ColdFusion: News, Initiatives and Updates from Adobe
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This is the season to celebrate and the intent of this post is to share a series of positive news and initiatives from Adobe that we are excited to share with the community.
ColdFusion 10 feedback and ColdFusion Business
We have received positive feedback for ColdFusion 10, and this is also reflected in the way business for ColdFusion has turned up. The business is doing better now than any point in the last few years. This quarter has been ColdFusion’s best since 2008.
This is very encouraging to Adobe and we will continue to make efforts to grow the product. Thanks to you for supporting the product.
Roadmap discussions
We have initiated new roadmap discussions where Senior leadership from Adobe participate in engaging discussions with customers. In these discussions we have received excellent feedback on ColdFusion 10, and our customers also like the future directions that we are taking and look forward to the upcoming versions of ColdFusion.
Cloud Release
As you may be aware, the promised cloud release of ColdFusion on Amazon EC2 has been delayed due to issues with agreements between Adobe and Amazon. We have resolved these issues and we are slated to offer an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for ColdFusion 10 with flexible hourly pricing.
Shorter Release Cycles
We are looking to reduce the release cycles for ColdFusion to create more impact through new features and functionalities and also make use of the window of opportunity that lies with ever changing space of new and upcoming technologies.
Education Initiatives
During the next year, one of our major efforts designed to grow the size of the community is promoting ColdFusion at various community colleges. Adobe will come up with a detailed semester-long curriculum for server side programming concepts demonstrated through ColdFusion. Instructor guides, quizzes, exams, and software required to teach will all be provided; along with access to a community expert that the instructors or students can interact with. If you have any contacts at colleges near you, please let us know. If you have any other ideas to promote ColdFusion in education, share that with us as well.
ColdFusion Conference from Adobe
Due to MAX’s focus on Creative Cloud tools and services, we are considering a full-fledged ColdFusion conference to be organized by the ColdFusion Business Unit at Adobe. While Adobe will be the primary organizers, we want to maximize community involvement in various aspects such as content selection.
Recharging CF User Groups
We are looking to actively engage with the ColdFusion user groups during the next year. ColdFusion 10 events are already in the works with interested user groups, and more is on the way.
Future Directions
We are also excited about our future releases – Splendor and Dazzle. A high level overview of each is available on our public facing roadmap available here. If you have questioned Adobe’s commitment to the platform, I encourage you to take a look at the roadmap. All of the customers with whom we have discussed the roadmap responded positively and gave promising feedback. Customers are also excited about the directions that we are taking, addressing key technological challenges in upcoming versions. If your organization is keen on participating in a roadmap discussion with the senior leadership from Adobe, let us know!
We look forward to exciting times for ColdFusion.
I will leave you with some of the photographs of the party that the Product Team had to celebrate the quarterly result and the success of ColdFusion 10. Here is the link.
Leave your thoughts and inputs as comments on this post.
Happy holidays everyone and come back for a great 2013 for ColdFusion!
150 comments so far ↓
It's really good to hear some positive news regarding Adobe's investment (be that $$$ or time, marketing, motivation etc).
It'd be good to keep this sort of positive messaging going.
Keep to the good work.
--
Adam
@RobG: Appreciate the input. As a policy we do not disclose details on pricing or changes if any ahead of time.
Certified and structured tutorials for developers.
Cheers..
Thanks again!
~Brad
I see no plans for a package manager on the roadmap, is this being considered since it is a key feature (selling point) of many languages out there (ruby, python, node, .net). also if a package manager is considered, will it be opensource?
I'm curious as to how you will support the new conference. Will it be located in one place or move around? Will it be part of Max or totally separate time and place? How will it effect your support of local conferences such as RIACon and NCDevCon?
However, I am concerned that there's still focus on features that would require CF-served client-side code. Even built-in social media integration worries me. Client side code including code that accesses Internet based APIs will date quickly and become a frozen snapshot in time from the moment any edition of CF is released. For example, what if FB/Twitter change their APIs a year later and shutdown support for their old API a year after that. Where does that leave CF customers who've invested in CF11 and are locked into its support for a specific API version? They'd have to upgrade to CF12 as there's no guarantee Adobe will release free updates for any length of time. It's a similar story with mobile development. If you use a 3rd party framework or tool you can keep updating your own code to use the latest release. But if CF has a particular flavor/version built-in you're stuck with that forever until you upgrade to the next version of CF. It's cfform and cfajax all over again.
I'd be interested to hear how Adobe will address these issues? Buying a CF subscription is not a good solution (after paying $8K for each Ent licence). I'd rather see more server-side technology being created and integrated, that's what CF has really been about from the start. Social media integration should be handled by open source plugins for CF, like the good stuff at RiaForge.org.
Adobe, please work with your Dreamweaver team to get them to keep their CF support up to date please. Builder isn't everyone's first choice of dev tool, especially if you've come from a web design background or just prefer a more accurate visual layout.
All that aside, it's really exciting to hear so much good news from Adobe. Thank you! (What brought on the sudden change of attitude? Is there a new boss?)
Anyway good to see more work going into promoting the product is finally been addressed, in both education and conferences.
