Thank you everyone who voted in the State of the CF Union 2013 survey. Despite some worries ColdFusion is alive and well with a new version released since the last survey 3 years ago, and another in the works. I noticed that many folks are not on the latest version of CF and are yet to adopt a framework. However CFC use is nearly universal. And open source products such as CFEclipse, MySQL and Railo are used by about half of developers. Group learning resources such as user groups and conferences are used by about half of developers (down a bit since last survey).

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

  • Three quarters of developers are using CF9, with about half that number using CF10. This is a similar adoption curve as 3 years ago for CF8/9
  • If you are running CF7 or earlier you are behind the curve
  • Just over quarter of developers are using the open source Railo ColdFusion, little change from 3 years ago
  • More than half are using Enterprise CF (vs Standard). The ratio of Ent/Std is little changed from 3 years ago.
  • 80% run on Windows. Same as 3 years ago.
  • A 30% use Fusebox with other frameworks FW/1 and ColdBox the second and third most used. Fusebox, Model Glue and Mach-II have declined in use over the past 3 years, ColdBox about the same and FW/1 has increased in use. However the most popular "framework" is No Framework at all.
  • While nearly everyone uses CFCs just less than half use ColdSpring or similar to organize their CFC and only one in three do data via CFCs using ORM. These are respectively slight and substantial increases in dependance injection and DAL use over 3 years ago.
  • UDFs, Custom tags and CFIncludes are still as popular ways to reuse code as they were 3 years ago but still a little behind CFCs in popularity.
  • Most developers have used CF for more than 10 years and 90% use object orientation
  • CFers are heavily multi-lingual - using Java, PHP and .Net in large numbers. These languages are in similar use by CFers as 3 years ago, where as Flex and AIR use has declined by about half over this time period.
  • SQL Server remains the database of choice, with MySQL closely following. Oracle and Access runners up. All except Access are used by similar percentages as 3 years ago, with a moderate decline in Access use.
  • Half of developers use subversion, and Git is now used by a third (up since 3 years ago). But the same 20% as 3 years ago of developers don't do source code control at all.
  • CF Builder, Dreamweaver and CFEclipse are the top tools, all used by a similar number of developers. CFEclipse is down in use a bit over 3 years ago.
  • Half of developer attend a local user group some of the time, which is down over 3 years ago.
  • CF.Objective() is the most attended conference by CF developers, followed by MAX. Overall conference attendence is down as a percentage of respondees.
  • The top challenges facing developers today is too much work, followed by maintaining someone else's badly written code and integrating with legacy apps and security issues.

And the winner of the copy of FusionReactor is Paul Ihrig of Columbus OH. If you need to get on top of your backlog of work, learn new CF features, meet ORM gurus then check out our developer webinar series.

 

This entry was posted on February 12, 2013 at 9:38 PM and has received 10129 views. There are currently 4 comments. Print this entry.