This is something that I've been mulling over / worrying about / contemplating for a coupla months now. I find myself poised over the keyboard frequently about to write this increasingly often. And Rob Glover is to thank for making the comment on Twitter that made me think "actually, yeah..."
This is my conclusion. I now believe Adobe is doing more harm to ColdFusion and CFML in general than they are good. And I think it's time - for the benefit of CFML as a language - for them to pull out. There's a few reasons for this.
Firstly, whilst they are "mothership", the language is just not going to go anywhere. As far as I can tell, no-one involved in the Adobe ColdFusion Team actually uses CFML as a matter of course, and I think the entire business unit is completely detached from the community. Worse, what they are doing on a day-to-day basis is Java. Whilst Java is a great language, it's not even remotely the same in intent as CFML is, and - worse - Java is a behemothemic (I made that word up) old juggernaut which works in a completely different way than the spritely languages that compete in the space CFML is struggling to be relevant in. Adobe don't (seem to ~) know how CFML is used, what the target market is, and what they should do with it to keep it relevant.
Secondly... $$$. I guess this makes sense. Adobe are not in the business of making a great language, they're in the business of making money for their shareholders. To do this, they need revenue, and to have revenue, they need to sell licences. Because they're in the software selling business. Unfortunately the people they market CF / CFML to are the people who pay for the licences, and all they need to do is to generate enough smoke, and angle the mirrors in the right way, and the licence-purchasing decision makers will re-up their licences. Especially if - and I think this is where the bulk of Adobe's ColdFusion revenue comes from - the person signing the cheques (dear god, I actually typed in "checks" then, initally) is doing so on behalf of some US government agency, and there's very little oversight on the sort of money they're paying; and what's more important to them is continuity, not innovation.
Thirdly. And this is how I came to this conclusion, remember, so this is the third reason that influenced me to think the way I do: Railo. I've been using Railo since it came on the scene, but only in the capacity of reading the mailing list and testing stuff out. I have never had any of my apps running in production on Railo. This is not slight on Railo, it's just that I have always worked for ColdFusion shops; licences already purchased. But over that time I've seen Railo arrive as the third possibly-viable CFML solution (after ColdFusion and BlueDragon... the New Atlanta one, not the Alan Williamson one, which came along around about the same time as Railo?), and then surpass BD (closed or open) becoming the second player in the CFML market, to now pretty much being the leader in the CFML community. I don't mean in revenue, or in "stature", but in importance. Basically I've gone from not giving a shit what Railo might have to say about CFML, to not giving a shit what Adobe might have to say about it (I never gave a shit about BD, for varying reasons). This is partly because Adobe hardly ever say or do anything sensible / useful about CFML other than when there's a release cycle on, and more recently because what Railo is saying about CFML and the CFML community just makes sense. Whereas everything out of the Adobe stable these days is going more and more heavily on the marketing smoke and mirrors, and is almost entirely without substance.
Fourthly I've been looking at other languages recently. I'm a slack-arse when it comes to forwarding my career prospects: I'm good at CFML and that finds me work. Well has done so far. I'm lucky in that regard (although I will never become a rich person with my work ethic, I at least have a place to hang-out and write code every day ;-). So I've pretty much focused on CFML and enough JS to get by over the last decade. However now that I'm looking, what I do see out there is every other relevant language just does stuff better than CFML does these days. It's a complete frickin' myth that CFML is still this quickest-to-market / rapid-development language. It might be so in the context of "my simple website", like what CFML used to excel at ten years ago, but in the context of doing more than "making it easy to generate HTML", even my superficial knowledge of competing languages reveals that CFML is basically irrelevant in that space now. Now I'm not saying some stuff on a line-of-code-by-line-of-code basis is simply easier to do in CFML, but I really think ColdFusion is lacking the bigger picture here. Plus it just moves too damned slowly to keep up. THat and when they do decide to do new stuff, it's crap like <cflclient> (ColdFusion 11's apparent marquee feature) which seems to be a wizard for writing JavaScript for mobile apps. In CFML. What? Are you lunatics, Adobe?
Update: <cfclient>? Wah?
Someone asked what I'm on about with this mention of <cfclient>. It was mentioned on a slide in a presentation I saw at cf.Objective() of new features coming to ColdFusion 11. There was also discussion of the CF -> Mobile functionality in the same presentation, and again at Scotch on the Rocks. I do not claim any specific knowledge about the functionality other than what's in the public domain via those sources.
Someone asked what I'm on about with this mention of <cfclient>. It was mentioned on a slide in a presentation I saw at cf.Objective() of new features coming to ColdFusion 11. There was also discussion of the CF -> Mobile functionality in the same presentation, and again at Scotch on the Rocks. I do not claim any specific knowledge about the functionality other than what's in the public domain via those sources.
The shining light here for CFML though, is Railo. They listen to their developers / their community. They do Railo (and accordingly CFML ~) consultancy, so they know what people on the ground are actually doing, and they enhance then language in ways that will benefit professional CFML developers. They seem to look at what other languages are doing, and consider those features for Railo / Railo's CFML. They keep the language alive and moving. They seem to give a shit about CFML (the Adobe ColdFusion Team seem to be interested in CFML because it pays their salary, and not really beyond that. Well that's my impression).
So here's what I think. Adobe? Give up on ColdFusion and CFML. You're not helping.
And Railo? Screw what Adobe might have done / might be doing with CFML. Take the language as your own (that sounds more melodramatic than I intend it to, but you get the idea).
What do you think?
--
Adam
