ColdFusion has 2000 new "customers" per quarter. Apparently.

G'day:
I was surprised to read this, from Rakshith:

[...] we get 20000 new customers ever year [...]

My ellision there does not change the context of what he said at all. It was just in the middle of a comment about something else.

This, obviously, raised some eyebrows. This morning Rakshith modified this claim:

@ Everyone: I stand corrected about new customers. I wanted to say 2000 new customers per quarter. We do not add 20000 new customers but rather it is 2000 new customers per quarter or 8000 new customers per year. I apologize for the confusion.

And yes, I am only referring to ColdFusion new customers here.

That is a bit less unbelievable than 20000, but I'm still keen to hear how they measure that.

I have asked for further clarification.

Interesting though, eh?

One thing I'd say about this though is that - if it's true - then... where are the people joining the online / visible community. If we are harsh and say each of those is a licence, and each of those means one developer doing the work... even if only 1% of them were interested in the online side of the community, we'd still see 20 new faces per quarter. Which... we're not, as far as I can tell. More's the pity.

Still: I think this is more a case of Rakshith presenting conveniently described numbers which do not in reality reflect what one might expect "2000 new customers per quarter" to actually mean.

Update:

Rakshith has just updated:

@Adam: New customers in this context are entities or organizations that have never bought ColdFusion from us in the past. Each such customer has bought one or more units of Standard or Enterprise. 8000 new customers will mean more than 8000 new units purchased.

Blimey. Where are they all?

--
Adam

CFSummit: Yeah yeah yeah, all right Rakshith...

G'day:
So yesterday I said this:

"Cold Fusion" (sic) in @rakshithn's notes. Maybe it *is* 1995. #cfsummit2015

— Adam Cameron (@DAC_dev) November 9, 2015

To which Rakshith said this:

@DAC_dev Dude, seriously - Either you are drunk or trying too hard to point out issues. There's no "Cold Fusion" in *any* of my slides

— Rakshith Naresh (@rakshithn) November 9, 2015

Them be fighting words, so we had a bet, and... having checked his presentation... I lost the bet.

So here's my penalty: you're right, I'm wrong. Sorry mate.

Now shouldn't you be here in the PUB having a pint???

;-)

--
Adam

The Adobe ColdFusion Team are doing a bloody good job at the moment

G'day:
I know I am the first (and loudest, and most repetitive...) to whinge about Adobe's ColdFusion lads (/ladesses), but... fair's fair... there's very bloody little to complain about at the moment.

ColdFusion 2016 in 2016? ColdFusion 2016+1 in 2018?

G'day:
Brad posted an interesting (if very blurry) image from CFSummit earlier:

Tridib's plan for the future of ColdFusion http://t.co/gJhvKFaOw9 http://t.co/UCrKxfRlrn #CFSummit2014
— Brad Wood (@bdw429s) October 16, 2014

Update regarding irritation: cheers Rakshith

G'day:
Y/day I got all ranty with this: "Please indicate your irritation @ the ColdFusion Team".

A bunch of people joined in the irritation (that sounds vaguely NSFW, I know), and fortunately Adobe have fed back:

@dacCfml @AdamTuttle @adobeCare @ColdFusion This issue will be reopened and evaluated. #ColdFusion
— Rakshith Naresh (@rakshithn) September 10, 2014

Adam made a good follow-up point, and Rakshith responded positively to that too:

@AdamTuttle @dacCfml @adobeCare That should have been the initial response itself. Something for us correct going forward.
— Rakshith Naresh (@rakshithn) September 10, 2014

This is all positive. I thanked him on Twitter, but I just wanted to say thanks here too.

Good man, Rakshith: thanks.

--
Adam

ColdFusion 11 is not ready for release in one month's time. Simple.

G'day:
This is a short adjunct, designed to encourage the Adobe ColdFusion Team to respond to their community. It'd be helpful if you could retweet it.

