Next versions of ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder
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With the release of ColdFusion 10 and ColdFusion Builder 2.0.1 in May 2012, we have started work on our next versions of ColdFusion Server and ColdFusion Builder. Today, we announced the codenames for these releases at RIACon 2012.
The next version of ColdFusion server will be called Codename Splendor and that of ColdFusion Builder will be called Codename Thunder.
As we build our long term plan and roadmap for these products we have also finalized the codenames for our subsequent releases as well. The subsequent release of ColdFusion server will be called Codename Dazzle and that of ColdFusion Builder will be called Codename Blizzard.
We have some exciting feature themes and product directions planned for these releases and hope to bring them out sooner than our regular cycles. Rakshith, our Product Manager, will be soon announcing the product roadmap …so stay tuned.
19 comments so far ↓
@David: We are definitely interested in listening to our developer community. Could you please point us to the discussions you are referring to?
http://www.cfhour.com/post.cfm/show-154-breaking-up-is-hard-to-do
It spawned from someone posting a video where they "broke up" with ColdFusion and stated their reasons. While I don't feel the same way, they do make some great points about the product and the CFHour podcast also come up with some insightful ideas based off it. Hope you find it useful.
Sublime Text 2 w/ Atomi's plugin has actually emerged pretty hard as the go to CFML editor on the market as far as I can tell, it's improved my productivity significantly and does things CFBuilder can't and won't ever be able to do while being a much more performant and smoooth experience on all platforms. Adobe could even buy the plugin and takeover development or subsidize it. It's only a handful of features away from becoming the extraordinarily powerful CFML editor the community had been clamoring for for years. IMO. Thanks.
P.S. The captcha on this page is almost impossible, just struck out multiple times trying to post this comment.
And code insight that works - look at any real-world CF app and you will see that the current implementation simply doesn't. I use CFBuilder for syntax highlighting - thats it.
Please do file any bugs/ERs regarding CFB's debugger at bugbase.adobe.com. This way the team will have specific examples and others can vote for and discuss them.
Thanks,
-Aaron Neff
We had done a survey recently to find the usage of ColdFusion Builder among ColdFusion developers. We found that a large percentage of the CF developers use ColdFusion Builder as their IDE of choice in their work. The percentage was significant for us to continue to invest in ColdFusion Builder as a part of our overall ColdFusion offering.
Thanks,
Vishal Manakame
Group Program Manager
I don't use CF Builder, I use Dreamweaver and it's fine, part of Creative Cloud, comes with the rest of my CS6 apps - CF Builder should be a free thing that comes with CF - but don't waste resources on it. Spend more time getting universities and young developers into the language.
The problem with CF is not the server or the IDE it's, the marketing and the fact that the cfml language is not a general purpose language and last but not least the proprietary nature of it.
Marketing-wise it looks almost as if Adobe is ashamed of Coldfusion. It doesn't get picked up by the media, blogs and is not prominent visible on it's website.
The language is confined to web development and as such doesn't allow to create command-line tools which all new languages have. Think of Node.JS it has command-line, can start a local server from command-line, think of RoR which can build a skeleton app, do datamigrations, package management and deployment all from command-line.
I believe this is a serious handicap, it's also not open source so it doesn't attract people with creative ideas with vision as to were the technology should evolve. These people choose NodeJS, Rails or Django, MeteorJS and so on.
More and more companies are choosing open source not only as it's more cost effective but also because it doesn't tie them to commitment and faith of one single company.
What Adobe should do is open source and sell support, SLA's to companies, not charge for the application server as such. That would broaden the user base and more and more developers will give it a try.
It's these developers that will make the decisions in enterprises after a few years. And as it is now they will go with what they were exposed to when they were younger. And that will mostly be open source languages.
Also are we getting the beforeApplicationStart event handler that can be configured at admin level with cfm/cfc scripts?
Can Adobe also treat ColdFusion as a 'promotable' product and guarantee 5 more years of product life. After all it is their 'ATM that just keeps spitting money'. It's about time the ATM got some publicity. Time to put the Flash platform team in their box.