But what worries me, is the multitude of bugs and enhancements, that had been reported in a lot of cases over 10 years ago.
The next version of ColdFusion Builder, had better have a stable editor, that supports full code collapsing and isn't sluggish when compared to a lot of other editors. I spend more time fixing the editors problems when coding than I am being productive.
CFML is the same, as a language it is old and it is showing its age. Changes made every 3-4 years are too far apart, and things like being able to support all ORM Events should have been added when ColdFusion 9 was a twinkle in someone's eyes.
Polish off what is there first, and then begin to develop modules/plugins that Adobe can seriously make money from. Like I would rather see a more OOP programming style in ColdFusion, with support for an MVC framework that authors can leverage from, before I start seeing Social Media integration.
Like having LINQ searching in ColdFusion, similar to the way .Net does it, I love LINQ.
The biggest problem is the Market Research that Adobe uses to field test their concepts, is coming from the wrong type of developer. But that is an opinion from observation only.
@serigo: Phill has answered your query on certification and tutorial. Thanks Phill!
@Brad: Yes, we will provide such updates as often as we can. Glad to see the impact this is making. The focus of MAX has changed particularly in this year. And it is only fair that CF gets a better a focus through a dedicated conference with all the attention it deserves.
@Tony: Interesting perspective on encouraging CF projects. Something for us to consider. The roadmap is not frozen, but an ongoing document that will get updated as we move along. We realize the importance of package manager and there is a good chance of it making into subsequent versions of ColdFusion.
@Roger: Thanks Roger. Great to hear this. The details of the conference is yet to be worked out. Out involvement with other conferences will not change. We will continue to support other local conferences such as RIACon and NCDevCon.
@jeff: A majority of our customers are buidling mobile apps or websites. We are looking to provide a unique end-to-end solution so that our customers do not have to look beyond CF to build a full-fledged mobile app. That said, mobile is just one of the features planned. There are other host of features planned including the PDF improvements.
@Henry: Your point taken on keeping it updated. The social apis will be implemented as custom tags that can be updated without having to wait for a new version of CF. And yes, we will keep it up-to-date with the new updater mechanism.
@Wil: You saw us participating as the platinum sponsor of cf.Objective() last year. We will continue to be involved with cf.objective()
@Brad: Not true anymore with our participation since the beginning this year. We were actively part of cf.Objective() and CFCAMP where Railo was very much a part of the conference.
@Elias: Interesting idea for sure. We are evaluating it.
@Gary: Thanks for the encouraging words. We are excited to share these updates with the community. I have answered how we plan to handle social apis in my response to henry. Do take a look.
@Andrew: Thanks! We are spending enough effort to correct issues existing in ColdFusion Builder and the server. You will see that in action when the new release comes out.
@Henry: Absolutely! The features will be designed such that they can be easily updated.
Thanks for the feedback guys! Let us know any other thoughts that you may have. If you have any contacts with the local colleges around where we can promote the curriculum that will help. Let us know.
--
Adam
But I guess time will tell how quickly these things get polished :-)
With that said, we need a stable and healthy platform. Being number one is not about having the most instances but being a product market fit. It is my opinion that outside the enterprise we have not achieved awareness of where ColdFusion achieves product market fit. Who are the customers and what problem does CFML solve the best for them? What features solve what problems?
I did some personal extensive research on the state of the platform doing my own interviews and see possibilities. The possibility of an Adobe sponsored conference, a roadmap, a focus on cloud instance solutions and communicating with us like this are positive moves. This type of buzz could get my publisher to move on a new ColdFusion Book.
As per users point of view, if I can host a application comparatively very less price than ColdFusion then why I will opt for ColdFusion. It doesn't matter what is the server side language you are using to develop my application.
Thanks for the update! Not a couple of days ago I was sharing on LinkedIn how much of a bad taste Adobe has left in my mouth over the past couple of years with CF. This blog post addresses some of the issues I was complaining about (specifically, getting CF into colleges), but I still have a few questions:
Will Adobe now participate in the CFML committee?
Will Adobe begin to take any major role in pushing open source use of ColdFusion?
Will Adobe be focusing it's CF marketing efforts on SMB as well as the enterprise?
What are Adobe's plans to promote the language and raise interest within the open source community?
Will Adobe continue supporting, and sending resources to, NCDevCon, RIACon and cf.Objective(), despite the possibility of throwing their own CF conference?
While the number of instances sold might be going up, the number of available positions for CF have gone down - even in traditionally CF centric locations (like DC). Does Adobe have any significant plans to help address this situation?
All in all, this post is enlightening and inspiring - I would love to see Adobe refocus it's efforts on CF - as others said, it's pretty well felt like Adobe has abandoned CF in the past couple years - their latest marketing push included. And with the announcement that MAX will not have any CF specific stuff, the landscape seemed even more bleak. This is a positive note from Adobe in a time when some of us are frankly considering abandoning the technology altogether in favor of newer technologies and those with a larger jobs base.
-- Denny
Keep up the good work! So excited for the future of CFML.
