The marketing gurus at Adobe have just released an Evangelism Kit for ColdFusion [via Damon Cooper's Blog].
For as long as I've been using ColdFusion (over 3 years), I always heard detractors saying it was a dead or dying product. We never got much help from Adobe (or Macromedia) in justifying ColdFusion; we were forced to speculate on the future of the product, and the number of customers using it. I suspect that Adobe never had the need to justify CF; sales were fine, and so too, most likely, were revenues from the product.
So now I am going to become one of those detractors. Let's just say that this kit hasn't inspired me. On the contrary... I can't but feel that this Evangelism Kit spells the decline of ColdFusion. Here are few things to consider:
- Why now? 10+ years without such an offering. Why create this document now? I suspect that some of the major clients listed are actually migrating away from CF, so better to indicate that these companies are using CF while it is still technically true.
- Where are the exciting new features? I mean, look at the roadmap. Sully features "enhancements". I'm surprised "bug fixes" didn't make it onto that list.
- Open source competition: Blue Dragon, Railo and more
- Leveraging other products and scripting languages as middleware in the RIA stack: Groovy (the boys at Broadchoice, filled with names synonymous with ColdFusion, are using Groovy more and more these days: 9 posts tagged with "Groovy", zero posts tagged with "ColdFusion"), PHP, and Ruby.
I like ColdFusion, so I hope Adobe can keep it alive and keep its developers highly productive, but just when I think Adobe will push to make CF mainstream, I feel they took at least one step backwards, and may not have any more momentum to move forward.
0 comments:
Post a Comment