What Do You Need From The ColdFusion Team?

Usually conversations like this I tend to stay away from, as they never feel to go anywhere, but considering the communities outlay of comments, I thought I should share mine. There's several posts along the lines of 'more marketing should be done, or done towards [insert area of business]'. I tend to agree, but on a different level. I'm sure MM is in fact out there selling the product, or attempting to. But they need to quit trying to sell it to *us*. the community is here, open and willing. We don't need some sales pitch everytime something new comes across within ColdFusion itself. Put that effort out there, it'll come around. IMO, for the education sector what needs to happen is a core group of individuals needs to get together with Geoff and crew and build a set of applications on top of FarCry tuned for the education sector itself. As that product emerges, Macromedia should push it's academic version hard. Couple a solid application structure with a cheap implementation, the code base and server will be within the schools IT mindset. Then encouraging that sector to have classes, job openings, publications will be that much easier. I don't however agree to the IDE market based comments and how HomeSite+ should be pushed more, or how DreamWeaver should have 'x' feature. Let MM give a very generalized IDE, and a base for what an IDE can do for ColdFusion. Then support the companies who are building a CFML specific IDE. Don't flog one language preference over another in the IDE phase. Make the cash of the IDE and help CFML grow. That being said, the RDS specification needs to be opened up. Allow IDE developers who want to build an IDE product for ColdFusion to access it the same way Macromedia wants to. More tools for a given language can never be a bad thing. Standards. Invent some, adopt some, do something. ECMA script option in cfscript, a whole new documented standard, (from MM or within a committee of active CFML companies)... something. There needs to be a definitive answer to everything done in ColdFusion. "Why x does 'this'", "Why z does 'that' when y does 'this'". The entire CFML spec and its outcomes should be on paper, available, and ready to examine. Not to chose sides on a MM biased based post, but Blue Dragon shouldn't have to guess what a certain outcome should be. Develop and invoke a component that doesn't have the surrounding [cfcomponent] tags ? Who would have thought, it's not documented, it doesn't make sense, but yet it's possible. It should be documented. While I don't work with the language, I've always followed PHP and its evolution. One thing I admire with PHP is the push for no 'magic' happening by introducing something, and for the most part, it's stuck well. ColdFusion has a lot of 'magic' happening in certain situations, mainly with cfcs. Magic in this context meaning 'I do something and something else happens, or has an adverse side effect'. Watch a month worth a posts on the cfcdev mailing list and you'll soon see the whole magic coming across. cffile not being thread safe, local vs arguments scope clashes etc. Enterprise language? Put it on paper. I'm well aware that there has been new products coming into the market place for Macromedia, but the lack of new CFML content on 'desdev' really does stand out. As far as I can tell, the only thing that has been added as of late is a 'getting started' setup. Is the docs not adequate for that type of content? What about the 100k + user community that has already breached that era of CFML? Architecture section is pretty weak I might add. Opening up the process you have to follow in order to have content considered for 'desdev' would be nice as well, for those who don't know what it actually takes to help MM put content in the CFML domain. Open up the Bug/WishList database. I can't say this loud enough. Comments like Matthew Walker's (which I agree with), carry very little push outside the scope of the conversation. Mainly because there isn't any way to push an idea past submitting the idea into the blackhole we call the 'wish form'. Educate hosting providers on all issues within ColdFusion. I don't know how many times I've argued a case for a taglib and got knocked down, frankly because of ignorance on the companies fault. Having all of the tools in the toolkit is one thing, being hampered by the lack of knowledge of your provider is another. We all know the community is loud, it always has been. Sadly we're not the only voice that has to be considered in this equation. Cheers

As a large numbers (read the majority) of CF developers work in small teams on small projects, I would like to see is an initiative from Macromedia to assist and lead in the creation of large opensource projects. Less experienced or even experienced developers could learn the process of building large scale products within large teams, something the average CF developer doesn't usually encounter. I think this would assist in improving the overall standard of CF developer and also spread the CF word once some robust opensource products were available.

