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.