ColdFusion: Staying the Course
Following on the heels of the slew of Adobe announcements of last week, Adobe evangelist Terry Ryan released a blog post stating that ColdFusion Zeus is still under development and on schedule. We're still here--same leadership, engineers, and sales team as before last week--and we're still selling ColdFusion 9 and working hard on the next version of ColdFusion, codenamed ColdFusion Zeus. If you're interested in more on ColdFusion Zeus, your best bet at this point is to search "ColdFusion Zeus" but know that we'll be releasing more official information as the release draws closer (the official information we are able to disclose at this point is that we will be releasing Zeus sometime in 2012). If you have any questions or need licenses for ColdFusion 9, please feel free to post a comment here or to contact me directly.
You just need a clip of Dana Carvey classically "staying the course". Here it is, in just the first 10 seconds :-)
http://www.hulu.com/watch/4117/saturday-night-live...
Thanks for the clarification Josh. Keep going!
Two questions, Josh. Do you think the mobile Flash folks had any idea the axe was about to fall? How about the Flex folks?
Second question: if Adobe had already made a decision to sunset ColdFusion, would you be privy to that knowledge?
And, Charlie, calling legitimate concern FUD is, itself, FUD.
Now, on the other hand to run around with a "cynical" approach to our platform because you are asking someone to babysit your phobias is just wrong. To come back to the community after you leave it and sound the alarm again is dubious also. There is a clear difference between critical review and cynical review.
My confidence is not shaken. And look at our community examples of people like Ben the blogger who brings tons of value to the community from what he learned outside the community. CFML is awesome and learning other languages has not prevented me from feeling right at home with ColdFusion. I am vocal about things that would be nice from my perspective to be different. Like when will Adobe give me the ability to create an "else" function in my custom tags! ( had to sneak one in here ) Regardless of that the language is still my preference but not because I depend on it.
While I do hope that my comments will help to diffuse any angst about the future of ColdFusion that anyone may have, Hal's questions are good ones. Essentially, I view his questions as boiling down to this one: "on what authority do you make these claims?" Well, that doesn't apply to the statement that the teams haven't changed since prior to last week; that's merely a statement of fact. But am I in a position to give unequivocal assurances that the course of ColdFusion will not change? No, I am not: I help to sell the product, I don't chart its course (though I do give input from time to time). I am just the messenger. So feel free to take the message with a grain of salt--but better a positive message, offered in all sincerity, than nothing, right?
John, as always, your insights leave me running for a parser. A parser and an entire bottle of Aspirin. I'm not *quite* sure what "the issue is you are not secure enough in business to put all your eggs in one basket". See, I didn't even realize that putting your eggs in one basket *was* a good business strategy. Or any strategy really.
But you've left me much to think about. Over the years, I've collected some of the gems you've come up with. My collection of "Farraris", I call them. My favorite? "Transparency is the basis of much of my trust." Keep them coming, my friend. The world now, more than ever, is in dire need of crazy.
This is one of those "reassuring" messages that only makes you nervous. And in this case also extremely curious: what is the problem in the development of ColdFusion that would make such a "reassurance" necessary? Anyone?
As a ColdFusion shop, we have always left the Flash-platform alone. Open, standards-based technologies seemed a much safer bet. But ColdFusion has always worked perfectly fine with pretty much all standards and technologies, and it was and is extremely suitable as the back end of pretty much any application, web or mobile.
So to us, as a ColdFusion shop, the axing of Flash mobile was reassuring in its own right. It means that Adobe would be making an even clearer shift to mainstream technologies and away from its proprietary Flash platform. I don't see how that can not be good news for CF developers!
Adobe has never really pushed their Flash platform onto their CF base, and now it seems more likely than ever that they never will. Plus, Adobe can now concentrate more of its CF development efforts towards working with the mainstream rather than the Flash platform. It may just be a winning strategy. If Adobe assures that ColdFusion will continue to work smoothly with mainstream stuff like HTML5 and jQuery, and make entry into CF easier for developers (isolation modes for shared hosting, ...) and Adobe may just have a real contender to knock the socks off PHP, .Net, Java and the like. For the many, that is, not the few. What a bright future it will be!
I'm glad to see your post. With my humble opinion, I believe the community has the right to question and wonder about the future of the product they addicted to.
This is no panicking, this is just questioning. When flex team blogged and with Ben Forta comment, that was the turn point; I got a lot of questions about what if same thing happen to CF, of course all I did just re-send your post and others to upper management.
Base on my experience working with California customers CF is loosing the battle against .Net because of resource factor, unfortunately now trust factor too.
I think we should focus on two things to make ColdFusion shine.
• Target the new generation and include CF in education system to start building resources
• Create Free hosting services for individuals
• Continuous chained online training from A to Z ( I’m ready to volunteer )
I have become accustomed to being able to create everything from a insurance site to a facebook app with CF in days not months. With jQuery and CF my team can make anything in 1/100th the amount of time. Currently we make CF talk, sing a song, call people, text people, deal with megs of xml, throw json around like a pro football player, play theme music, buy lotto tickets, read error messages, and make a shit ton of money.
Thanks Adobe, I love you almost as much as my wife!