Matt raises the old debate over pricing which is still very valid and part of the reason that take-up isn't as grand as it should be, particularly with students, startups and small businesses. My main use is Enterprise so cost isn't the key concern for my business but pricing has created a lack of young talent.
While the educational licence is free, students know it will cost them money to carry on using as soon as they leave the sanctuary of education, hence the greater appeal of learning zero-cost alternatives. When you start off doing your first commercial websites you don't want big overheads like server licences or more costly shared hosting.
It would be great if the AWS cost with CF was really competitively priced. And a licence for shared hosting providers was made cheaper to compete more comfortably with LAMP/.NET hosting to encourage developers (inc students) building small websites to choose CF over PHP.
If CF is starting to make money again then imagine how well it would do if it was actually marketed! You know, promos on the adobe.com home page, ads on technology websites and loads of other things to get people talking about it (who aren't already existing CF customers!)
If you want to foster community, how about starting with involving more of the community in the release of your product(s)? Take a page from Brackets.
I was lucky enough to be in a previous CF and CFB test group, but couldn't help think that it would've benefited from more participation (it seemed that 3-4 guys accounted for the great majority of traffic in the private forums.)
Opening up these forums and testing to more people IMO would be a great boon to the product - as would the knowledge of the features being planned. I'm not interested in being surprised about new features, I'd rather be informed/armed with the proper information in order to make good decisions/help my customers make good decisions in the future. I think a more open dialogue and participation could only help here.
I run my online class at a private liberal arts university in North Carolina using ColdFusion, and I'm thinking about including CF next year in the curriculum.
@John: Great to hear that. The initiative driven around education is what I believe will help spread the word out on ColdFusion outside of existing enterprises.
@Matt: I agree it could be an issue. But ultimately, we are running a business. Yes, there will choices made because of the pricing and there is no way we can fight the price battle and still run a business.
@David: Cheers buddy! Look forward to your continued support in shaping up the future of the product.
@Andy: Absoutely! Rather than opening up the alpha and beta we are planning to include a significantly greater number on our pre-release. We are also evaluating how to garner more pre-release feedback through recognition and awards. I am confident that the upcoming pre-release for the next version will excite a broad range of ColdFusion developers. Look forward to having on the pre-release yet again.
@Phillip: That is great news! I will reach out to you personally as well to understand more. Yes, with a strong curriculum in place it will be exciting to see you start offering a CF curriculum!
Look at something like Parallels Plesk control panel - historically it was expensive to buy outright, but now they have monthly pricing that is affordable to hosts of all sizes and it's a massively popular platform. Have preferential pricing for virtualised machines like they do - I think my Plesk costs something like usd$17 per month for each virtual node, so that's for a package that I think cost usd$600 or something to buy outright a while ago. I'd pay usd$25 a month for CF10 - but there's nowhere that even does license leasing that I've seen. Monthly costs make much more sense to web hosts - Creative Cloud has worked out ok right?
You also need to get back on-board with large hosts such as Media Temple - who have hosted CF in the past, but don't know anymore - for either cost or security reasons generally. Go to them with attractive incentivised pricing and they'll adopt the platform, shout about it for you and grow the user base for you enormously.
Regarding participation (or lack thereof) in MAX; I think stepping out alone is an enormous mistake and will only serve to marginalise the CF community even further. CF should be actively encouraged and included in MAX - it should be pushed front and centre - use it as a platform to really educate people about it. Start talking about it in the same conversation as Dreamweaver and people will start to feel that way about it.
FYI. I notice on the Adobe site today MAX is the full feature banner - something I recall CF10 did not have even at launch! It's a rather damming indictment for Adobe frankly, and I fear indicative of how they truly rank the platform.
Even if you click on Products on Adobe.com there is no initial mention of CF you have click more Products and then it's buried deep in the catalogue with things I've never heard of.
Why not include the developer edition of CF as part of the Creative Suite installer perhaps? So then everyone who installs Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash etc. gets presented with the option to setup CF with a simple web server config and start using it with some good tutorials etc.
Considering the position Adobe hold in the creative industries it should be so very easy for them to make CF massive - I simply don't understand where you're going so wrong - sorry.
Conferences evolve as companies and customers and markets and products evolve. That's a reality, and one that has played out many times before. When DevCon and UCON merged to become MAX the former UCON base was upset that the content and focus was too developer-centric, and they were right, but that is what was needed then. And even DevCon itself changed when it evolved from being a single product event to a corporate event. And MAX has also changed over the past few years, and it is going to keep changing. And having been doing this for over two decades I can tell you that the same is true for just about every industry conference, big or small.
Last year at MAX we launched the Creative Cloud, and the response since then has been phenomenal. Creative Cloud is the single most important initiative for Adobe right now, and so MAX has evolved again and has becoming the Creative Cloud conference. This is significant, and yes, it changes the products and technologies represented at MAX - there are products that have never had much of a presence before that are now taking center stage, and others that are being deprioritized. This is a new MAX, no disagreement there.