In my opinion, CF11 is not ready to release for one very good reason:

2014-04-12 17:58 Untriaged ColdFusion 10 bug count: 67. List: http://t.co/XGoReqPrfq
— CfmlNotifier (@CfmlNotifier) April 12, 2014

67 ColdFusion  bugs not even looked at yet? Yer having a fucking laugh, Rakshith.

I wrote a speculative article the other day: "ColdFusion 11 release date confirmed to be no later than...", which intuits that we're about four weeks shy of ColdFusion 11 coming out. I think this is borne out by an increase of bug closures with "can't be arsed... maybe in two years time" (I think it actually said "Closed/EnchancementRequired" or "Closed/NotEnoughTime").

However as far as I can tell, Adobe haven't even bothered to look at a whole bunch of the issues their paying customers have raised with them.

I really don't understand how Adobe can be so dismissive of their clients. I seriously can't see how this is even "minimum professional" behaviour, let alone appropriate behaviour when they're in one of their very rare development cycles.

In contrast, Railo has the "luxury" of being able to do continuous development, so continuous issue triage/resolution, and they very rarely leave an issue untriaged (and even unfixed!).

Adobe choose to only do development on ColdFusion once in a blue moon, so they really have to at least triage all the currently outstanding issues. And, if they were to have any sense of professional integrity, fix the bugs, implement the features, or explain why they don't.

Adobe have done a bunch of good stuff for ColdFusion 11, but they are way more than a month away from delivering a professional product. Part of being professional is listening to one's clients.

I would like Rakshith to respond to this article. And what's up with their bug-fixing...

--
Adam

Balls I say!

G'day:
Sorry Rakshith, I know you deleted this message, but it's too amusing for me to not keep for posterity.

ColdFusion 11: Confusion as to why <cfhtmltopdf> is not simply an adjunct to <cfdocument>

G'day:
I had a look at <cfhtmltopdf> a week or so ago in "ColdFusion 11: <cfhtmltopdf> is pretty good!". And as I say in the article title: it works really well (other than a coupla bugs I raised). However one thing I can't work out is why we now have two tags that do the same thing: <cfdocument> and <cfhtmltopdf>.

They might - under the hood - use different mechanisms to arrive at the same goal, but surely the whole thing about having a tab abstraction layer is that the underlying mechanism ought to be irrelevant: the tags - and indeed the CFML language as a whole - is supposed to abstract the minutiae away from the developer.

A coupla things that are different about <cfhtmltopdf> are:

1. it only works on Windows;
2. it is enterprise only.

Both of these are a bit shitty (or a lot shitty, really), but they do not - in my mind - justify why <cfhtmltopdf> is a separate tag.

So, anyway, I asked on Twitter for some sort of explanation:

@ColdFusion, can you pls explain why <cfhtml2pdf> is a new tag,not just an upgrade to <cfdocument>? They do the same thing,yes? #ColdFusion
— Adam Cameron (@dacCfml) March 9, 2014

And this morning I got a response from Rakshith (well I am presuming he's still the man behind the curtain of the @ColdFusion account?)

@gamesover @dacCfml The new PDF engine service can be installed as a seperate service on a remotely. You can chose to disable it as well.
— Adobe ColdFusion (@coldfusion) March 12, 2014

@dacCfml So rather than force fitting the available functionality, a new htmltopdf was introduced. Much easier for CFers to comprehend.
— Adobe ColdFusion (@coldfusion) March 12, 2014

Rakshith is mistaken about the release schedule for ColdFusion 11

G'day:

First things first:

To demonstrate a point, I am going to release this blog article with one title, post my usual Twitter status update, and ask someone to "retweet" it. Then I shall be changing the title subtly... and the title change will reflect the title I actually want the article to be seen as. This is to demonstrate that once someone says something on the internet, it stays said. The original title was unfairly harsh, and a slight overstatement (although not actually inaccurate). By design.

