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.

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.

Querious will also import and export CSV, or tab delimited data, and on import, does a much better job than most other programs in letting you map your data to your tables.

The last feature I will mention is my favorite. The ability to save not only common queries, but groups of queries is awesome. Querious calls these query collections, and put common queries and tasks at your fingertips.

Querious costs $25US, which I think is a good price point for this tool. I’m still at the beginning of my 30 day trial, but unless something better comes along pretty quickly, I’ll be buying it.

AppStorm Review (9/10)

Get Querious

I’ve used Eclipse and CFEclipse for a while now, after switching from Dreamweaver several years ago.  I really didn’t dislike Dreamweaver as much as many people did, but found Eclipse to be a little better, especially with the addons that are available.  I’ve also used Coda from Panic software for the past year and a half, and it’s becoming my primary IDE.  It is not as feature rich, but it’s simple, and lightning fast.  It’s also got great FTP/SSH support, and Subversion integration.  As far as its ColdFusion support, it has some limited CF autosuggest.  Not as good an CFEclipse, and I don’t expect it to support CF9 immediately either, but it’s enough to get by on.  Since I’m using ORMs for most of my sites now, I don’t find I’m writing as many built in CF functions anyway.

In a perfect world, Bolt will be as fast as Coda, as feature filled as Dreamweaver, and as extensible as Eclipse.  All of our CF_Fingers are crossed.

I’ve taken in all the Flex coverage and sessions at CFUnited and MAX, and I’ve attended full day workshops on Flex more than once. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been nothing but impressed with the capabilities of the platform, and pleased that Adobe has made everything work so well with ColdFusion. I just don’t like the end product of most sites built in Flex. I am most impressed with sites that use nice clean markup and unobtrusive JavaScript for progressive enhancement. Whenever I visit a Flex site, it feels like I’m using someone else’s computer. You know that feeling? for me it’s the fact that usually, my MacBook Pro’s trackpad scrolling will not work with the Flex scroll-bars. Not a huge deal, but it makes a difference.

One of the big advantages of using Flex is not having to worry about testing in multiple browsers. I believe over 99% of people can access your Flex site with their existing version of Flash. This is a great benefit, but it’s not as big of a deal as it was a few years ago. Today, the biggest problems are still with IE6, and for many sites I’m happy providing decreased functionality for those users. Using jQuery also eliminates a large amount of JavaScript incompatibility between browsers.

There is a market for Flex, and I think that market will continue to grow. I’m also pleased that Adobe has embraced it, since it adds a perfect piece to their product suite. I just don’t like the whole “If you’re not jumping on the Flex bandwagon, you’re missing the boat” mentality that I hear a bit too much in the ColdFusion community. I hope that Adobe continues to support and enhance the capability of ColdFusion to work with HTML based content.

I found it really easy to add all kinds of functionality using ColdFusion as a blogging platform, and that’s why I’ve stuck with the CF blogs so far.  But then I did a little work on my cousin’s blog last year (check it out if you like illustration), and was intrigued.  Since then, WordPress has made a bunch of updates, and the admin interface is simply beautiful.  I found a very simple template, made some changes to the CSS, and everything worked.  My last step is usually to bite the bullet and open up my new sites in IE6 – to see how late I will be up fixing it.  For the first time ever, I had absolutely nothing to fix.  I know this is due to the good work of the template designer, and not necessarily WordPress, but it speaks to the magnitude of people working on this platform.

I still think ColdFusion is the best platform for a ton of things, and personal sites may be one of those things.  As a developer though, I can appreciate the amount of work that has been put into WordPress, and when a piece of software fits your needs so perfectly, it’s hard (and irresponsible) to ignore it.  The reason I love WordPress is the same reason that I love Macs.  They just work, and they look great.  It may seem silly that the look of the admin interface is so important to me, but if I need to look at something every day, I like it to look good.

I must say that I’ve got a bit of guilt about this.  I almost feel that I’m betraying the CF developers that have put work into open source applications that come close to meeting my needs.  There are still plenty of CF open source applications that I use daily and support, and I don’t see that changing.

For developers, it’s not easy to test a site in IE. If you use Windows Vista, you have IE7 installed by default, and it’s not trivial to install IE6. If you use a Mac, you would need multiple instances of Windows running as virtual machines in order to test in IE7 as well as IE6.

Then I came across this: Multiple IE from Tredosoft This little application will install IE3, IE4.01, IE5.01, IE5.5 and IE6 on an XP machine with IE7. They can all run concurrently. I runs multiple versions of IE in Parallels, and can test all my sites without booting up the old Windows boxes to test sites.

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.

You install the software on both machines, and once set up, it acts as though each machine has multiple monitors. your mouse pointer goes off the edge of your screen, and appears on the monitor of the other machine (it will even wake the other machine up it it is asleep). When your mouse pointer is on the other screen, your keyboard switches control also, and you have full control or both machines.

Can it get any better? Yes it can. You can drag and drop files. Teleport seamlessly transfers files in the background, and the drag and drop action of your mouse between two machines acts as a file copy. I use this all the time, and it saves so much time. I can come home from work, open my laptop on my desk, and with the mouse from my desktop machine, drag any files I need from my laptop to my desktop in about 5 seconds. Teleport also synchronizes your clipboard, so copy and paste works between machines as well.

Download Teleport at http://www.abyssoft.com/software/teleport/

If you don’t have multiple Macs, and still want to try something like Teleport, there is an application that has most of these functions, and will work with Windows, Linux, and Macs. It’s not an easy to set up, but there are good instructions on the site. It’s called Synergy.

Download Synergy at http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/