Of course, ColdFusion fans will see this as yet more proof of Adobe’s dislike for their favorite product. Right? Well, funny thing is that fans of other products excluded or deemphasized feel the exact same way about their favorite product. Trust me, we’re hearing from them too. That’s unfortunate, because this is not about which products we like or dislike, and it’s entirely about supporting company and customer future direction.
The fact of the matter is that Adobe needs to do what is best for the company and their customers, and the new direction for MAX is intended to support just that.
And Rakshith and the CF team are right. This does create the opportunity for a more focused CF event. And considering the maturity of ColdFusion and the space that it occupies, the size of its customer base, the roadmap, and more, I believe that that’s exactly what CF and the community now needs.
--- Ben
Thank you for the great post. You mentioned an initiative of working with CFUGs more. I am with the Chicagoland CFUG and was wondering how I could get on the list to work with you?
All this info is very encouraging. Thanks!
-Daniel
I still think nobody requires a CFTwitter or CFMobileTable tag or whatever you guys are thinking of behind the buzzwords, but at least we can talk about it and understand your reasoning.
Knowing CF sales are doing well is great news to spread too.
Hope to see you at Scotch on the Rocks this year too.
And if you need any conference help please let me know!
I'd really love to see CF take a 'feature' break and concentrate on the core language. Maybe it's time to break that backwards compatibility (keep CF10 as a long term) and 'fix' all the odd idiosyncracies in the language. Joe Rinehart did a great video that outlined all these awhile ago.
Make script the default, use tags in views, get rid of all the client side fluff no one uses, etc. This has all been discussed over and over again over the years. Basically modernize the language.
And I don't think it would hurt to do another 'tour' and visit your big existing customers to let them know of this roadmap. As Roger pointed out ColdFusion is on or near the chopping block in a lot of the big government agencies that typically have been long time ColdFusion supporters. I don't think Adobe can afford to loose these sort of clients.
Also, I would suspect that there is a relation between the products that get the most face time and the products that are most widely used and make the most money. Let's say PhotoShop generates 10x the revenue that ColdFusion does, Adobe execs would probably ask you why it should get more or even equal face time on their site.
Of course, the big question is how much MORE lucrative ColdFusion could be to Adobe if they could shake the "old", "outdated", and "lame" stigmas that have permeated the world and get people flooding back to it. I'm frankly tired of seeing job postings on Twitter to convert old CF sites over to PHP and people asking incredulously, "What, you still use ColdFusion??".
I hope for all our sake that this marketing push is for real and does good, because it's about 3 years overdue.
And Rakshith, I do hope you're serious about Adobe being accepting Railo because it's not what I've been seeing. I understand that to an extent they are competition, but unless Adobe is about to release a free version of CF, (unlikely) I see Railo as CFML's only chance to ignite an open-source adoption-- the kind that caught on in PHP back in the day and made it the break-out language that half of the commercial apps in the world are written in now.
As far as I know, there has never been an anti-Railo policy at Adobe or on the ColdFusion team. I am aware of specific comments made by specific individuals over the years, but I have always chalked those up to be the actions of very passionate team members sometimes going overboard, and not representative of anything more devious. As for me personally, I get on well with the Railo folks, and have never had issues or voiced any concerns about them (which, to be fair, is not something I can say about some of the other CFML engines).
--- Ben
Ben, perhaps my observations were anomalous, but two specific examples I saw recently was the lack of Railo mention on learncfinaweek.com which was a community-driven project hosted and funded by Adobe. The second example was a conversation last month where the CF team declined to sponsor a prize for a community give-away if the contest advertized Railo in any way. To be clear, I don't fault Adobe for those decisions as they are theirs to make, but they led me to believe that there was an sentiment in Adobe to shy away from spending money on things that advertized Railo. I welcome the news of that not being the case.
@Daniel: Thanks Daniel! It is good to know that you are associated with the UG in Chicago. I think we are already working with the UG from Chicago. But do drop me a line 'rakshith@adobe.com' and we can take it from there. Thanks!
@Tom: Thanks Tom! Pre-release will be great way for you to understand the details. I can get you on the pre-release as soon as it opens up, if you are interested.
@Denard: Let's not forget that the CFML committee started as an initiative from Adobe. Sean has outlined, pretty well on his blog, the inherent issues that they faced in trying to a buy in from every stake holder. And it is a fact that as a policy Adobe cannot discuss about the upcoming features out in the public. The committee only but struggled while it lasted, not just when Adobe decided to step out of it. I don't see a point in going through the entire excercise all over gain when you know it eventually wont benefit anyone.
@Jim: Thanks for offering to help Jim! Dan, you, Roger, Simon and others at the NCDevCon do a fabulous job running the conference. You support and guidance will help! Backward compatibility is a tough one to crack. Between CF8 and CF9 we did break backward compatibility and we still have a few customers running CF8 just because their apps are built using those features of CF8. But I agree with you, it has to be a right balance of breaking compatibility and modernizing the language.
@Shakti: Great to hear that!
@David: Agree with you! 100% ;-)
Contact me if you would like to check out the site.
Just FYI, I've specifically responded to things that the following people have said: @jeff c, @Brad Wood, @Andrew Scott, @Andy K, @Rakshith, @Tom Chiverton, @Shawn, @ Dave McGuigan
Still a great thread and an excellent discussion!
