This comes off the back of a few unrelated discussions I've had recently about people having moved on from CFML, and there being a reasonable desire to encourage and facilitate other people to do so too. There's a feeling that a lot of CFML devs might move away from CFML if they were helped to, but lack the confidence to make the leap themselves, or know where to start.
One suggestion floated was to start a project similar to ColdFusion UI the Right Way, but basically covering any part of CFML. Someone's suggested they might help giving examples of how to do stuff in Go; and I'd definitely help out giving examples in PHP (which might encourage people to stick with CFML, I dunno! ;-)
The motivation for this is that I think persisting with CFML is - for a lot of people in a lot of situations - career "assisted dying". I think for most CFML devs it's deleterious to stick with it. I'd like to help show these devs that other languages aren't scary, and indeed a bunch of them are similar in ease of use as CFML claims it is.
I've created a survey on freeonlinesurveys.com. I used to use Survey Monkey for this, but they now limit their free surveys to ten questions, and this one has 15. I've not tried freeonlinesurveys.com (either as a provider or a consumer), so I hope this works out. The UI for creating the surveys sure was easy to use though.
Anyway, the survey is here: "CFML usage and migration strategies". Go fill it in if you can be arsed. To let you know what yer getting into, the survey is 15 free-flow questions, as follows. I've included my own answer for each question:
So you could be writing a lot of stuff there: that's excellent if you do. Or you could write as little as you like: also cool, just slightly less so.
- Provide a brief comment about youself (don't worry about your CFML usage or dev work just yet: this is just about you). Don't worry if you'd rather not give too much detail, that's cool.
This is my own answer: Adam Cameron. I'm London-based and (breaking my own rule slightly here) have been a dev for 16 years and in the IT industry for... blimey... 23 years.- How did you come to be a developer, and are you primarily a developer or is it an adjunct to another role (like a sysop or designer or something like that)?
I did programming at polytech, and loved it. I then took the first job that presented itself to me, which was as a sysop & desktop support bod on a NetWare network. I started using CFML there just before I went abroad for a few years. On return I got offered a job as a CFML dev with no professional programming experience at all.- Summarise your CFML usage timeline (just timeline for this one). Include things like what year you started, when you moved on, if you have. (or what's the time timetable for moving on if it's just planned). Mention versions in this one.
I started in 2001, and stuck with it until 2014. I shifted to PHP because the company I work for did. During that time I used all versions of CF from 4.5->9 professionally, but also have good knowledge of 10-12 as well, as I've been involved heavily in the CFML community and testing of ColdFusion's CFML implementation. I've never used any other CFML platform other than ColdFusion, other than experimentally & community participation.- During that time was it your primary or sole dev language, do you think? Or was it always an adjunct to some other language? How did it fit within the mise en scene of your daily usage? For the purposes of this answer, let's consider "a wee bit of client-side JS and a bunch of HTML & CSS" as a given. Only mention those if they represent a significant part of your work.
Yup. I did purely CFML from 2001-2014.- Did you work on just in-house code bases for your employer, or did you also work on third party code bases - like open source projects - too.
Just in house, and for client applications when I worked in a studio.- If you're still primarily a CFML developer... why? That's not a loaded question, and I'm not suggesting that you're wrong for being where you are. It's just good framing information. Don't answer this if you've moved on from CFML: the next question is for you.
I've moved on.- If you've moved on from CFML: why? Did you just change jobs? Did other languages you were using just seem more appealing? Over time did you find yourself using CFML less and less? Did you actively change because of career-longevity considerations? What language(s) did you move to? Stuff like that.
I was offered a job doing CFML, with no professional programming expertise at all, and it was a good way of getting away from doing network / hardware / desktop suppport work, which I didn't enjoy. That was my only reason for even starting with CFML: it was easy to pick up. I stuck with it cos I am lazy, and couldn't be arsed changing, and it paid the bills. By the time I decided I'd had enough I was tithed to my employer, so had to stick with them. We started a move to C# but that didn't take as we got bought out by a PHP shop. So now I do PHP. It was a good opportunity to shift languages, even if PHP would not have been my choice.
My chief concern with changing languages is having to take a pay cut from "senior" dev to being a newbie in another language. I cannot sustain a pay cut.- Do (/did) you use primarily or solely ColdFusion; or Lucee or Railo; or some variation of BlueDragon? In what proportions? If you migrated from one to another: why?
ColdFusion. I never used any of the others professionally, but have messed around with all of them a fair bit.- Do (/did) you participate in any CFML-based open source projects? To what degree (like you are the owner or primary committer of the project; or just a single commit; or raised some bugs but never actually coded anything; or wrote some docs, or whatever)?
I raise bugs when I find them, and have helped a bit with cfdocs.org and luceedocs too. But never submitted a pull req.- And what about in other languages?
I've raised a bug in PHP 7 which got fixed. I have not directly contributed to any side projects though.- What is or was - for you - the best feature of CFML which has you going "yeah, that's pretty cool actually". List more than one if you like. Importantly: had you compared similar functionality to how it's done in other languages, or was it just based on liking the CFML feature?
That it's loosely and dynamically typed,which cuts down on pointless boilerplate code like one sees in Java. I didn't really compare to other languages too much.- Are there any CFML features that would have fallen into that category for you when you were doing CFML, but ended up not being as cool as you thought when you looked at other languages?
<cfquery> isn't really any easier to use than how it's done in any other language. That's a myth.- What is it about CFML (or the underlying ColdFusion / Lucee / etc platform) you like the least? Explain why, if poss. Again, list as many or as few as you like. If this/these contributed to you moving on (if you have, I mean), mention that too.
The vendor attitude. Adobe is slack at their job with ColdFusion, because they have too "enterprise" an approach to something that should be dynamic and agile. The community is very small and shrinking. Community expertise seems to migrate away, rather than steward the community (most of the community stalwarts still around aren't even CFML devs any more!)- If there was a project similar to "ColdFusion UI the Right Way", but aimed at any part of CFML (like how to make a DB query in PHP instead of CFML for example), would you be keen to help on it? Would it be of interest to you to be a "user" of it?
Well yeah. It was partly my idea.- What else do you think might be useful to share?
nothing really
One of my Twitter contacts said that if I furnished the questions, they'd blog their thoughts. That's another thing you could do instead of doing the survey if you like: just let me know about it, as I don't follow any technical blogs these days (CFML or otherwise). Or you could reply in a comment here (although for me the survey would be easier to deal with, to be honest). Just whatever.
If you could also circulate word about this to your CFML contacts, that'd be cool too. I dunno how much notice the CFML community takes of me any more. Cheers.
That URL again: https://freeonlinesurveys.com/s/AuQ2WWKy#/0.
Or just RT it:
"Survey: #CFML usage and migration strategies" (https://t.co/3u9vr0PD1J)
— Adam Cameron (@DAC_dev) January 7, 2017
Righto.
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Adam