ColdFusion biggest challenge

 

The biggest challenge IMO has always been ColdFusion's marketing department and senior management - actually, it's the company who owns ColdFusion's head of Marketing is usually design orientated. To the point that three competitors have emerged due to the poor decisions passed down to those who code the end product. To the point that the Dreamweaver demos PHP apps, but not ColdFusion ones. Adobe's senior management team and board are like a parent who leaves a kid in the car for hours on a hot day.

Just visit the download page to see what I mean. You would think that ColdFusion, a product that is widely used in web development cirlces would be promoted on the download page?? Even free products are highlighted above ones that make money?? Heck even Adobe Color Management Module gets a mention and below the product selection is AN EMPTY SPACE!!! Yet again ColdFusion is on the outer! Design Premium and Acrobat Pro are on there twice!! TWICE!!

To the exchange listing.. four columns 16 products... Interesting how they are grouped into fives so that ColdFusion is on the bottom... subtle, but noticeable how ColdFusion always ends up visually obscure.

Interestingly, there's an adobe marketplace, but no ColdFusion marketplace - a product that has had a long history of add-on's and products, instead they are nested inside the exchange. Yup - Adobe love to promote CF!

Then we head to the developer exchange where unless you've been a CF developer for two weeks, nothing is really useful - no advanced topics are discussed unless someone is pushing a framework or ORM. How about articles about optimisation, application layout. And as for articles on zdnet, cnet or any other general site... very sparse. Anyone seen a ColdFusion ad in a IT industry magazine lately? Seen plenty of ads for other languages??

I love ColdFusion, I love the new cfscript enhancements (and those about to come).

THE biggest problem is the object creation performance. hands down it's the one thing that prevents us from creating true OO websites with CF and the one thing that makes CF look "unfinished" and "immature". Yet Adobe doesn't look at it as a big deal. They would rather devote resources to implementing useless enhancements (cfscript... please) then deal with the a main issue.

# years w/Coldfusion: 8 (since 4.0)

Problem: CFC creation performance

Solution: treat CFCs as singletons with static methods, which limits the utility of objects

Problem: CFC not a java object

Solution: none, this is something that languages like Groovy and Scala I believe have figured out (does Railo also have this worked out too?), so I believe this is doable. It would be a boon to have the ability to create objects using ColdFusion and pass them to Java objects. Yes I am aware of the bridge that Ben Forta has detailed in a blog post BTW

* 11
* CFC creation time
* Use Groovy for the object model
* Don't attempt to build a large-scale Flex or AIR application that relies on CFCs, because it will be very slow

Other issues just for more input: difficulty integrating the CF engine into an existing JEE app (with Railo it's pretty straightforward); tag-based CFC coding is extremely verbose; lack of modularity (I think we should be able to upgrade versions of things like AXIS or EXT as long as the upgrade doesn't break backward compatibility with previous versions of that module, which they rarely do).

I think the biggest challenge in Sweden is to find a CF job. I really want to work with CF, Flex and testing but I haven´t found a job so I am working with other things during daytime and CF the rest of the day. It is really sad that there is no promotion at all in the Nordic countries.
4 years of CF.