IMO, the following is needed: In general, turn CFSCRIPT into a language that can replace CF tags; i.e., I want to be able to do things like query from within CFSCRIPT blocks. For specific functionality, I would like to see some easy way to create multilingual web sites. I would like to see some of the more useless tags (CFSLIDER, for example) be deprecated, and replaced with more useful "stock" widgets like a calendar that can be given a number of parameters as well as a query object and output Flash or HTML. I would like to see even better, more automatic, whitespace suppression (i.e. without explicit CFSILENT or CFSETTING tags). I would like to see a tag, perhaps CFAPPLICATION, act as a "switch" that adds greater support for presenting a single set of templates on a number of delivery platforms (i.e. WAP/WML, HTML, etc.). And, most of all, I WOULD LIKE TO SEE MACROMEDIA PROMOTE COLD FUSION MORE AS A LANGUAGE AND AS A DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM, AND PRESENT IT AS A VERY REAL, VERY MATURE, ALTERNATIVE TO .NET. Sorry for the shouting, I think that last one needed emphasis...as if my being the nth person to mention it wasn't enough.

I make and sell a few custom tags including TerraForm mentioned above. By far, the number one problem I encounter is people having problems installing them. It's part of the philosophy of custom tags really: use something without understanding how it works (which often means "without understanding how custom tags work"). But it's only becoming a bigger problem as I add richer features such as skins, shared resources, and localization resource bundles. What I'm really distributing are apps with hundreds of files and a tag API. I think the "custom tag" paradigm is outmoded. It would be really nice for CF to have some kind of integrated third party app installation process that worked for *both* exclusive and shared servers and verified a correct install. It would also be nice if products could be in some way "Macromedia certified" (for a fee of course).

Here is my number one wish for CF: Open up the serviceFactory and let us in. For those that may not know, the serviceFactory is an object that exposes many low level functions in the ColdFusion engine. With it you can: Flush your trusted cache Toggle trusted cache on or off Reinitialize the axis web services engine Output the SQL for all the queries that ran on a page and much more. The functionality exposed in the serviceFactory object could enable us extend our apps, error handling, and site admins in new directions. And before anyone says it, yes I know none of it is supported and could change at any time. But to at least have some centralized documentation about it's capabilities would be a welcome addition for those of us that want to get in to the nuts and bolts. I'd also like to see more documentation about low level Java functionality (such getting at the output stream buffer). Some of this kung fu can only be found on blogs, but should be made more publicly available by Macromedia.

Terraform is a really great product and would be an outstanding addition to the ColdFusion package. I think getting the word out, particularly to colleges around the country, about CF should be priority. By that I mean bringing a new crop of developers who are not yet familiar with CF. Some repository for best practices information. I agree with the comment that CF developers are out there building some amazing apps, but those experiences (good and bad) really are not out in the open to be learned and improved upon. I'm not sure how this would be done but we really need more books out on CF. Given any bookstore, you'll find half a shelf of Java/JSP Books, 1/4 ASP/ASP.NET Books, and the remainder to PHP and CF. Somewhat related to the best practices idea, I'd like to know how people are using CFCs and frameworks (Fusebox, Mach-II, others even).

The main problem behind Coldfusion's low market presence is the fact that business customers are not willing to pay a high price just because their developers like the CFML programming language. If they do not have to pay for a dedicated C# server or a VB server (they simply do not exist), why should they pay for a CFML server? Microsoft really understands how the market works. They charge developers for using a programming language by selling them Visual Studio and sell value added server platforms (SharePoint Portal Server, BizzTalk Server, Project Server, Content Management Server etc.) to business customers. Each and everyone of these servers has a set of features that have clear business value. Coldfusion lacks such features. There is no built-in content management, project management or portal functionality or whatever other out-of-the box business oriented featureset. It is just a programming environment. From what I have heard from Blackstone this will not change. So the new Coldfusion upgrade will definitely be a killer upgrade for developers. There will be many enhancements to the programming language but it will stay a developers oriented product instead of a business oriented product. So, until MM start delivering server platforms that have real value for business (Flex 1.0 is another example of a developer oriented server platform) they will have a hard time persuading businesses to buy into their server products. What I would like to see is merging Coldfusion, Flex and Central technology into one Macromedia RIA Server. Such a product would deliver added value to developers (CFML, AS2 and MXML) as well as business customers (occasionaly connected apps, synchronization, blast feature etc.).