--
Adam
Also cfexecute should support piping like: ls -1 | wc -l
And last but not least support nginx as frontend webserver!
I think there is a misunderstanding about what I was saying. Let me be very clear that I never said that Adobe was "anti-Railo", nor did I suggest that you two didn't get along. Those aspects to the discussion were both introduced by Ben (who perhaps hadn't read the complete comment thread).
Please read my original comment which was addressed to Wil (by name) and his suggestion that Adobe "fully embrace" CF.Objective(). I interpreted that as a suggestion that Adobe take over that conference instead of creating a new one. I was simply pointing out the obvious potential conflict of interest that could create (which you have just confirmed).
Also, please do not put words in my mouth. I never once suggested that you should or would want to "spend effort and funds" to support a competitor. In fact, I have supported your decisions to protect your interests which was the whole point behind my first post. I have also seen you "draw the line" you spoke of recently (and supported it) and was simply suggesting to Wil that the conflict of interest might inhibit you from running a conference like CF.Objective() (or being more involved than you are now). I don't know how to make it any clearer than that.
Since then in the conversation you have stated that you will continue to sponsor other CF Conferences, which I think is fantastic. You have also (unnecessarily) re-affirmed your working relationship with Railo and I think that is also fantastic.
At the time, creation of the committee was useful to help unify the community and the CFML engines. New Atlanta had spun off Open BlueDragon and formed its own steering committee. Railo was going open source as a JBoss community project.
Several years down the line, Railo has shown continued commitment to compatibility with Adobe ColdFusion, whilst OpenBD has gone its own way and stated publicly that compatibility is not a key concern for them. Today's "CFML committee" would only be Adobe and Railo and they seem to be getting on just fine without a committee.
Both Adobe and Railo have ways to get user feedback and perform extensive testing as new releases are being developed. Their different approaches are due to their underlying natures - Adobe has a commercial product and has to be careful about forward-looking statements; Railo has an open source product and has to do almost all of its development out in the open.
I'm very pleased to see Adobe moving to more frequent releases for ColdFusion, as well as making a concerted effort to crack the education system and introduce CFML to students. I think the roadmap is really too vague to be useful - but Adobe's hands are mostly tied there by the "forward-looking" caveat and responsibility to their shareholders. The roadmap does, however, show that there _is_ a long-term plan! My initial reaction to Adobe's plan to run its own ColdFusion conference was "I hope that doesn't cannibalize their support for community-run conferences!" and Rakshith has addressed that (good!).
By the way, I haven't blogged about it but after the formation of The Railo Company with investment from international partners, announced at cf.Objective(), I stepped down from Railo (and all US-based business has transitioned to the new European company). I mention that here since at least one commenter in this thread has recently accused me of shilling for Railo and being anti-Adobe, neither of which is true (and the latter never has been). I have opinions about both companies and their products but I'm happy to praise both when they deserve it and criticize both (again, when they deserve it).
@Adam: Thanks for the feedback!
@Patrick: We are looking to support CentOS with the next version of ColdFusion.
@Brad: If we are on the same page now, it should not matter anymore. When you drew references to a couple of instances it certainly looked like you were indicating the contrary of what you just said in the post. Never mind, misunderstandings do happen. And it is all the more possible when you are responding to bunch of folks with various inputs. Thanks for all the feedback Brad. Appreciate it. Cheers!
@Denard: Thanks to you too for sharing your feedback and thoughts.
ColdFusion 9/10 have pretty good support for Microsoft Excel manipulation (xls and xlsx format), and I do believe there is support for Microsoft PowerPoint manipulation (I haven’t used it)… but what about Microsoft Word?
We've been running on CF8 since it's release (we started on CF3), and I definitely can't advise them to upgrade to CF10 based on reports of issues with the CF10 upgrade ... And while I appreciate the ease of use and rapidity with which product can be brought to bear in CF, I can't convince them to spend the money to upgrade to at least CF9 -- Not to mention that the product doesn't appear on the list of network approved products for the .mil network -- only because it hasn't been sponsored and tested -- As an aside, neither has Railo.
Unsure where to advance from here.
More than a few negative ones too when your updates screwed up our installations.
Someone else brought up PDF generation and maintenance. There should be a complete API for working with PDFs within ColdFusion. You should be able to work on documents to add or edit any of the meta data, tags, add or delete pages, work with security, etc. Adobe owns both products so this shouldn't be a huge issue. Please do this before some other document format comes out and is required by US government or industry.
@Brian: We have been having engaging discussions with our Government customers already via the roadmap discussions. The feedback from every goverment customer has been great and they too are excited about the directions that we are planning to take going forward. We can arrange a roadmap discussion where we first talk about the benefits of CF10 and then talk about our future directions. Reach out me : rakshith@adobe.com and we can set something up.
@Lola: You can email me: rakshith@adobe.com
@Roger: You will a much better PDF generation and maintenance support in the subsequent version of CF. Stay tuned!
