The marketing material provided by Adobe is vague about the growth of the product, focusing mainly on the growth of the developer count. This is misleading, since the amount of developers familiar with ColdFusion can’t really decline much, and those developers are not asked how much they still use CF. They also mention the amount of companies using ColdFusion. That’s like Ford announcing the amount of companies that use their trucks. Even if a huge company has an exclusive agreement with Chevrolet, I’m sure they have a Ford stuck in a garage someplace.

The marketing information is also heavily aimed at large enterprises. This is where the product is being used right now and where it will continue to be used for the foreseeable future. ColdFusion finds itself in this corporate world, where product cycles are slow and bleeding edge technology is avoided like the plague. It is rare to see a development team using the latest version of  any software, shunning it until others test and discover the bugs. To this end, I still encounter ColdFusion apps in active use that are running on version 5, soon to be 10 years old.

I once worked with a team of 5-6 developers on a ColdFusion Project. I mentioned that I was excited about the new features coming up in CF8. None of the other devs knew that there was a new version coming out, and a couple asked which version we were using.

ColdFusion has some huge benefits. In short time a developer can be brought up to speed and developers of all skill levels can contribute to large projects. Large companies love this model, since developer turnover can have lower impact on product support. I’d have no problem recommending ColdFusion for huge projects based on its capabilities, but that is not the only factor. You need to make sure your developers (who will be the source of any innovation in your project) are working with tools that inspire them to innovate.

And What About Those Developers?

Part of each developer’s inspiration needs to come from her peers, and not only the ones she works with every day. Good developers are active in the community, contributing to or consuming streams of daily RSS feeds. I’ve found the ColdFusion community to be second to none on all levels, except perhaps, their relative abundance. Anyone who has searched for a code snippet or a solution to a CF problem knows that four times out of five a Google search will land you on one of a handful of blogs for your answer. We all know who they are, and they are all fantastic and extraordinarily helpful, but they are few, and the success of the platform relies heavily on this group.

Conferences are also a wonderful forum for developer inspiration. ColdFusion is down to two or three conferences a year, occupies only a small part of the MAX conference (thankfully bolstered by an excellent community driven “un-conference”), and the content is frequently focussed on Flex, which Adobe prefers to keep arm’s length from any mention of ColdFusion. In contrast, there was a Ruby on Rails conference every week this summer, for a total of 20 in a six month span.

I find that developers are much happier working on a project using a technology that they know will be around for a while. I do my best work when I know the code I’m writing will be pasted into a future application. This helps me on my next project and helps the next developer who sees my code.

In the places where ColdFusion thrives—Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and universities—developers are often locked into a routine that does not include innovation. I’ve seen this first hand. Innovation is inextricably paired with risk, the mitigation of which is often the most important goal in these institutions.

The Future

It’s getting easier to get an application out to the public. Finding good hosting is a breeze, and you don’t need a sysadmin to install your application. Cloud computing allows us to go from a test application on a laptop to a scalable thriving website in a day. The fact is that small development teams launching medium sized applications are using Ruby, Python, and PHP. These applications used to be out of question for enterprise use, but that is changing. Small teams like 37 Signals have seen their applications creep into some very large companies—even against their own recommendations.

Corporations have tended to choose ColdFusion when building applications in-house, but now more often than not, they are outsourcing the work, buying well tested and supported enterprise level applications that reside on external servers.

A huge benefit of ColdFusion is the time in which a server can be up and running for any size of project. It is no longer a leader in this department, and given the fact that most of the competitors are open-source projects with massive user groups, ColdFusion needs to offer a lot more to keep up. Adobe is capable of this, but only if it is profitable, and that’s not a sure thing.

ColdFusion is Not Dead

I happen to think the future of CF could be quite bright indeed. Adobe does some amazing and innovative things, and they have the ability and creative minds to build this product. My biggest fear is that growing the product will become less worthwhile for them as fewer corporations invest in their own applications. If CF is offered in a cloud computing environment (which I believe Adobe is still considering) its ability to integrate well with existing enterprise products will allow it to be a great rapid deployment option for companies of all sizes.