I also have the feeling that MM applications could be more improved. There are some issues for example with DWMX 2004, focussed as the main ColdFusion developing platform, which are just annoying. Like the context sensitive help, buggy, non-printable, text is unselectable. And still it lacks a good working treeview. Move actions always result in failures in the tree. :) Developers often said, we want to deploy our applications compiled at clients. This has been called so many times.. and who comes first... BlueDragon. Makes me think Macromedia does not listen enough to the CF community.

I didn't read all the comments but Mike Brunt hit it on the nose for me *ouch* I was posting up flyers about the Macromedia Worldwide User Group presentation in the Computer Science department at Temple University (Phila, PA) and one of my Prof. approach me and told me how he had fought for the department's support in CF and other Macromedia tools. As I am a Computer Science major, I truly want more variety in the classroom than MS products on the computer desktop in the labs at Temple. To compensate for the loss, I rely heavily on community forums (ie. actionscript.org) to self-teach.

MM has done a poor job of building the developer community. The Exchange site is slow now that everything has been Flashified (by the way, Flash should stick to animations and forget about being an application), so few hosts support CFMX, the server is too expensive (ASP.Net is free with Windows Servers), JRUN is buggy and slow, CFMX doesn't have enough features out of the box (I had to buy a bunch of custom .DLL's), and most important there is only a fraction as much CF expertise out there as there is other application languages - the only way MM is going to get anywhere with CF is to grow the user base much larger (I think a free version of CFMX - not just a development environment - would do the trick). My experience with CF was good in the beginning, but I'm outta here. I'm moving everything to an enterprise ready environment, Microsoft .Net. -Chris

Would people care about Homesite if Dreamweaver weren't such a slow dog? Granted, DWMX 6.1 was a huge performance increase. But quite frankly the DW developers should be ashamed that using DW to upload files to a site pegs the CPU at 100% usage! I understand that DW is busy doing a lot of "helpful" things like keeping track of all files in a site/projectd and making sure our links are maintained. If DreamWeaver was shipped with all of these bells and whistles turned off by default it would load quick and run effortlessly like Homesite. As users performed certain functions DreamWeaver could interactively offer the user a "better" way by prompting them to enable the bells and whistles. Funny that PHP is not in Ben's spellchecker. ;-) Can somebody please fix the "&quote;"s?

Dave, I know that CF Enterprise actually does come with JRun...it was a typo...should have been "CF Enterprise now coming with a full version of JRun" instead of "CF Enterprise not coming with a full version of JRun". Silly spell checker couldn't understand what I meant instead of what I typed....can I put that in as a feature request?

I have to agree with Adam's, David's, Jeff's and Pete's comments. Macromedia has to do better marketing with CF all around. The user group program gets little internal support (they need applications, AND A BUDGET!!!), and give us UG managers more access to help evangelize the product. The same goes for Team Macromedia. We volunteers get a lot less for what we do than people might recognize. MM has to learn to better market CF to the general web community, education, enterprise market... everywhere. Currently, it seems most marketing is done to expand the market within its existing market, and upgrading, and not going after new markets. This includes having more web hosting companies that offer CF, getting more schools that offer CF courses, actively showing the power of Java with the simplicity of ColdFusion. ColdFusion is buried on MM.com and you really have to go looking for it. There is no concerted effort to market the product to the general IT community. CF needs to take market share away from PHP, Java and ASP/ASP.NET. ColdFusion is Macromedia's ticket, and always has been, but its marketing people continue to market it as a niche-type application server. They don't get it... There is a fundamental flaw in the way ColdFusion is marketed. ColdFusion is marketed as an application server. CFML, the company's potential salvation, and what we LOVE about CF, is NEVER MARKETED. If I can impress anything on the powers that be, it would be to shift your marketing focus from CF Enterprise to CFML. Get more hosting providers that offer CF as a language to its customers (I get tired of seeing PHP and Perl as the only languages many providers offer!!!). Offer a CF Express again, so that more CF apps can be put into production, and help evangelize CF... by evangelizing CFML. EDUCATION EDUCATION EDUCATION!!!!!!!! You get more CF developers, and guess what? You'll sell more CF servers.