Today I wondered out loud on Twitter whether the ColdFusion 11 pre-release lifecycle seemed longer than usual. Brian Klass set me straight on that:

@dacCfml Previous cycles have been in the 10-12 month range. CF11 is following the same path.
— Brian Klaas (@brian_klaas) January 17, 2014

And, indeed, having done some homework, I am well off base with my instinct. I'll get to that. That's only tangential to what this article is about.

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.

New Railo docs site

G'day:
Bam Bam Bam. Three articles in rapid succession this evening!

I shoulda said something about this earlier, but it slipped my mind. Mark Drew has been beavering away getting the new Railo online docs sorted out, and they're now live.

The site is here: Railo Documentation Viewer.

Wanna know the best thing? This is the URL for the docs on <cfassociate>: http://railodocs.org/cfassociate. I did not look that up, I just knew all I needed to do is to type the tag (or function) after the domain name, and it works. Contrast this with Adobe's equivalent docs. Take a deep breath... http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/10.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec22c24-7f5b.html. Got that? Railo seem to have a better grasp of web concepts like SEO and URL hackability than Adobe have (well if Adobe does, they don't care).

On SEO... if I search for "railo docs cfassociate" the first link is the page above. If I try "coldfusion docs cfassociate" I get the CF8 version of the docs as the first link, and the docs for ColdFusion 7 are third. ColdFusion 9 and 10 don't actually show up on that search, but Google displays them as results for "similar" searches: "coldfusion docs cfassociate", then the CF9 docs are listed. Oddly, if I actually do a search for "coldfusion cfassociate", I get the CF8 match first, the CFMX7 match on the second page (who the hell every looks at the second page of Google's search results? ;-), and by the time I gave up... page 5... I'd still not seen a link to the docs for any currently-supported version of ColdFusion. Blimey on page 3 there was a link to this blog of me talking about the tag, but nothing from Adobe on CF10 or even CF9. Slack. How can a web company be so poor at making sure their own docs are googlable?

Official confirmation: Adobe is on the case regarding ColdFusion 10's web sockets security issue

G'day:
SSIA, really. But you know me: I can pad 14 words of information out to take 1400 words to say...

This is in reference to the security holes that were discovered in ColdFusion 10's web sockets implementation a few days ago, as I discussed in an earlier article: "Web socket security issue: risk assessment & findings".

Rakshith posted on Twitter & on the Adobe ColdFusion blog today that a fix is in the pipeline. He does not go into any details as to whether they're fixing all the issues identified, or some, or what: I guess time will tell.

However I'm pretty impressed with their turn-around time on this one. Henry raised the issue on June 27, and it's only a week later and they're got a patch in the works (I presume it's well under way, not that they were simply starting it when Rakshith announced it).

I look forward to testing it, and I will feedback with my findings having done so.

Not bad: only 180-odd words to re-articulate the necessary 14 ;-)

--
Adam

Censorship on Adobe ColdFusion forums etc: resolved

G'day:
This is the final chapter in the ongoing story which started with an Adobe forum moderator making some questionable censorship decisions on a form thread I was trying to help on, and continued as Madison Murphy from Adobe worked with me towards a resolution.

Running ColdFusion Builder as a plug-in on 64-bit Eclipse is faster than CFB standalone

G'day:
Actually the title pretty much sums-up this article. But you know me: I'll pad it out to be a few hundred words at least ;-)

Adobe offers free installation support for ColdFusion. With a list of caveats

G'day:
We were reminded by Rakshith on Twitter this morning (well: "morning" for me, anyhow) that Adobe offers free installation support for ColdFusion. His Twitter message was a pointer to an article on the ColdFusion Blog explaining it .

Taken at face value, this seems really great. And it is, to a degree. However - as is often my wont - I have managed to find things about it that rankle me. Which is handy on this somewhat-jetlagged "slow news day" for me.

Positive Communication from Adobe regarding ColdFusion: more thoughts

G'day (again):
I'm following the comment thread on the "ColdFusion: News, Initiatives and Updates from Adobe" blog post on the Adobe blog that got posted a few days ago. I offered my first tranche of feedback a coupla days ago, and here's my second lot.