I’m a web developer working at a huge company, and as far as I know, I’m the only one using a Mac. We develop web based software for several clients and naturally maintain a myriad of servers with various staging and development environments. This means keeping local versions of Windows based server software, as well as client code and databases—a difficult task for our company issued Dell laptops—trusty and quick little things, but due to our long upgrade cycles, simply not up to par. I switched over to the Mac world about five years ago, and I’ve been using Parallels for testing websites in Windows for almost that long. Then I had an idea. What if I used my MacBook Pro as my main machine and used Parallels to load the development environments as I needed them? I’m really glad I tried it, because it has given me the best of both worlds.

I started by creating a base installation of our company’s standard image of Windows XP. Included in base install is IIS, SQL Server, ColdFusion Server, PHP, VPN clients and a set of our supported browsers. Once I have a working streamlined version of Windows as a virtual machine, I archive a copy of it and set up our development environments for some of our clients. We have different versions of server software for different clients, so I usually have three or four different Parallels VMs with various configurations.

Using Parallels in this way has almost too many benefits to mention. By setting up shared folders between my Mac and my virtual Windows environment, I can use my familiar IDEs to edit my code, and run Photoshop on my Mac—saving files directly to folders in my Windows environment. I can also use the native Mac mail and calendar apps since they integrate with MS Exchange server so nicely, eliminating my need for MS Office.

Another huge benefit is the ability to quickly setup a sandboxed environment for any given client, simply by adding their code and databases to one of my archived VMs.  This entire environment can be set up in minutes and used for myself, or given to another developer to work on, ending dreaded over-the-phone environment configuration. The suspending/resuming speed in Parallels 6 is extremely quick, allowing me to shutdown and resume VMs depending on the client. This quick switch between machines lets me allocate the maximum amount of memory and processing power from my Mac, since I don’t need to run them concurrently.

There’s also the look I get in coffee-shops. I use Spaces in Snow Leopard to switch between my Mac environment and my Windows environment—both of which I keep in full screen mode. On more than a few occasions, people do a double take when they see my Mac laptop instantly swap over to Windows and back. Sometimes I switch back and forth for no reason at all. I’m a show-off.

Finally, and by far my favourite benefit of Parallels, is that I get to use my Mac every day.

I’m always torn between reading a book about a new technology that could potentially further my career and a book about something totally cool and fascinating, but unrelated to my field. There are many times when I find a book that satisfies both criteria, like some of the books I’ve read on cryptography (The Code Book, by Simon Singh is fantastic). I’ve also been reading a lot of books focussed on Biology lately too. I find it fascinating that the process of natural selection, by definition, can always find the best solution to a problem, given a specific toolset, and enough time. Often though, the books I’m interested in reading have nothing to do with my field.

I often fall into the habit of reading programming book after programming book, and I find that after a while I start to skim, just trying to finish the book as quickly as I can, which is a terrible way to learn. It’s not a lack of interest in the subject matter, but a desire to let a different part of my brain take the reigns from time to time. It’s been shown that sleep can actually help your brain learn a concept more than staying up all night reading about it. I think that letting your mind switch gears for a little while does the same sort of thing.

My Conclusion? When you feel burned out, find a book that totally fascinates you. Read a bit of it every day, even in the time you set a side for work. It will rejuvenate your mind and make you work harder.

All that is great, but I’ve begun to expand my use of the program.

Billings comes with a little menu bar timer that allows you to record the time you spend on different tasks. I set up “projects” in Billings for things like work on personal projects, and personal development. You can give each project a different “rate of pay” and apply a discount to it. I bill myself $75 an hour for personal projects, and then give myself a 100% discount. The software still keeps track of the time spent, and the money which it represents, which gives me an idea of how much I have committed to a project.