I agree with David Fekke's comment that making the language an open standard designed by a board of developers other than Macromedia would help revitalize the direction of ColdFusion. BlueDragon's advances are proof that competition is a good thing for CFML and it's developers. Wasn't CF always touted as an implementation of CFML rather than the owners? Let's get it out there in the hands of those who can invent and evolve the language. Don't let it go stale in your hands and dent the careers of its developers.

a) The exchange doesn't suck because of Flash. Not sure why others think it's slow... it's plenty responsive for me. b) Not sure why people want multi-threading...If your issue is that long running processes are freezing your GUI, switch GUIs...Flash, CFFLUSH an animated gif, whatever. c) 6.1 Enterprise DOES come with a full version of JRun, you just have to install in J2EE config. What I'd like to see from macromedia is, like others, more evangelism in the enterprise sector. It should really be marketed as a RAD Java-based web app platform. Most people's impression of CF is that it is a toy that is unsuitable for enterprise use, when it fact it does scale pretty well. I recognize that CF's roots is ease of use, but I think MM can do more to bridge the gap between that and a robust product respected by larger organizations. The way I feel, CFCs are very, very close... and I do use them extensively in all projects, whether it be for simple web-services or a full-blown MVC architecture. The issue is that I almost feel like MM didn't take it's own product seriously and think that people would actually try to build enterprise-level solutions that utilize CFCs. We need a real constructor (see blue dragon), and we need better thread safety for persistant CFCs (I don't care if I have to var everything, but the fact that if I use cfinclude in a cffunction it eliminates any var'ing is ridiculous). Either cfinclude should not work inside cffunction, or anything included should only have access to the local function scope. That and why cant I make the CFFILE scope thread safe? I want CF to stay, but MM needs to give me the tools to buld the argument. .NET is doing a much better job at proclaiming ease of use and being enterprise-level. Central and Flex pricing is off anybody's charts... I wonder if someone up top WANTS these products to fail. You can't compare Flex to Websphere, they're not the same thing. Compare JRun to Websphere, and that should give you an idea how much flex should cost, especially because it is so new. This isn't 1999 or 2000 when an executive would jump to blow some money on new-fangled technology. It needs to be PROVEN before it's worth anything. Ooops, wrong blog ;)

You're right Jeff. Another thing that is very hard to see (specially here in Brazil) due to the lack of "enterprise" documentation and maybe support: good hosting companies for those who can't afford for a CF license. You can find hosting providers that offer CFMX, but in a limited way (disabling sensitive tags such as CFOBJECT and CreateObject() function) or in a insecure way (leaving all open) and even not using sandboxes. CFMX Enterprise + sandbox security are fine, but to make it completely safe in a shared box you must turn-off Java integration (createObject and so on), which is very bad because we use it extensivelly (even to invoke CFCs). The sanboxes doesn't isolate Java features properly. An example: access to ServiceFactory and settings is possible in a shared environment, even using sandboxes. This is unacceptable and must be changed. Definitively ColdFusion Server needs a better support for shared environments at the security level. Some say you can use multiple instances (also aka CFMX for J2EE), well, this is not a choice if you offer shared ColdFusion accounts. It demands more memory and hardware usage and work. It's ok for a sort of dedicated/semi-dedicated hosting, but even so, I've never saw a hosting company offering it. Disabling features such as CreateObject() and others that offers a security/privacy risk for applications on the same server is not a good thing for the technology. I belive hosting providers plays a very important role in the success of a language. CFServer must have a better support for shared environments. I belive that despite of the price, CF is a marginally supported technology on hosting providers because of it. ASP.Net is expensive too, but offers a better solution to shared hostings, so it's easy to find someone who supports it. I hope Macromedia folks can build a mechanism to really isolate applications in the same server. The sandbox concept is fine, but it does not work very well as we know.

I feel like MM is really wanting to be viewed as an enterprise-ready company...what with CF Enterprise not coming with a full version of JRun and with Flex being aimed at the enterprise. I would personally love to seem them hit that level but the problem I see is the sheer lack of really advanced documentation. When I'm looking around Java forums and even going to the bookstore, there are a ton of high level Java/J2EE articles and publications but all the CF stuff seems to be beginner/intermediate stuff with only the slightest mention of really serious programming techniques. I think the beauty of CF is that is easily accessible to those who don't need industrial strength tools, but still has the strength for those who do need it (read: J2EE). So to make a long post, short...more focus on enterprise resources...books, articles, Breeze presentations, etc. The more advanced the better. Show what the product can really do.