These are replies to people's comments, and some general thoughts. I'm posting them here rather than there because this is too long for a comment cluttering-up someone else's blog. I'll cross reference this article over there too though. Also I want to get this discussion on the radar of my readers too, in case they're not aware of it, or have not thought/bothered to follow it.

I've worked my way down the comments, and commented / responded as I go. It's a bit stream-of-consciousness.

Positive Communication from Adobe regarding ColdFusion

G'day:
In a break from the perceived doom & gloom I have been seeing recently regarding CFML - this blog, Sean's blog, Andy's blog (Andy's gripe is specifically about the ColdFusion installers not working on the current versions of Windows), the Fusion Authority blog etc, some  stuff from the Railo community (which seems a bit counterproductive to their cause, but it's only an element of the lunatic fringe that engage in this), and various series' of sound-bites on Twitter - Adobe published a very positive-sounding article on their official ColdFusion blog yesterday. It should come as no surprise that Adobe are sounding positive about their product, but it's really not something we hear too much of too often (Rakshith, take note ;-).

One might think that the article was all just self-promotion & marketing spiel, but this one actually had a bit of meat to it, which was refreshing.

Missed marketing opportunity?

G'day:
This is more on the "CF10 in the UK" thing that I wrote about recently.  First things first, I'm gonna reproduce a comment Rakshith made against one of the other articles here, so as to clarify things:

Hey guys, I was not referring to UK when I said 'over there'. UK was never in the context of this conversation. I was referring to <cfmldeveloper>.<com> and not UK. My bad that I should have just said <cfmldeveloper>.<com> than saying 'over there'. Sorry for the confusion.

P.S. I have better access to data than anyone could possibly have to make a ridiculous claim that Adam is the only in UK using CF10 :)

I'm the only person in the UK using ColdFusion 10???

G'day:
Sorry for the attention-grabbing headline, but it's not a complete work of speculative fiction (although I kinda hope it is).

CF on Windows 8 and Java 7

G'day
I am sitting in a pub in Portumna, Co. Galway, in Ireland.  Drinking a... [I can't bear to say this]...a Coke.  This is the first time I have been to Ireland and I won't be allowed to have a Guinness. This is a crime against reality.  ("Doctor's orders" in case yer wondering).  I mention this solely because a problem shared is... supposedly... a problem halved. What a load of ballocks.

Anyway, all that is besides the point.

Just in case you weren't hanging on every word on the #ColdFusion tag on Twitter today, I hit Rakshith up about what the story is with two things.

Firstly, I asked for clarification about when CF10 will be installable on Windows 8.  He responded (very quickly, thanks Rakshith!) with a blog article, over here.  The short version is "3-5 months".  Given Windows 8 is due out... what: any day now?... OK, just over a month away according to Wikipedia, that's a bit later than I expected.  That said, it will not affect me one bit (I'm still on Vista on one machine, and only just on Win7 on the other).

The next question was about CF9 and CF10 being certified on Java 7 (Java 6 will be EOLed in Feb next year), and his response (Twitter-only this time) was "support for #ColdFusion on Java 7 will come out before Java 6 gets EOLed in November."

Note: I only just now found out the EOL on Java 6 has been pushed out to Feb 2013 (apparently this will be news to Rakshith too...)

Well I hope it's closer to Nov than Feb, to be honest.  It's one thing for Adobe to get there just under the wire with ColdFusion, but please bear in mind all of use need lab time for our server upgrade testing too.  So having a coupla months leeway would be rather handy.  If Adobe are targeting Nov, then that's cool.

This is a pretty short post (for me), but I'm typing on a dodgy old netbook in a noisy pub (the only place in Portumna I've found with Wifi), so it doesn't lend itself to in depth research.

Time for another pint.  Of Coke.  Sod it.

--
Adam