If you do any pro bono work for charity, I’d also recommend tracking your time and generating an invoice, using your regular rate with a 100% discount to send to the organization. Many people who get a free website (for whatever reason) do not have an idea about how much work goes into it, and what the regular rate is.

I also work full time during the week. I start the timers whenever I’m at work as well, or if I’m working after hours, as that helps me make sure I’m putting in my hours, and gives me an idea of how much time I spend on each project, which can be valuable later on.

I’m coming around to the idea that 12k of CSS isn’t going to hurt anyone. That’s the size of my compressed version of Blueprint CSS, including basic reset, and base typography directives, and the grid. The grid is the key to Blueprint CSS. The reset and typography stuff is nicely done, and tremendously useful, but the grid holds the power. Now I’m pretty comfortable laying out even a complex site using floats, clears, and block level elements, but in programming, whenever you find yourself repeating similar tasks over and over again, it’s time re-use some code.

Blueprint’s grid framework allows you to assign each of your div elements a column span value, which corresponds to a 24 column (by default) grid, 950 pixels wide. Your divs are assigned a width using classes, and can be nested in any way you like. It is also possible to apply padding and adjustment to divs using the same grid. I’ve used Blueprint CSS for only a couple of sites now. One was adapted from an existing design, and one was built from scratch. In both cases I was able to save a lot of time by starting with a base grid.

If you don’t like the default width, or the amount of columns, there is a handy tool that will adjust the grid.css file to match your needs. (Blueprint Grid CSS Generator)

Blueprint CSS Home Page

For now, I’m sold on this framework, and I plan on using it for a few upcoming projects. I’m okay with the size of the files for now, but If I were to use it for a very high traffic site, I might think about stripping out any unused classes.

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The book is Brain Rules by John Medina. It’s a great introduction to the way the human brain works. It covers the biology of the brain, and much of evolutionary origins of its physiology, and human behavior. It’s fascinating enough by itself, but it really gives some good insights on memory and learning that are very applicable to programmers.

One of the most useful things I learned from the book is how to take advantage of the way the brain stores memories to learn new concepts and programming languages faster. Programmers need to learn new things all the time. Whether it’s a new function, or a new version of a language, or a completely new language, the things we need to learn are not the same as the things our brain has evolved to learn. Our brain really needs to struggle to store complex concepts that are not related to our immediate needs, but we can give it a hand.

I find the best way to learn a new language or concept is to use it immediately. If that means putting down a book mid-chapter and writing your own version of a function right away, then do it. But don’t just write a generic “Hello World” type function. Write a function that displays your favorite Monty Python line, add a big screen-capture of the show, and make sure everything is big and bold on the page. You’ll have a much better chance of remembering the code you wrote, if the output is memorable.

When I was first exposed to ColdFusion, my company hired a trainer to come in and teach us the basic course. This is almost 10 years ago, and I still remember some of that code line for line. It wasn’t elaborate output that he used – it was the variable names. He named every variable “Jimmy”. It wasn’t much, but he did it with such a straight face, that it was hilarious, and in turn, memorable. Building functions called getJimmy(), saveJimmy(), killJimmy() was enough to remember those functions forever.

Jimmy up some of your code. You’ll be glad you did.

Download it here

Coda is marketed as “one window web development” and it really is. I’ve been going back and forth between Dreamweaver and Eclipse for coding over the past few years, and both are great tools. I still use Eclipse for large sites at work, but I needed something for building small sites, and for quickly editing sites I’ve built in the past.

Coda lets you set up as many sites as you want, and for each site, remembers which files you have open. To make a change, you edit the file, or files and hit publish. It FTPs the files in the background, and keeps everything synchronized. You can even edit files directly on the remote site, which is great if you have specific server config files that you don’t want to be synchronized.

Also, code recognition is available for HTML, CSS, Javascript, Actionscript, Coldfusion, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, and several more. Coda is one of those programs that I’m happy to pay for. It’s $79, but will save you time every single day. There is a free trial that I think is fully functional.

Give it a try.