The O’Reilly book comparison is not valid. I like many of O’Reilly’s books. Their Cold Fusion book just doesn’t compare to the other books out there by Forta. I’ve been in the Oracle World those are much better. O’Reilly’s Nutshell books used to be THE source.

I know that everyone has already posted many of these counters to Kevin’s statement, but I figure that the more developers that speak out that maybe a greater respect will be offered to the CF development community.

First, in regards to image manipulation, CF8 (Scorpio) will have with over 50 attributes. I heard this at Adobe MAX 2006 two weeks ago. Up until this point, I have used Alagad’s image component and it has worked flawlessly and was easy to integrate and learn the syntax.

Second, I started out developing in ASP.Net, then Java (J2SE/J2EE), then learned PHP and finally ColdFusion. ColdFusion has been my best experience for programming languages in terms of rapid application development, learning curve, reliability, scalability and security. I would highly recommend this language to anyone that wants to move from static site development to dynamic content.

Regarding the book sales figure, everyone that develops ColdFusion knows that there are really only two de facto books on CF development, the Web Application Construction Kit and the WACK: Advanced. If you use Dreamweaver MX2004 or 8, you have the entire O’Reilly code and function reference libraries available in the Results/Reference panel. I own the O’Reilly book in addition to the other two but have only opened it maybe four times in 3 years. It is horrible. Otherwise, I use CF community sites, like House of Fusion and CrystalTech’s ColdFusion Forums and Adobe’s Devnet.

I work as a web and multimedia developer. It takes the PHP-only guys about twice as long to develop applications as it takes me to develop in ColdFusion. If it were ASP.Net or Java, it would probably take four to five times as long.

The integration that ColdFusion 8 will contain for easily integrating with Flex Data Services is another amazing strong selling point for the language. I have several clients rallying for RIA in their intranet systems.

I have not had any problems finding jobs for ColdFusion and I get calls from headhunters regularly.

Finally, I develop to make money and create creative, functional applications. I don’t do it very the thrill of rolling in code. Rather, I would like to build something and focus my other time on developing the marketing and enhancing the application or learning new technologies. I have rarely come across a scenario that I have not been able to use CF to develop a solution to a client’s needs. I feel like this article was written from a “geek” (meant in the highest regard) perspective rather than a business perspective. While I value being a geek, at the end of the day, business drives my career.

I’m sure Kevin did not mean any malcontent and I’m really happy to see the outpouring of support from the CF community. Don’t get me wrong, I still think SitePoint is terrific and hope that we don’t have another one of these misinformed reportings. I’m also glad to see the revival of the CF blog on SitePoint as it will give me another reason to regularly visit the site. Thanks for listening.

I posted a new comment with some links to alternative coldfusion engines that would save you money and let you benefit for using the coldfusion “language” but someone must have considered it “inappropriate” because the took the post away. I would have emailed you but you did not have a way to do so, hence my post in case you came back. If you see this then perhaps you can leave a message as to how to get in touch. Meanwhile I am left wondering why they would take away a post containing links to alternatives - one would think more choices make more things possible. ~megan

I have a few friends that are loyal CF users, and in private they say that their clients (small/mid businesses) are beginning to ask for more ‘main stream’ solutions (asp or php) due to the overwhelming popularity of the ‘others’. For example a client will ask for a proposal and 10 other companies will send in PHP based solutions (maybe a few asp) and only one (if any) will be for CF. So the client will ask “what is this ColdFussion?” and after you make your points they will say “If it is so great then why is yours the only proposal in CF”.

So what I am saying is that for CF to become a real contender (I am talking popularity not language strength) and be adopted by more users, the CF community needs to get very active and Adobe needs to make a stronger effort to make CF more widely available. Also the hosting community needs to see the potential for CF and have it be readily available (the hosting community has strongly endorsed php or LAMP due to the low cost issues, if adobe would provide very low cost solution maybe the hosting community will pick it up. For example the largest hosting provider in my country only offers CF as a paid add-on. I used to see many courses offered for CF in local trade posts but I no longer see this.

I would love to use more CF but my clients are, in most cases, not wiling to get tied into a seemingly limited group of developers (at least in my local area) or a limited number of hosting providers (we have the same problem with Ruby).

I have no numbers to prove this, but the feeling I get from talking to my CF friends is that although whoever has used CF will say it rocks they end up having to use other platforms to be able to be in the mainstream competitive market.

Please note that I am in a 3rd world country and US$1200 will buy you a small house (a very small house in a bad part of town, but a house none the less) so it is a very high cost. This makes CF a great tool for the rich…for the poor LAMP is the only way to go.

Any more silly theories ?

Link: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/proven/

~megan

ME:::::::: Above statement doesnt hold good at all for measuring CF growth, as liveDocs and CF Dcoumnet available are the Best, I have found compare to other langues. Guess What, I have been doing CF Web Development from past 3 years and I dont own even a single CF book. Obviously I dont need it, as it is really easy to learn with documentation. I woud highly recommend CF to New learners/ fresher, as getting started language.

More of this brilliant statistical thinking we have going on here guys. Amazing stuff, lets think about this for a second..

Refreshing my knowledge of ColdFusion code through the pages of the journal, I gained a renewed appreciation for the “hide the hard stuff” approach that’s exemplified by the platform.

First of all hide from the hard stuff - more like “wrapping tags around tags” gee that makes SENSE.

If you’re the kind of {boss) who just wants to get the job done without getting drawn into the technical details, ColdFusion may be uniquely suited to your style.

I only {changed} one word (from person) and look what its says.

Amazing how much difference 1 word can make.

Coldfusion is a stable platform.
During the last few years, as coldfusion has deployed practically seamless upgrades.. people haven’t been ‘forced’ to buy new books and constantly upgrade their IDE’s.

Thus book sales figures might not be crisp.

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Ive written a lot of image processing code..

Lets remember that many reputable hosts ( like crystaltech ) have the image components pre-installed on all shared servers. Its been that way for some time… years.

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Its estimated that ‘half’ of coldfusion implementations are at the intranet level. Major corporate intranets run on this. A rather large, yet invisible side of coldfusion.. and one that is often overlooked in ’statistics’.