I spent the day on the show floor at FOSE, the Federal Government tradeshow in D.C. Lots of ColdFusion interest (as well as interest in Contribute, Flash, Breeze, Flex, and more).
For me, the most important part of all the ColdFusion discussions and interaction was the reminder that ColdFusion must remain true to it’s origins, simply making developers productive. Most of the ColdFusion interest was from individuals wanting to really simple and basic things, creating dynamic content, implementing basic database integration, providing basic access control, creating dynamic user relevant menus and nav bars, and so on. Ironically, this is all stuff that was doable in ColdFusion 1, and 8 years later ColdFusion is still the easiest and most accessible way to solve these problems, no other product or language comes close to ColdFusion for this demographic and need. And it is a need that has not diminished at all. Often, all that we hear are the needs and demands of the top tier developers, those who needed SUPER and bemoan the behaviors of ‘this’ within CFCs and want more access to underlying Java. And while we must continue to make these developers productive, giving them the tools they want and need, at the same time we must be cognizant of ColdFusion’s core value proposition, it’s original mission, a raison d’etre that is as legitimate now as it was almost a decade ago.
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