacrifices in order to support older hardware. As our requirements move on, so our hardware must – especially with computers being as cheap as they are today!

So far my Windows 7 experience has been flawless, it’s much much leaner that Vista, on boot I’m using 641Mb of memory (hey, memory is cheap these days), Vista was using almost double. It’s way snappier than Vista, I’ve seen the UAC prompt a few times but nothing that begins to trouble me. My every day apps, Aptana, Digsby, Cygwin, Adobe AIR, Firefox, Live Writer all installed without hitch. I’m actually liking the new task bar – I didn’t like the default behaviour but find ‘Combine when taskbar is full’ option much more user friendly. The behaviour of the start button is subtly different to Vista – I especially like the sub menu of ‘recent items’ that hangs off a particular program after you’ve opened files in it.

I’m not going to convert people after they read this post – I don’t expect to. Operating system of choice is just a sensitive subject as your programming language of choice. They all have their merits, they all have their weaknesses – just as a programmer in one language is always quick to defend his language of choice the user of a particular OS is usually quick to justify why their OS is better than the next or more usually to simply ignore any suggestions that there is an alternative out there.

Will I be booting Windows 7 tomorrow morning – ABSOLUTELY!

As previously announced by Amazon they have now launched a web based management console for Amazon Web Services. At the moment it only supports management of EC2 instances but the ‘coming soon’ section lists;

• Tagging
• Monitoring, Load Balancing and Auto-Scaling – sounds way cool!
• Amazon S3 support
• SimpleDB support
• SQS support
• CloudFront Support

Amazon is making things really simple to manage now!

If you have an EC2 environment then it’s well worth checking out at https://console.aws.amazon.com

This is more for my own benefit, but I thought I’d add it here so all can see (and I can find later). A client sent over a spreadsheet containing 2 columns, the PK and a column of string data. They wanted this data to be used to update existing data in their application. My first thought was to reach for CF and do it there but SQL 2005 makes this task real simple (I found after a little bit of investigation). First up, I imported the spreadsheet into a temp table (tempdata) and then using 4 lines of SQL updated the original table using the values from the temp table using the SQL 2005 Update FROM clause; [sourcecode language='sql'] update objProduct set displayname = tempdata.displayname from objProduct,tempdata where objProduct.productSKU = tempdata.productSKU [/sourcecode] simple huh?

One of the things I look forward to watching on TV over the Christmas period are the Royal Institute Christmas lectures in association with Microsoft Research.

This year one of the lectures was titled ‘Untangling the web’ – bearing in mind the lectures are quite ‘child’ focused the way it explained various topics was excellent and as usual excellent use of practical demos (not using a computer!)

One demonstration was how PageRank works using a series of tubes and water levels – basically each tube (differently coloured) represented a page and these were linked with tubes (which corresponded to links) so when a valve was opened the tubes with more inbound links ended up with a higher water level etc.

An equally more simplified demonstration was  Key encryption using a brief case with big pad locks – which makes it trivial to understand. Person A has a brief case with a Red key and a Blue key, he needs to get the private key over to Person B who has a green key. So person A plays a blue key into the brief case, locks it with a red padlock and then sends it over to person B. Person B then locks the briefcase with a green padlock and sends it back to person A, who then unlocks his original red padlock and sends it back to person B who is now able to remove their green padlock and obtain the blue key from inside. Simple huh?

Next up a demo of bandwidth and routing – can’t remember the specifics but it was really easy to understand.

I can’t find a link to the video online but if you’re in the UK you’ll probably be able to find it on Channel 5's onDemand service.

You know what I mean, the search box – probably top right of just about every browser these days;

How do you use it – do you just set your default search engine to Google and forget about it? What about when you want to search Wikipedia, do you just search for Wikipedia, click on the top result and perform your Wikipedia search from there? What if you’re looking for something on Amazon? If you’re like me and you’ve ever changed it to perform a search – you’ve probably forgotten to change it back to your usual default search engine afterwards!

Here’s a handy hint for Firefox 3 users (of course, which you all are). If you click the search engine selector and choose ‘Manage Search Engines’ you see a box like this;

on which you can set keywords for each of your installed search engines.

So to search for ‘ColdFusion’ on Amazon.co.uk I can type into my address bar (aka Smart Location Bar, or unofficially the ‘Awesome bar’);

“amazon ColdFusion”

and my search is performed directly against Amazon without having to worry about switching search engines (or more importantly search Amazon and then switch it back to my default afterwards!)

EDIT: I’m not disputing the fact that people use the search box, my question was to whether people actually use it to switch engines – or as most do just treat it as a ‘search google’ box.

If you own an iPhone or an iPod touch then chances are you’ve played Tap Tap revenge. It was one of the early apps to come out and it’s been steadily upgraded over time with downloadable tracks but it still lacked something. It didn’t feel like Guitar Hero or Rock Band on the consoles.

Anyhow, all that changed when Guitar Rock Tour dropped last week – it’s got a feel much more like Guitar Hero, with licensed music (that you’ll recognise) and you can play guitar as well as drums! 

Note: I just tried searching the app store for Guitar Rock Hero and I can’t find it…funnily enough that happened yesterday too when I was looking for ‘Trains’