We stand commited to the ColdFusion product and have published our roadmap with our long term commitment plan. Please see the road map published at http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/product-roadmap-for-coldfusion
Direct link at http://blogs.coldfusion.com/assets/content/roadmap/ColdFusion%20RoadMap.pdf
thanks
Vishal Manakame|Group Program Manager|Adobe Systems
It's a great idea to get students - not just high schools but all levels where we want them to start learning about coding - using CF. One of the problems of more modern computers, that has been in the media lately, is that it's become largely inaccessible to kids wanting to learn about programming because most of the languages (C#, Java, even JS to a degree) are complex and non-obvious and most require compilation to do anything, unlike BASIC used to be. Also unlike CF, which is pretty easy to understand and learn and has the added benefit of providing "instant gratification" to the student. (Just like old-time BASIC but for the web.) I'm sure lots of kids would love it.
Adobe should make more of these benefits and get CF into schools, IMHO.
Having introduced it to several different companies I've worked for, perhaps the most common two questions I've been drilled on hard from upper management was:
1. What is Coldfusion? Never heard of it.
2. Why does it cost so much? (Sticker shock!)
Because I like CF and have significant time invested in learning and using it, I put my teacher/salesman hat on and got to work educating management on the benefits of using the product. We went over all the "evangelist" documentation, my past experiences/successes and then discussed who is using it and why. Just when I've got them understanding CF and excited on the RIO benefits from the rapid app development cycle CF affords I get the inevitable question about the sticker price. $8,499.
This is perhaps the most difficult part of the discussion because I have to tear apart (not disparage) other competing languages feature by feature to show how CF compares against them. Since I don't know all of them all that well, it makes it hard to compete against "FREE". I use quotes because I KNOW free is never free. I have been successful so far in showing management the benefits of using CF BUT it is exhausting to be an unofficial Adobe Salesman/Evangelist when I don't even get a commission on sales. ;-) Initially I purchased my own CFBuilder License because I didn't have the heart to ask them to spring for that too at the time. A year or so later, I got them to buy my other developers their copies of CFB so they could better enjoy the CF experience.
RECOMMENDATIONS (CHRISTMAS LIST for SANTA)
Make CF More Accessible To More People
1. Re-evaluate the price point on all distros of CF Server and drop the price. Break down the barrier to entry. It costs to much to properly get into CF. When going head to head against hosts providing PHP, Python and ASP in their services, CF fails. How? Hosts who make CF available cannot resell hosting at their competitor's prices because they need to recoup the huge investment and save for expensive future upgrades in order to stay up to date on their technology offering. Thus, they choose not to carry it.
2. Make CFBuilder free or nominal in price. $299 is TOO MUCH! You see, everyone knows CFBuilder uses Eclipse and Aptana. FREE is already on the brain. When we see $299, we ask... what for? CFBuilder is cool, but it's no MS Visual Studio. $59 is a more realistic price point.
3. Get creative on how to make $ supporting a larger user base while lowering the price point of CF to broaden it's distribution. This is a change that requires far more time to talk about but is ONE of the 900 lb gorillas in the room.
4. MARKETING! I can appreciate the apprehension CF developers have in moving forward investing time and money into something that just seems to not exist outside of their sphere of influence.
BENEFITS
1. By making CF Server more reasonably priced, more Hosting companies will offer CF as part of their services. (right now the offering out there is VERY slim). My host won't upgrade to v10 because there just isn't the demand to justify the cost. Those on the server who use CF including myself and several of my clients are stuck on v8 unless I move them off to another host. That's just not something I relish thinking about.
2. By making CF Builder reasonably priced, you can use it as a marketing tool to get developers properly introduced to CFML. Conversely, IF you strengthen CFBuilder such that it deserves the current sticker price, make it a tool developers will want to buy because it's so friggin awesome to use. Not only for CF but for JS (JQuery/Angular etc), HTML5, CSS, Source Control functions and so on.
I'm sure there are far better ways to slice this pie by far brighter people. However I think we are all agreed the pie needs to be sliced a better way.
I love CF! I will continue to use it where I can for as long as I can. Right now, I've had to move on to a shop using the Microsoft centered products. Before I introduce CF here, I will wait and see what Adobe does in the next 6 months.
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