I think Apache POI might have this functionality, but the docx format is horribly difficult to deal with (such as Word splitting a single word across, what they call, multiple "runs"). Some companies spend $10,000+ to use Aspose products to deal with the complexities of Office… but that simply isn’t an option for most.
Congratulations for the good news, you guys plant the good seed now you getting the fruits. There is one thing we all notice on this blog, can you guess it? I guess you did, look the number of comments whether was positive or negative they all mean one thing to me, how passionate and how they love ColdFusion.
In my humble opinion, you guys need to focus on the IDE too, in today's world IDE is the productivity factor, coming from Visual Studio to CF Builder it is like driving car then jump to bicycle. Many occasions I suggested to work with DW team not west time with new IDE, DW combine design and development tools, if you guys worked by adding CF features to DW we were in better position now. In addition to DW with CF features, you could include CF developer edition to Dreamweaver installer as optional server side pack. Imagine how many CF servers will be installed with DW copy, which will introduce to new audience how easy to have CRUD operations/services/PDF/image manipulation and many of CF features available as first class citizen with DW. I guess right now we have CF Builder, the focus should be on that at least bring it to Flash Builder quality.
One more thing to add before I end my comment, regarding to Ben Forta's blog (with all respect, for me he is CF God Father) about using CF ajax features, in my opinion these kind of announcement will not serve CF despite the fact it is true. For example .Net has same built-in ajax features they start moving silently to JQuery in fact they include it with MVC framework but never criticize or announce publicly.
Congratulations again and keep the good work, I will be your number one supporter.
This very positive news bodes well for CF's future. Excellent!
Let's please further improve customer satisfaction, product quality, and Adobe's image by enabling bugbase to better facilitate discussions. Currently, ticket authors and commenters are frustrated about the inability to "subscribe" to ticket comments and status changes. Bugbase doesn't inform them when an engineer asks a question (unless the engineer actually sends an email) or when a ticket becomes "closed as unreproducible". Thus, valid bugs can remain in CF. And bug discussions then occur in less appropriate channels that actually do facilitate discussions via "subscribing".
CF rocks and 11 will be lucky. "Typed" on a screen keyboard so ignore any typos :)
Happy Holidays to Adobe and the CF Team!,
-Aaron
@Travis: Interesting. Do you already need such a support for word document manipulation in your web app workflow? If yes, are you already using any solution. I will also be interested to understand the usecase on how you moight end up using such a server side word manipulation feature. Look forward to hearing back from you.
Happy holidays everyone! I look forward to more interactions as we roll our plan for 2013. I am also excited more than ever about how Adobe and the community can work together make a positive impact to ColdFusion.
what does this mean?
Thanks!
What I feel personally is we need to create more n more CF resources because nowadays CFers are asking salary like anything as CF resources are hard to find, which is not good for the whole community. Lot of companies(enterprise level) are developing application on .NET just to save this extra salary burden coz .NET resources are easy to find with lot less salary. So before cursing Adobe we should also show responsibility toward CF and think twice before asking sky high salary.
I've always said CF is crazy cheap in the enterprise market so it's good to know Adobe's business plans are having a positive effect.
But it is so different, with the enterprise market being so the opposite I fell over backwards.
What I think would be more interesting, is how much of an increase / decrease sales have been on the standard editions.
And maintain that Adobe needs to find a way, to get people to bridge the gap between those still using V5.0 to future releases, and I strongly believe open sourcing or making the CML engine free. Would encourage more of an adoption to the latest and greatest, potentially increasing sales if the package it right.
@Subranath: Thanks! Great to see overall optimism. We will make sure to continuously provide updates on all the initiatives planned.
@David, @Roger, @John : Agree with you that we cannot make any assumptions on salaries for CF developers based on anecdotal evidence.
@John: No. The surge was not because of a large group or customer renewing the license. There has been a steady upswing across Q3, Q4 and now Q1 as well. Two high performing quarters in 2008 and 2012 does not mean sales have been declining. So your assumption is not true. As I have stated in the post, our customers like CF10 as a release along with the improvements/features introduced in CF10. This has been validated through our increased customer engagements this year. We will continue with these engagements during the next year as well.
@David: You could attribute the success to whatever you want to, but the overall business is on upswing and that is what matters.
@Andrew: We are doing better on both Standard and Enterprise editions. One way we are bridging the gap that you point for customers stuck with prior versions is by having deep conversations with them on the benefits of the new release. Like I said, this is has helped improve the business.
@John: I would like to reiterate again that the surge was not because one large corp or entity. There has been a steady upswing right from the quarter where CF10 was released.
I didn't mean that was the only reason. You guys create a truly awesome product, that's why I use it. Keep up the great work man.
Thank you *very* much for communicating the issues to the bugtracker team! You're always very welcome. I've been anxiously/busily preparing for CF11 :)
See you next year!,
-Aaron
LOL! at the "They just call it PHP. The rest is implied." *awesome*
-Aaron
Email: rakshith@adobe.com
Twitter: rakshithn
Look forward to hear about your website.
A free usage tier/time in the official AMI is a good next best thing though.
