Tuesday 20 August 2013

A very uncontroversial survey from Adobe regarding ColdFusion deprecation

G'day:
I almost got "excited" about some forward thinking from Adobe here. Rakshith just posted this on Twitter:

Take this #ColdFusion survey to let #Adobe know features that need to be deprecated/retained/replaced https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XCKLJXH
Twitter
I thought "woohoo! let's get rid of some cruft". And you should go fill it out.

However it's disappointingly uncontroversial. It doesn't ask if it's about time we retired <cfform> and stuff like that, no. It asks about this stuff:
  • CFSPRYDATASET   
  • ColdFusion actionscript functions (CF.query, CF.http)   
  • CFAPPLET   
  • CFPresentation for flash presentation   
  • XML forms   
  • CFTree and CFGrid with format="Applet"   
  • CFDocument for FlashPaper   
  • Report Builder   
  • CORBA   
  • CFREPORT   
  • Flash Forms   
  • Live Cycle Data Services Integration (not to do with PDFs)   
  • AIR Integration (Ability to save in an offline database and sync changes with the server using AIR)   

Surely (?) the answer in 95% of situations is gonna be "yeah, get rid". And does that even need to be asked? If the intent is simply to deprecate them (remember: deprecate means "still works, but won't be updated; might get removed". Like how parameterExists() is deprecated - and has been for a decade - but still works!), then there's no need to measure that no-one needs this stuff.

I wish they had asked some more contraversial questions like "shall we ditch <cfform>?", "<cftable>... who uses that?". "<cfinsert>? we're getting rid. That OK?". Stuff like that.

But anyway... it is a good start.

Ask us more stuff, Rakshith!  And please... let us know the results. It's interesting stuff.

Cheers.

--
Adam