I know this might be uncomfortable for MM, but BlueDragon has added some nice tags that are not available to the CF community. CFIMAGE and CFIMAP are two examples of tags that should been added to CF a long time ago. I know that CFIMAP is available as a devnet add on. Maybe MM should ISO the language so the community can add their input to what ColdFusion should or not support as a language.

More support for CFUG's would be nice. Ed and Amy do a great job with the limited resources they have but their resources are indeed limited. Providing more giveaways, T-Shirts, etc. The last box our CFUG received from MM only had 3 T-Shirts, Free download of Dreamweaver, and a demo version of RoboDemo. Helping provide Macromedia speakers is also nice, I think you guys do pretty good job with that already. Maybe the user groups could setup a program where Macromedia could hook up non MM speakers with user groups. Community week is providing User groups with some exposure, but why not provide that exposure all year long. Or when a person buys a product include the nearest user groups in the email.

Macromedia should buy TerraForm and hire Matthew Sheppard to help integrate it with the next release of ColdFusion. http://www.electricsheep.co.nz/products/terraform/ TerraForm is such an incredibly useful tool for developing form based applications. There's a bit of a learning curve but it is worth it. It makes ColdFusion's cfform and cfinput look like a joke.

PLEASE stop hiding HomeSite+

www.macromedia.com still feels slow. I don't know if the slow reaction of the mouseovers on the main navigation is intended but it compounds the general slow feeling of the site. I use a cable modem connection with a 1.8GHz Dell Latitude, 1GB RAM, not a dog of a machine. I agree with another comment that flash in the exchange is a pain, it takes the way I'm used to browsing and replaces it with something that reduces functionality, even though it looks nice. what's up with fusetalk in the forums? it seems like every fourth time I visit the forums it is not working. when working, it is slow. searching the forums is even worse. I think the CF community would benefit from more open source projects like FarCry CMS. perhaps Macromedia could help to foster projects like this with a special section of macromedia.com. the PHP community has varied and rich open source projects. to name a few quality projects: nucleus, phpBB, gallery, phpCollab (alternative to SiteSpring http://www.actionscript.com/archives/00000367.html ), osCommerce. the aforementioned projects solved a real world problems and provide an excellent code base for learners and the curious... about PHP. some more open source CF projects certainly wouldn't slow down the adoption rate of ColdFusion.

Ben, I would like to echo some of the other suggestions. 1. Redo exchange, it's two steps backward from the old Allaire site. It's just too hard to find a custom tag on there. 2. Setup a mailing list with all security and tech alerts. 3. Buy a couple of Google boxes for the Macromedia website. I hate having to leave the site everytime I want to find something. 4. Do whatever it takes to get ColdFusion into the colleges. Our local universities have classes on DreamWeaver and Flash but not ColdFusion. Maybe Macromedia needs to create a staff position as college evangelist. We need to create an army of young CF enthusiasts infiltrating corporate America.

Ben, one area that I think could really use improvement is the marketing of ColdFusion outside of the normal CF chanels. By that I mean we see plenty of advertising and evangelizing of CF in the CFDJ, CF related blogs, CF mailing lists, etc. Where I don't see a lot of CF presence is on many of the large general development sites such as DevX (small amt of CF content), Builder.com (relatively small CF section), O'Reilly Network, and many other sites like this. I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like to see a more proactive and active approach on Macromedia's end to push CF further into the market. Get it into more large organizations, evangelize to the education system, partner more closely with ISPs, work with the operators of large developer communities to get the CF message out!

