The reason CF developers are so hard to find is because fewer and fewer people are learning it.

Fewer and fewer people are learning it because it’s dying as a viable career path.
…

Accept reality and move forward, always. There is nothing wrong with CF but there is something very wrong with the marketing strategy of everyone who’s owned it since Allaire.

I have been saying exactly the same about my primary GUI development language, Delphi, for a long time. Borland/Codegear have been dancing the same marketing dance as Macromedia/Adobe have been with CF and it has reaped the same results. People have been saying that Delphi is dead for a number of years and there has not been one shred of marketing to refute it. Jobs are few and far between and if you’re lucky to find one now, it is usually a Delphi->.Net conversion gig.

I got started in HTML markup languages with a product called IHTML back in 2000/01. I then moved to CF (v4/4.5). It was really nice back then but lacked a lot of features. After a brief layoff from web development, I have moved on to PHP. I would love to go back to CF, as a developer friend of mine has claimed that CF8 is WONDERFUL. BTW, he has no PHP experience.

I don’t use CF or ASP.net now mostly because of the lack of affordable hosts. If anyone can show me otherwise, I may switch my thinking and move back from the “dark side”..

I began using CF back in the 4.0 days and loved it. So quick and easy to solve the problem. The fact that it solved the problem made it the RIGHT solution.

Then I got into enterprise portals, search engines, and content management systems. In that world (at least in my experience) CF solutions were almost always considered legacy. I preached CF till I turned blue.

One portal in particular was a .NET solution so I decided to pick up ASP.NET. This lead me down the path of ‘Gang of Four’ and Martin Fowler methodologies (I suggest Learning Tree #511). CF supports most of this now that it finally supports interfaces (at least I think so).

Now, a few years later, I find myself working for a start-up company creating augmented reality situational awareness solutions for the military. Sorry folks, there is absolutely no room for CF in this world. Just managed .NET / Java or unmanaged C/C++.

ok sassy this just proves that you are just plain dumb. Im sorry but comments like this are ridiculous.

You just don’t get it and that’s fine.. just don’t waste your time on something that is above your head. It’s a damn fine career path, I bring in WELL over 6 figures a year, so you just remember that when you are filing your taxes for your messily pay that you will get with the others. Either way you go you aren’t going to make good money until you are good at whatever language you choose and no offense but it sounds like you got a long ways to go.

Fyi~ most coldfusion developers I know make around 70k – 120k a year, most php and .net developers I know make around 40k – 70k a year.

But yet you keep coming in here knowing absolutely NOTHING about Coldfusion and try to tell the people here that are in the Coldfusion community “how it is”… This IS the problem with Coldfusion.. meaning people flapping their mouths with no knowledge… I got $10 that says you are a blonde ;)~

Fewer and fewer people are learning it because it’s dying as a viable career path.

If you doubled your salary recently, you couldn’t have been making that much to begin with.

Accept reality and move forward, always. There is nothing wrong with CF but there is something very wrong with the marketing strategy of everyone who’s owned it since Allaire.

I’d get in touch with Jason Delmore at Adobe if your boss is internalizing this. http://www.cfinsider.com/ is his blog – he’ll get you the correct information.

Look, I don’t know what else to say – People have been sounding the death knell for ColdFusion for about 7 years now, and they’ve been consistently wrong – maybe they just like being wrong?

CF 8 has been a massive success, Adobe is planning for CF 9, and ColdFusion has been rolled into the “Platform” Business Unit – along with Flex, Flash and AIR, so it’s being positioned as an integral part of Adobe technologies (http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1070).

Post back if you want more resources (maybe give your email address and I’ll ping you off-line).

Cheers,

davo

We recently spoke with CF support at Adobe, and they said that they only had 5 people dedicated to supporting CF. This convinced my boss that Adobe is getting ready to stop development. How much information is out there on Adobe’s continued investment in the product / CF 9?

Thanks in advance for the help,

– Jim

This is true all over the country. But it’s not because the demand for ColdFusion developers is going up, it’s because the supply of ColdFusion developers is going down. There’s plenty of demand for COBOL developers, too, if you can find any…

CF is not dead as a technology, but is dead as a career choice. There’s just no jobs there. It’s as technically capable as anything, but everyone hates it. CF still suffers from it’s reputation back in the days.

