Addressing the death of ColdFusion

Terry Ryan posted a link to a StackOverflow thread asking about the merits of ColdFusion… while the thread itself is closed, I’m going to post my own commentary here.

Many fellow CF devs came out in support of the product, which we should. What surprised me was the incredible lack of knowledge on the part of the naysayers. One in particular, a humorless little Frenchman named Pascal Thivent…

I’ll address some of Pascal’s “ahem” assertions..

Is ColdFusion outdated: no. I could just say that they’ve just released version 9 and leave it there, but here’s some detail.

Unprecedented support for Microsoft technology
- Sharepoint
  - Direct access to Sharepoint security features and authentication for SSO capability.
  - ColdFusion apps can be Sharepoint web parts
  - Direct access to Sharepoint services via <cfsharepoint>
- Excel
  - Generate Excel spreadsheets natively with <cfspreadsheet>
  - With formatting and functions
- Direct Access to the ColdFusion server from other languages
  - Java, PHP, and .Net now can leverage functionality directly from a ColdFusion server installation
  - Java developers have been able to access ColdFusion components since V. 6.0
  - .Net support has existed since version 8.

ColdFusion is Java
- This has been a mantra of ColdFusion developers since version 6, when ColdFusion was rebuilt on the JRun J2EE platform.
  - It can be run on almost any J2EE platform
  - JRun
  - JBoss
  - IBM Websphere
  - Tomcat
There are open source CFML engines
- Railo: http://www.getrailo.com/
- The Smith Project: http://www.smithproject.org/
- Open Blue Dragon: http://www.openbluedragon.org/
- All of these are backed by OpenCFML: http://www.opencfml.org/

According to Adobe there are currently over 700,000 developers world wide and that number is growing every day.

I’m a ColdFusion developer, if I’m going to compare to other languages, I’ll do my homework first, lest I wind up deserving of a smackdown like good ol’ Pascal.