I keep tabs on hot fixes here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/coldfusion/ts/documents/tn17883.htm so I am not sure I agree that things are difficult to find, but I do think that there are opportunities for the Sever to check a centralized database and prompt us for available updates not unlike Windows Update. I would really like to see is the Marketing of HomeSite + come out from under the shadow of DreamWeaver. The marketing of this very fine product is confusing to be kind and off-putting to be generous. A cult following is not the way to refer to your development community. The DRK's are very cool, but I would like to see this sort of stuff out in the public domain. This can only help advance techniques used by the developer community at large. I realize it must be a small revenue stream, but nothing compared to the license fees people generate when they see all the advanced things that can be done. At a minimum I think if the company want to keep making money off this type of education then perhaps charge a premium for access for the first three months or something and them dump it to the public. Finally, I would like to see some sort of multi-threading functionality. The more advanced and app, the more things it needs to do concurrently that does not involve generation of web pages. Scheduled tasks and XML request and reply handling are two examples I can think of. Being able to construct a module that can spawn multiple processes in order to say process all the records in a contact table, or make simultaneous XML requests to two or more external systems would really help speed up CF heavy lifting capabilities. I'm sure you can imagine the need, but if you need a real world example from the travel industry I can email you more detail.

I have been using CF since the first versions came from Allaire, since then I have regularly emailed to Macromedia about volunteering for Coldfusion Support to the community. Never heard anything from them. I will release my cms system soon and with that my blog, this will become my support platform from that time :)

Sometimes I go to the local MMUG, but since it is in the evening, that takes away from my family time. I have been to more likely to go to MSDN events, because they are during work hours and my managers are happy to let me go because it counts as free training towards our corporate training goals, as it is an official MS event. How about a free version of CF that supports a maximum of 1 running process at a time. Not good for anyone who wants to deploy a site that gets more than just a small amount of usage, but it would allow people running personal websites and students to put CF in use for free. A lot of people who just want to learn a web programming language probably go with asp or php in part because others will be able to see what they have done. I have to agree with the comments to remove flash on the MM exchange site, although I see that as unlikely at best.

I was having a look at the Amazon web services page, and in the Articles and Tutorial section you've got articles on consuming the web services using .NET, Java, PHP, Python, PERL, even Notes... but no ColdFusion. Now of course the majority of ColdFusion developers know this can be done easily and there has of course been at least one article in the CFDJ, as well as a few in various blogs. These are all CF resources though, Amazon isn't! You could theoretically assume therefore that ColdFusion is unable to consume Amazon's web services. You'd think that with Amazon being such an internationally used and trusted site, with god knows how many visitors that MM would have made sure that there was a link in there outlining how you consume web services with CFMX ... a serious opportunity to promote one of CFMX's strengths is being passed up here! And the same goes for other popular sites out there (google, ebay, paypal) who provide useful web services and links on how to consume them in various languages. And I also nod my agreement at the above posts about the lack of clarity in the MM support site

I'm in a large ($25B)+ company as a contractor and we are actively using CF for well over 100 apps on our intranet. There are a few other groups throughout the company that also utilize CF. Unfortunately, outsourcing dictates that much of the IT infrastructure is moving to a massive IT firm (which happens to partner with MM). Sadly, neither of the two companies consider CF to be a 'corporate standard' (they claim Java is). Now, in theory CF works well with Java, but somehow management doesn't see it that way. One boss stated that if we have a big security framework, or database pooling framework, that getting CF to integrate with it would be difficult at best. I don't know enough Java (none) to refute that. A lot of our problem is convincing the powers that be that things can coexist and that I won't have to recreate the wheel/security framework/whatever each time I make a new app. CFMX rocks, and most of the time I doubt the majority of us use its full power. But when we need to do so, or integrate with other 3rd party products things get confusing.

Agree with the thoughts here: 1. improve access to information needed by people who USE (not want to buy) ColdFusion (patches, hot-fixes, technotes, etc) 2. ditch the Flash on the Exchange - I used to use this all the time to see what people were doing and releasing but it's now totally unfriendly, slow and I probably haven't visited it more than once or twice since moving to Flash. 3. better organization of 'who's using cold fusion' - it would be nice to have something I could search through - say I have a potential e-commece client - I could come to Macromedia - search on e-commerce and get a list of clients currently using CF for this task. Back to coding! Jim