That has not been my experience at all… in fact, I just got a full-time gig as a ColdFusion Developer, doubled my salary, and shortened my commute to 10 minutes.

There is plenty of ColdFusion work out there.

Like others have said, this shouldn’t be a problem on a shared host that actually is worth hosting with.

There has been a lot of talk in the cf community as to how to better promote ColdFusion, and one very practical benefit would be to increase the size of the developer base to fill the demand that exists in the ColdFusion job market. Again, each location will be different, but I think this is a great time to be a ColdFusion developer in respect to finding work.

The other side of this coin is the fear that this situation will continue, and that this will be a determining factor in companies choosing other platforms than ColdFusion because of the difficulty in finding developers. In addition to increased efforts by Adobe, I do hope there are both CF and broader web development community driven efforts, such as this blog, to communicate the strengths and uniqueness of ColdFusion as a platform.

The other thing to remember (especially with php) is that there is a lot of market share of them but a good portion of their usage is “below par” coding levels. For example, there are a TON of PHP developers but most of them have no real clue to what they are really doing and of those huge php developer numbers only a handful are very good. A lot of the PHP numbers are sites where their “dynamic” content is nothing more that a email submission form.

If you are just starting out then I would learn a few languages and see where it takes you. But if you are just starting out I wouldn’t go to php as it “should” be done more so in an OOP manner and if you are just starting out you will have no clue what OOP is. That’s why you have so many “crappy” php apps.

I would say that if you are coming out of school and have a decent foundation of c, c++ or java then go to java, .net, php or ror. If you are not schooled in coding then start with Coldfusion and learn how to properly code then get into OOP but what you will find is that after a few years and you really start to learn to code well that there is no reason to leave cfm at all since it will do everything you need it to. And then if you have a job that requires one of the others then it will be easier because now you have a decent base.

BUT before you even get to a language IMO is that you lean how to PROPERLY make xhtml and css-p sites and then move onto a dev language. Most of these sites out there are so poorly coded in html 4.01 that its repulsive. As to anyone who says that you cant make a standards complaint site in cfm… you are an idiot and shouldn’t be coding at all if you actually think that.. that’s just completely stupid.

“If you are going to invest 5+ years in a technology career, you might want to learn the languages with all the jobs.”
They all have jobs but like I said before, if I was starting out I would go for the ones that I could make the most money with. There are tons of .net jobs and tons of people who do it so why would an employer pay high dollar when if you demand more $$ they will pass you by because someone else will take bottom dollar.

If you were smart you’d start to learn flex, those developers are making bank…. and of course whats the easiest to get data into flex??? Oh yeah… that would be Coldfusion

If you are going to invest 5+ years in a technology career, you might want to learn the languages with all the jobs.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=coldfusion%2C+ASP.NET%2C+PHP&l=

You know, you can get Gimp for free (nothing against Gimp) but most people I know that put food on the table with their work use Photoshop.

There are plenty of jobs out there. But here is the kicker… here in Colorado people won’t take a cf job if its below $45 an hour at the same time there is a TON of php/.net/ror jobs available but you are looking at maybe $20 an hour. I dunno bout you but I will take the higher pay myself. It’s like anything.. if there are a ton of developers available then the pay goes down.

Personally, I don’t worry about someone paying me, I get-r-done myself and I am certainly not short on business, actually my waiting list is well over a year long wait.

@others
More Fortune 500 companies use Coldfusion than any other language. The Gov uses more Coldfusion than any other language.

@cost
I have been using Coldfusion for over 6 years and I have never spent a dime to use coldfusion. It will only cost you money if you are using your own servers and if you are using your own servers then cost isnt an issue and you’d certainly be saving a TON of $$ on dev time.

Hosting might be a few bucks more but there is no way in hell I would put one of my clients on a cheapp azz $5 a month hosting…. get real cheap skates.

@the application scope
Any decent host will be running each site in its sandbox and its a non issue.

Personally, the problem with CFM is all the misinformation out there and if someone is dumb enough to believe someone else’s false info then they are ignorant fools, at least take the time to investigate it properly. I started with ASP, then did some PHP then went to Coldfusion and never looked back.

Use what you want to use, whatever makes ya feel good but don’t bash something when you dont ACTUALLY know sh*t about it.