ColdFusion: Adobe's Ugly Step-child

G'day
Here's an ironic observation that I would have made on Twitter rather than a blog article if the former allowed a reasonable size of message.

I was snooping around the ColdFusion docs website for some stuff on CFScript's try/catch, using Google to search the thing as the internal search engine ain't that great. Anyway, as I was closing tabs in my brower, one of those "would you please fill out our pointless survey to help us gather meaningless info which we will then ignore" surveys. For some reason I fill these things out on sites I regularly go to, so I set about filling this one in.


As per the norm with these things, most of the questions it asked were irrelevant: "how clear were the download instructions?", "how easy was it to search?", "will you buy products from us?", which I duly filled in "don't know". It's a bit daft answering questions like this on their documentation site rather than their main marketing site, I think... but ho-hum.

Then there was the question "What Adobe product were you researching today?". Firstly... you should have been able to infer that by the page I landed on. But anyway... the list of products I could choose from are:

• Acrobat Standard or Pro (not to be confused with the free Adobe Reader)
• After Effects
• AIR
• Connect
• Creative Cloud
• Creative Suite (e.g. Master Collection, Design Premium, etc.)
• Digital Marketing Suite
• Digital Publishing Suite
• Dreamweaver
• Flash Player (free player, used to view Flash content)
• Flash Professional (not to be confused with the free Flash Player)
• Flex (Flex SDK and Flash Builder)
• Illustrator
• InDesign
• Photoshop
• Photoshop Elements
• Photoshop Lightroom
• Premiere Elements
• Premiere Pro
• Reader (free reader, used to view/print PDF documents)
• SiteCatalyst

Now... what do I not see on that list? Yes, ColdFusion is consigned to the "Other" category. Nice.  Im particularly pleased to see Flex gets priority over ColdFusion, even though it's not an Adobe product any more.

None of this is surprising, but it makes it that much harder to take ColdFusion seriously given Adobe themselves don't.

And I didn't find what I was looking for in the docs :-|

Oh well.

[completes the rest of the survey]

Ha: this is quite funny. The survey doesn't have a submit button. And it's not posting anything as I go. Nice work.


--
Adam