Alex makes a good point here Ben and I would like to add one comment. Perhaps Macromedia should automatically email all registered users of ColdFusion with Hotfixes (I assume they have that info from the time of purchase-registration). But my main point is this. The seeds of our future technology-business world are in our Education system(s). Could Macromedia not make some concerted efforts to get heavily subsidized versions of ColdFusion into our Colleges and Universities backed by some sort of dedicated efforts to get CF development on the curriculum somehow. I know this for certain; CF is so bloody enjoyable to use that the word and usage would spread quickly. In addition, this may be a very good time to do just that as I see question marks appearing around the edges of the Holy Grail that "OO" promised to bring. How may other programming languages out there can support both Procedural and "OO" paradigms simultaneously with such ease? Those are my thoughts. Mike Brunt - webappermb

1. I agree about a better organized support site. Especially with by default flash-enabled macromedia site. I really hate using flash searching for custom tags, forums, anything. Flash has it's uses but not for essential things. 2. A better central location for best practice information. A lot of us are self-taught, so we can't always take advantage of the experience of others. I think it'd be nice to have a central location for all best practices for coldfusion. That is constantly updated, easy to find and search. 3. Screenshots and Portfolios of Applications created. To help us learn from each other, we need the ability to see applications that each of us make, hiding any secure or names of course, but with screen shots and explanations step by step of how you/we planned the application. As CF Developers we don't have a way to really show off our work, this could be a place to show off our work, and explain our thoughts, share some code, and so forth. This would be a big one for me.

I agree with Alex 100%. By the way Alex and others, you can signup for technote notifications on my blog at http://www.cfm-applications.com/expressive_v1_b2/technotes/index.cfm I know been has heard this before, I would much rather have easier access to Technotes, Updated Technotes, Hotfixes, and Security Patches than a new CF version.

Ben, IMHO the support site of ColdFusion (and other Macromedia products in general) is very poor in terms of organization, very difficult to find informations regarding security patches, workarounds and hotfixes. Hotfixes are mixed with technotes, technotes are hidden and very often not listed at the technotes index, and so on. Macromedia blogs (especially the Brandon one) became a place to find fresh information regarding the product instead of the support site ar MM.com. This is very bad because you've lost track of the changes and also looks like (to our clients to be more specific) that MM doesn't have a good official support for the product. Blogs and support foruns are great, but not the best option to publish sensible information such as hotfixes. Also, very often technotes are updated (including new hotfix files and new drivers version) without a clear notice. You have to keep visiting the links to make sure you have the latest files/info... For that reason I was forced to build a application that keeps track of all sources of information (technotes and blogs) regarding CFMX 6.1, I organized (packed) it on my website at: http://www.cfgigolo.com/unsorted/pacote.htm. A better organized support site for ColdFusion will definitively make a great difference. And for the rest, you folks are simple great! :) The blogs (and the able for posting comments such as this) are a great example of it. Community are an important thing that many companies seams not to care. Abraços! Alex

From a European perspective... play the in-flight magazine game. A lot of 'executive' opinion seems to originate from reading articles on board transatlantic flights etc. Or television advertising? I've seen recent dot net and Cisco IP phone campaigns, for example, which are bound to influence public perception of a firms commitment to a product line.

the vast majority of stuff we do is intranet & will never see the public light of day, i guess much of the cf market is like this? getting some of this out in public would probably help.

I think Macromedia needs to be much more aggressive in the hosting community. There's nothing more offputting to entry developers than finding out they have to pay $30+/month for a simple shared hosting account, when you can get PHP accounts from $7.95/month. Do what Microsoft does with their service provider licensing plans (SPLA), have an extremely aggressive subscription plan for companies offering hosting, application providers etc. A simple certification/registration process, and then offer CF Standard for $69/month/processor, Enterprise $249/month/processor. Be aggressive, kill the excuse "CF is too expensive", let all the smaller Web hosts that would normally consider PHP have a fair chance of offering CF.

Push HomeSite+ or create a real IDE for programmers!! DW is not and is not perceived as a programmers tools, but as a html coder/designers tools. Have forced a lot of CF devloper to move to DW has been the worst mistake. The death of HomeSite/CF Studio has been a very bad strategic move and a lot of people have seen it like a betrayal.