PS I still struggle with the CAPTCHA (are those O in background ? or a real letter ?) Maybe I am a computer :-)
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Adam
@Tom - you can always use the AWS free tier and download/deploy CF10 yourself. It's a bit more involved (obviously) but doable. You just have to edit the memory setting to something reasonable for the 640M total you have with a micro instance and CF10 runs pretty nicely on Amazon Linux (for a dev server, obviously). I have a preso up from cf.O() last year with some of the details on how to do it with CF10 (http://css.dvdmenubacks.com/ColdFusion_On_The_Cloud_Amazon_EC2_and_S3_cfObjective_2012.zip) and an earlier preso with step-by-step how to do it in CF9 (http://css.dvdmenubacks.com/ColdFusion_On_The_Cloud_Amazon_EC2_and_S3.pptx)
Yes, absolutely. All the numbers and highs that we are seeing right now is because of ColdFusion 10.
@Hemant, First, thank you for your reply! I -am- thankful for the CF team's continued focus/efforts on improving the tracker (including 'testing the waters' w/ Bugbase). I'm sure much planning and time has been invested over the years. I'll note that the "Tracker"-related tickets *appear* to be mostly ignored by the bug tracker team. They posted some comments on tickets back in June of 2011, but I haven't seen any comments from them since. And most Tracker-related tickets are still "Unverified". Of course, ticket comments are currently not a very effective means of communication (since we don't get emails when comments are added). Maybe the bug tracker could have its own Prerelease :)
Thanks!,
-Aaron
With all of the betas of Win2012 that were available prior to its August RTM (and to Technet, which I'm sure Adobe has access to), I find it hard to believe that they are still working on this. It is for these reasons I still wonder how much of a priority ColdFusion really is, no matter what the marketing speak is. Can you imagine them taking this long if Photoshop would not install on Windows 8?
If I am getting a 30% increase in searches over the previous month every month, that has got to say Adobe pull that finger out and do your job.
The observation is that Adobe is governed by where they can place their efforts, but to think that deployment by business uptake is not now is wrong, as developers we are already trying to work on this solution.
But I said it once before, and I will say it again, how badly has this effected their sales, because I know plenty who have said screw it and moved over to railo or have gone with something else they use in house.
That means another few applications are not being written in ColdFusion, all because Adobe can't see past their noses.
Although there is one area I strongly believe there should be concern for, is the more frequent releases. Just because no one likes having to sift through bug reports to determine why their applications do not work.
As with any programming language, interface or just about whatever, making sure it all works well before adding new features is something that should be wrapped up first before continuing to add new improvements.
I know this is not always possible because of complexity, but I am a strong believer with regards to a better product. Which in turn leads to happier customers. This is great news for the CF community.
@Sean/Andrew: We realize that this is important and are working on it in addition to ensuring that a comprehensive testing happens on the new platform
@Ty Whalin: Thanks! Do you have any contacts at some of the communty colleges? If so, I would want to get in touch with you. I agree with you that the releases should not be so frequent that catching up with a new releases becomes a challenge.
@James: We are working on the support already. So please go ahead with your plan your upgrade. The support will be available in under two months from now.
Macromedia opened a facility in Bangalore many, many years ago and initially used it primarily for QA so we could have 24x7 dev cycles: dev in the US during the day, QA in India overnight. It was a great system and I interacted with the Bangalore team a lot when I was senior architect on the Web Team. Over time, Macromedia increased the staffing levels in Bangalore and increased the teams' responsibilities, moving a lot of product maintenance to that facility, which increased the US facilities' ability to focus on new product development.
Macromedia began to shift ColdFusion engineering duties to Bangalore in the CFMX7 timeframe if I recall correctly. By the time of CF8, most ColdFusion development work was being done by the strong team that had emerged in India. I remember interacting with Ram and others during that release cycle, and getting onMissingMethod() implemented "under the radar" since Tom and a few of the original Allaire team were still the senior engineering gatekeepers in the US :)
With CF9, everything except product management and marketing moved to Bangalore. The US-based engineers moved on to other products (or other companies). Then product management and marketing also transitioned to India. I think that was really when most CFers realized how involved India was in ColdFusion :)
Adobe took a similar approach with its facility in Noida. When Adobe acquired Macromedia, that meant the combined company had a substantial engineering body in India. Adobe already had several product lines being maintained entirely in India, right up thru product management and marketing. It was a natural step to consolidate divisions to reduce the communication and timezone overhead so that entire org charts within the company could operate locally and autonomously.
I don't know what the numbers are these days - I left Adobe almost five years ago (wow, that's flown past!) - but I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe has more staff in Bangalore and Noida together now than the rest of the world combined...
The ColdFusion team in Bangalore seems to have been pretty consistent - quite a few of the engineers have been around since the CFMX 7 days, I think?
@Rakshith, you've been with the team a long time, right? Hope you don't feel I've mischaracterized anything here... Like I say, in my time with Macromedia / Adobe (about seven years), I always had great interactions with the Bangalore team (bummed that I never got to visit them - my manager, Robin, and the head of Web Team QA, Svetlana, got over there quite a bit!).
@Damien: Thanks! It would be great to have to the beta program for the future releases of ColdFusion!
