Below are the partial results to date for the CF Server Hosting survey survey. If you missed the survey you can take it here. See how you compare with other CF developers.
 

We will announce the final survey results and raffle winners the first week of May.

Note that the results are batched processed so they may not include your votes immediately. Check back in a few hours if you want to be sure.

This entry was posted on April 22, 2010 at 1:06 PM and has received 4451 views. There are currently 4 comments. Print this entry.

After the successful State of the CF Union survey, we wanted to find out more details about the state of CF hosting in 2010. Help us find out what ColdFusion hosting issues people have with this survey . We will share the summary results with everyone so that you can see how you compare with other CF developers. Additionally, everyone who completes the survey will get a copy of a 25-page report on Advanced Application and Server Troubleshooting Techniques by hosting expert Edgeweb CEO, Vlad Friedman. Thanks for your time completing this survey!

Plus we will raffle off one ticket to CFUnited (a $1049 value), two 8 Gb iPod Touches and one copy of Fusion Reactor picked at random from everyone who completes the survey. You have four chances to win something awesome!

The raffle closes on Friday April 30th. We will announce the winners and final results the following week.

This entry was posted on April 19, 2010 at 12:28 PM and has received 3077 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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.

  This entry was posted on March 23, 2010 at 5:07 PM and has received 2782 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Hello world of all things ColdFusion, Flex and Air!

We are officially opening up the list of topics for the community to vote on! Our keen and trusty Advisory Board have voted on some of these topics already. Some of the topics they are voting on as we speak (blog). But we want to hear the voice of the people, the CF fanatics, the proud self-proclaimed geeks that truly represent what CFUnited is all about! Answer the call to action and make your voices heard!

Evaluate the topics submitted and VOTE

From gurus to newbies, everyone in the world and their dogs can vote (as long as they have an e-mail address) until February 12, 2010.

This entry was posted on February 8, 2010 at 5:39 PM and has received 4717 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey! As a token of our appreciation, please use the following code, CFSurv50, to get $50 off your registration for CFUnited 2010.

HOWEVER - you have to use it before Valentine's Day!

That's right! Show your love and register!

This entry was posted on February 1, 2010 at 12:23 PM and has received 3251 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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 6805 views. There are currently 6 comments. Print this entry.

The State of the CF Union survey ends Wednesday 1/27/10. If you missed the survey you can take it here. See how you compare with other CF developers.

And one lucky person will win a ticket to CFUnited. Yes it could be you, President Obama, if you are not too busy with your own State of the Union address Wednesday night that is - to spend 5 minutes answering questions on your ColdFusion development skills and challenges! :-)

This entry was posted on January 26, 2010 at 12:24 PM and has received 2469 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Help us find out the State of the CF Union with this survey - what versions of ColdFusion do people use, what frameworks, tools etc. We will share the summary results with everyone so that you can see how you compare with other CF developers. Thanks for your time completing this survey!

Oh yeah I nearly forgot, we will raffle off one ticket to CFUnited (a $999 value) picked at random from everyone who completes the survey.

We will announce the final results on the day of President Obama's State of the Union address. Hey perhaps he will slip the results into his speech, might get a standing ovation!

This entry was posted on January 14, 2010 at 3:35 PM and has received 9610 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

Its Demo Mania!!! (formerly known as "Demo Derby", but the name was misunderstood)

At CFUnited, on Friday August 14th, we will have a series of Demos from anyone in the community willing to show off their their cool app in 7 minutes or less.

Fill out this survey to enter. http://tinyurl.com/demomania-cfunited

Not everyone will be accepted but everyone will be mentioned

How your app makes it on stage: Must be new. Must be cool. Must be able to demo in a short amount of time.

Types of Projects include: Website Apps, Air Apps, iPhone Apps

Oh yeah, You must be attending the conference to enter and watch ;-)

http://tinyurl.com/demomania-cfunited

This entry was posted on July 14, 2009 at 8:19 PM and has received 4088 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

How do you measure up hot shot?

Take this quiz to see if you how you do.

Jeff Peters is teaching an intense class August 11th 2009 on "jQuery and ColdFusion"

jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries in use. ColdFusion can auto-generate JavaScript for many favorite AJAX-type tasks. This class will explore how to make automated JavaScript and hand-rolled JavaScript work and play well together, while retaining the developer's sanity. Bring your own laptop and a healthy dose of curiosity. Techniques explored are also applicable to other JavaScript libraries.

jQuery and ColdFusion: A Quiz

Or register now! http://cfunited.com/2009/classes#class-CU248

This entry was posted on June 22, 2009 at 3:29 PM and has received 4021 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.