Is Cold Fusion still viable as a development platform?

[lgriess]

I've seen other old old posts from 5 years ago asking why you would want to use cold fusion and no one came up with a proper answer as to why to use it over a more popular language platform like PHP or .Net.

I'm against Cold Fusion, I've seen the ads of companies looking for developers and talked with some of them and they regret ever starting to use cold fusion. They can't find anybody out there with experience programming in the language.

Please anybody tell me some advantages of Cold Fusion over PHP or .Net and why we should look for developers in the language, I think there are about a half dozen unemployed developers all over the world that code in Cold Fusion regularly.

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[snipped - no advertising]

[arrgh]

{Reaches for can of troll-spammer-be-gone}

[samaru]

Well, this topic has been beaten to death in other forums, but I'll give it one last whirl. Here's my personal take on it, after programming in CF for 10 years. There's no easy answer.

When comparing technologies, there are some things that ARE JUST NOT quantifiable, like:

Which language is easier? (Depends on your background.)

Which is faster? (Depends on your architecture, your experience, and $$.)

Which is cheaper? (There are several CF engines, not just Adobe's, that are free.)

Which language is more scalable? (Depends on your experience.)

Which language has the best community? (There are great people in all languages, as well as ignorant people who spread FUD.)

So me telling you that ColdFusion is better for those reasons would be a disservice to you. Me saying "PHP is faster than CF" has as much merit as me saying, "chocolate is better than strawberry."

However, some things ARE quantifiable:

Which language is more talked about on the web? http://langpop.com/ , http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Which has more books in stores? Barnes and Noble, Amazon

Which has more jobs listed in popular job search engines? monster.com, dice.com, etc.
Which language has more tooling? (Visual Studio vs Aptana vs CFBuilder vs Eclipse, etc. and addons).

Now, while quantifiable, I don't think these make a language "better." Also, .NET and Java are supported by Microsoft's and Oracle's marketing machines. Adobe on the other hand is speculated to not support ColdFusion as heavily, since they're more of a UI company and inherited ColdFusion from acquisition.

My belief is that these quantifiable attributes gives the illusion that some how "CF sucks" or is not as great as other languages. So the thought is almost:

Well, I know Microsoft, and a lot of companies are using ASP.NET, so I can't go wrong with that. What... ColdFusion? Not many people use it, right?

From my own personal experience, I started with CF because I thought it was very easy to use. It's dynamic-typed nature lets you write less code, just like Ruby or Python, so I don't really attribute the easiness to ColdFusion, per se. One thing that I do absolutely love though, is the CF Administrator, which lets you easily configure the CF engine and apps. Imagine the web.config/global.asax being able to be modified from a very-easy to use GUI, or the php.ini/.htaccess being able to be modified through a web app. I find it extremely handy.

Lastly, I'm a ASP.NET developer and left CF a while ago. The reason? More jobs and ASP.NET iterating more quickly (by MS) than Adobe. Also, I really enjoy C#'s syntax and tooling.

[arrgh]

Do not feed the trolls ...