I've been patiently waiting for 2012 support for a while now. Most of my new server hardware has arrived, the rest comes next week, and then we want to crack on with setup and moving clients over - but we can't - because there is no installer that works - not the software itself really, but the installer. A relatively small and simple piece of software that simply does not take that long to put together.
A couple of weeks back I see on this blog it'll work in 2 months. We can't wait 2 months. We've already waited longer than the 3-5 months you said originally - I'd second whoever made the point that: can you imagine a scenario where Photoshop wouldn't install on the latest version of Windows... no, neither can I?!
I would like you to, here on this blog, commit to a firm calendar date - Feb 16th perhaps - in 4 weeks time - by which time you promise to have a new working installer for us? I'd never get away with giving my clients timelines like 'oh a couple of months' - so why should you?
@adam - like many others I've been following your blog posts and updates on workaround - I've tried a couple, but have had little success. Can I suggest this... In the meantime, could one of the members of the adobe dev team do us a walkthrough of a workaround that works. We all appreciate it's a stop-gap - but at least it would be recognition of all of us who are getting hugely frustrated.
We're all CF fans here - It's a great language, with many benefits over it's competitors in my opinion - I really try to push the platform where I can - but it's embarrassing.
Whilst I'm on the subject - shouting about yet another security patch doesn't make me think - 'ah they're a great dev team looking after their customers, making sure things are properly secured' - it makes me think 'why on earth did they release it with that mistake in it that they've now had to go back and fix'.
Sorry to say I'm a couple of weeks away from turning my back on Adobe - and I'm sure I'm not alone.
PS. agree on the captcha WTF!
This is a very good suggested, and a very good middle ground that Adobe could taek, by way of amelioration for really droppping the ball on this one.
@RakshithN? What do you think?
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Adam
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Adam
Once installed you can switch this off and have no impact on ColdFusion, the only thing that requires it is the Web Configuration tool, and too be honest who ever decided it was needed for a non classic application pool has some answers.
I don't mind them coming out and say it is because of this, but I can write a tool to do the same job as the Web configuration tool tht does the same job and it doesn't require the CGI part of IIS.
If anyone wants to talk about dropping the ball, then this is a classic example.
The only problem is that the connectors need to be setup manually, and you will not be able to update to updater 7 or uninstall at this stage.
However I was able to manually patch ColdFusion 10 with updater 7, I am not confident at this stage it is 100% done. The patch or hotfix is correct but the version hasn't changed.
I am guessing that the version is being updated as part of the installer from the update.
It could be as simple as saying 'application.strictLanguage=true/false' to opt in/out of 'compatible' mode for instance, or having CF choose to use an older version of the compiler with '[server|application].cfVersion=6'.
There are many ways to fix things with out breaking code, or at least providing an easy way to unbreak them.
While I believe bug fixes are necessary and should be implemented, a "strict" mode is a slippery slope to losing the facets of CF that attracted the majority of its following in the first place.
http://adamcameroncoldfusion.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/according-to-06-60-and-both-are.html
and this:
http://adamcameroncoldfusion.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-holy-grail.html
If those weren't the specific sources of what she said, then it's the same thing, anyhow.
@James there's some argument for *allowing* strict typing already. CFPARAM, CFARGUMENT, CFFUNCTION etc. There are plenty of situations in which I'd *love* to be able to declare a variable as an int, and to get at least a runtime error if for any reason some code tries to make it a string. I have use cases for this all the time. I'd not want CF to compulsorily go strong-typed though. But then again that's a strawman: no one has suggested this.
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Adam
@Adam: There is no workaround that is completely foolproof. We would rather focus on the full support than any intermediate solution that is not fully tested under all scenarios.
@Mary: Backward compatibility is at the top of the list for most of our customers when they upgrade to a newer version. That said, it is not true that we maintain 100% compatibility. We have made the choices to break compatibility if it is the right thing to be implemented in the language.
@Tom: As I pointed to James, if there are ways where you think we could fix issues, yet maintain compatibility without having introduce complexity in programming, we will happy to consider baking that in. But that needs some good amount of discussion. And pre-release would be a great place to have that discussion. I would encourage you be a part of the pre-release for the next version as well just as you have in the past.
But I hope that Adobe seriously go back through the bug base and fix things like these that have plagued us for over 5 years.
I can understand them being deferred with not enough time, but we have had 3 versions and how many updates and they still have never been fixed.
Adobe should be actively caring about these type of bugs, the longer they take to get fixed means the more people are likely to move away from the language. Maybe not.
But there is no excuse to revisit of a release and begin fixing these type of bugs, and this is just from a small list as there are hundreds if not thousands of bugs like this.
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040277
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040278
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040298
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040508
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3041043
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3040941
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3041278
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3129821
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3133547
Thanks!
@Austin: We are working towards getting the AMI as soon as we can. There is no date that I can explicitly call out at this point. You will see an announcement going out when we are ready.
I tried to download Coldfusion installer for windows 8 support. And click on the link http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=coldfusion. But this goin to error page. Could you please let me know from where can i download the same.
Regards,
Gyan
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