Here are some comments from the State of the CF Union survey the other month:
- (Roy Martin Emerge Interactive) It is very exciting to see the passion and growing involvement in the ColdFusion community since I joined it in 2005. I'm looking forward to joining members outside of my immediate community events and experience the excitement from the conferences first hand.
- (Seth Aaronson sethron) ColdFusion still makes difficult stuff easy.
- (Steven Rubenstein Emaze, Inc.) CF still beats all other development languages. But it would be much easier if CF were more accepted in general. Everyone wants Ruby or PHP because they are free and there are more developers available for those languages.
- (Chuck Stazo UPS) I enjoyed attending CFUnited in 2009; I was able to meet and listen to many of the people whose blogs have helped me become a better coder. Having only been a CF developer for a few years, attending CFUnited really gave me a good sense of what people were doing with the technology and how they were pushing the boundaries of what the technology could do. At the time CF9 was only in beta and it was amazing to me how many people were out there working with the new product and how much they really knew about new features and functionality. I have worked with other development languages and have struggled in the beginning to get up to speed on syntax and best practices, resources were hard to come by and web search results were mediocre at best. With CF and CF users I have never felt that way, I was able to easily grasp the concepts and learn the language, and if I have questions or are unsure of how the best approach, I know the answers I find out on CF bloggers sites are top notch.
- (Gabriel Roffman etesters) Congratulations on having such a long running conference!
- (Mike Kelp EdomGroup, Inc.) I've worked in .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby, and Python and still find ColdFusion the absolute best tool for the web development job.
The biggest disappointments I'm seeing in the community right now are the obsession with cfscript and the number of people getting overexcited about Ruby. There are many far better languages, but it seems people get excited about some of the utility functions that in most cases only help you out of very poor logic or Rails, which has many good ideas but falls short of being the all powerful framework it is pitched as.
Most people also far underrate CF's capabilities in memory management and efficiency compared to others. Opening your mind a little past the general buzz of the blogosphere you can find some very unique (behavioral, dynamic) design patterns that are so easier to work with in CF than other languages.
- (Kevin Pepperman Liquid Blue LLC) CFML is my preferred language for web accessible content.
I feel that it leverages the best ways to deliver and manage web based content, and now that there are open source alternatives to ACF, that the language will continue to be adopted.
The CFML communitys are second to none.
- (Daniel Fredericks Alion) Now that I have started seeing CF in a whole new light, being one of the if not the most knowledgeable CF'er in terms of new stuff at my job, I've seen how CF really has advanced. I see how the community is very passionate about CF and how helpful they are as well. CF has really come a long way since I started, and well, so have I. I may not be the best developer, but I really want to learn more and more.
- (Tom Tedeschi Information, Inc.) Over the years we've found CF far and away the fastest environment to develop in, and have yet to come up against a problem we couldn't solve with it.
- (Bob Stobener Raley's) ColdFusion is the Macintosh of programming languages. Back when Apple and the Mac was on the ropes in the 90's, everyone had written the platform off. Today the industry follows their lead. I hope the same will happen with ColdFusion. Adobe and the ColdFusion community has to become more aggressive in promoting CF to consultant agencies and IT departments (the ones who make the decisions). It has to gain MindShare. Also, you have to be able to convince Java programmers that their life would be much simpler with CF as a front end, if nothing else. Adobe should be extremely thankful for open source engines like Railo as well as the CF community. They promote externally to Adobe's customer base (while Adobe seems content with it's dwindling customers). Just like Apple and the Mac reinvented itself with a determined commitment to succeed by aggressively showing the world its products, Adobe must relentlessly elevate ColdFusion to the industry and promote its tremendous value.
