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CFUnited Blog

State of the CF Union results and winner

Posted At : January 29, 2010 5:54 PM | Posted By : Michael Smith
Related Categories: survey, prizes

Thank you everyone who voted in the State of the CF Union survey. I noticed that many folks are not on the latest version of CF and are yet to adopt OO and frameworks. However CFC use is nearly universal. And open source products such as CFEclipse, MySQL and Railo are heavily used. Group learning resources such as user groups and conferences are used by the majority of developers.

Here are some of the interesting things I learned from the detailed results:

80% of developers are using CF8, with about half that number using CF9
If you are running CF6 or earlier you are behind the curve
Nearly a quarter of developers are using the open source Railo ColdFusion
More than half are using Enterprise CF (vs Standard)
80% run on Windows
A third use Fusebox with other frameworks such as Model Glue, Mach-II and ColdBox at 12-16%
While nearly everyone uses CFCs only a third use ColdSpring or similar to organize their CFC and only one in six do data via CFCs using ORM
UDFs, Custom tags and CFIncludes are still popular ways to reuse code but are starting to fall behind CFCs these days
Most developers have used CF for more than 6 years and over 90% use object orientation
CFers are heavily multi-lingual - using Flex, Java, PHP, AIR and .Net in large numbers
SQL Server remains the database of choice, with MySQL closely following. Oracle and Access runners up.
Two-thirds of developers use subversion, but a shocking 20% don't do source code control at all
CFEclipse, Dreamweaver and CF Builder are the top tools
Two thirds of developer attend a local user group some of the time
CFUnited is the most attended conference by CF developers, followed by MAX and CF.Objective()
The top challenges facing developers today is too much work, followed by maintaining someone else's badly written code and finding the time to learn new features.

And the winner of the ticket to CFUnited is Matthew Jones from Indianapolis IN. If you need to get on top of your backlog of work, learn new CF features, meet OO gurus or get up to speed on Flex or AIR then check out CFUnited.

This entry was posted on January 29, 2010 at 5:54 PM and has received 6825 views. There are currently 6 comments. Print this entry.

Related Blog Entries

State of the CF Union survey 2014 - partial results (February 5, 2014)
State of the CF Union survey - win a ticket to CFUnited (January 14, 2010)

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#1 by Brad Wood on 1/29/10 - 11:45 PM

@Matt: Congrats!

@CFUnited: I would be interested in seeing the average number of CF developers per organization, as well as a break down of the CF users by country/State. Is there any way you can cook up those numbers from the results? Thanks!
#2 by Brian Rinaldi on 1/30/10 - 2:05 PM

Once again I would caution not to draw too many conclusion from these survey results. Your pool is small and by its very nature is going to be predominantly people who attend conferences and read blogs. Thus, its not surprising, for instance, that they use things like Railo and CFEclipse or go to user group meetings. However, the majority of CF developers do none of these things.

These surveys are interesting and I am not criticizing having done it, just adding the "grain of salt" that should imo have been stated more clearly in this post.
#3 by Lance on 2/8/10 - 7:38 PM

Good survey, but agree with @Brian Rinaldi on the small cross-section of interviewees. I have been using CF for 10 years and still have not adopted a framework for various reasons. Also, I live in Ohio, and we have a good team of CF devs, but it has been very hard putting that team together. The MOST IMPORTANT thing the CF Community can do right now is spread the word, get people interested/involved and make more believers out of people. It is very hard to find quality CF developers here in Dayton (and Ohio, for that matter), but in other places they are abundant. What can we do to improve this?
#4 by Gary Gilbert on 2/11/10 - 12:39 PM

@Brian,

I have to agree with you 100%. This will be my first cfunited conference and I lived in washington dc from 2000-2006. It wasn't until 2007 that I decided to get involved in the community. most of the developers I know may read the occasional blog but are not active at all and/or probably wouldnt have taken this survey
#5 by Marc Funaro on 2/12/10 - 11:51 AM

"shocking 20% don't do source code control at all" - really? Shocking? I bet at least 20% of us are lone gunmen coders that have almost no risk of someone else screwing up our code. Nightly backups have worked for YEARS and I have never lost a single bit of work as a result. It's not that shocking, and setting up source control can be one extra task that for smaller or one-man shops is just overkill.
#6 by richard on 2/16/10 - 9:16 AM

@marc. If you only ever modify your own code maybe, but as soon as you develop code for clients you will run into branching versions, even if it's only to manage bug fixes in parallel with new releases. And being able to identify change sets is crucial if you screw up your own code.

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