Ben, As a user in Europe, I often have to defend myself against PHP/ASP users, who might not have the most attractive language to program in, but at least their product is free. So idea number 1: drop the price. Second idea: build a kind of "Cold Fusion Updater", like the "Windows Update" page, where bugfixes and patches can be automatically downloaded. Third idea: place some ads in European magazines. We often see Macromedia's Dreamweaver advertised here, but Cold Fusion is tucked away! Fourth idea: build a more stable product! Since the conversion from C++ to Java, CFMX goes down once a week on all my servers. CF itself is unbelievable powerfull, but there still are some tech probs (just read the forum...).

John, I wholeheartedly agree. All Macromedia seems to do is go after the existing customer base, and not go after the non-ColdFusion based shops out there. Macromedia needs to do a better job at educating the potential customer, and be able to deal with the objections of the misinformed IT manager. Regarding something I said earlier, and many others seem to agree with, is the lack of a ColdFusion presence in the education system, and I do not mean selling CF to educational markets. I am not a Bible thumper... far from it... but I am reminded of something in the New Testament that says, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach the man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." Although the allegory isn't entirely on the mark, teach someone about ColdFusion, and how to program in it, and I guarantee you that most developers out there would pick it for the bulk of the web applications out there if they just understood CF for what it really is, and not an outdated perception of what it was in 1997. I went around Cleveland State University on Saturday and posted fliers about the Macromedia's worldwide user group meeting on 5/19, and when I got to the areas in Engineering, Business and Urban Studies there where the web and programming courses were being taught, and I saw the courses offered, I saw Java everywhere.... VB.NET everywhere... and even some PHP and Perl.. but ColdFusion... NOWHERE. What does that tell you? It tells me that Macromedia is not doing what it needs to do to grow the base... at the base by educating the developer. The future of ColdFusion does not lie in teaching a designer how to develop in CFML, it's how to teach a Java developer to be more efficient and build apps faster by using ColdFusion for most of the application and use Java only where it's necessary. In the end, it's all Java. One final thing: I have seen this mentioned elsewhere. I think Macromedia needs to reexamine its licensing model. It's been proven that there are all sorts of reasons why teams of CF developers do not develop on their own machines... version control among them. Most shops buy development, testing and production licenses, and often staging, intranet and multiple production licenses in clustered environments. This means that a company needs to make a SIGNIFICANT investment in ColdFusion app servers before a single piece of a ColdFusion application can go live. This puts ColdFusion behind the ball in investment versus PHP, ASP/ASP.NET and even Java. Look at this for a company that BUYS a ColdFusion application!!! You have to buy the application, PLUS all the servers!!! I think that Macromedia needs to offer copies of ColdFusion for use in development, that DO allow for multiple developers to use the same server... FOR FREE. This new license model would allow more companies to EXPLORE the use of CFML for its application development without having to make a significant initial investment... and I believe would sell more ColdFusion servers and develop more ColdFusion developers in the long run.

Simple. More public awareness. I just got an email about learning how to use CF... I know how to use it. MM seems content to market to it's customer base. There are huge organizations using CF, gov't agencies, etc... The only place I've seen MACR advertising is in the CFDJ.. Again marketing to the chior. I know MACR Can't compete with the M$ advertising machine but even a few comercials, some banners all over the internet, hell spam somebody once, pop ups suck but look at X10. The marketing aspect of MACR is seemingly uninterested in expanding the user base. I sure haven't seen a Flex comercial, how will anyone know how kick ass it is? Is it our (the developers) jobs to market MACR products? I also agree with pretty much everything else being said; The exchange, more UG support, DRKs, etc....

Do an encore tour of the user groups that will miss the first leg and make Minneapolis/St. Paul a part of it!

1) Exchange: the fact that the custom tags scene has splintered badly is evidence of how incredibly annoying the flashed exchange is to use. No right click to check out a tag in a new tab? Painful, painful, painful. (And no search by title/description/etc? Jeez.) And why not a portal page listing new forum items, tags, tutorials, news from outside (other site's articles), etc? 2) Price: a free stripped down version as a starter and/or cheaper hosting. 3) Visibility: an evangelizing team that does real work making sure CF is represented at Amazon, ebay, Paypal, c.c. companies, and anywhere else imaginable. Write the solutions for them and have them listed alongside everyone else's. 4) IDE: dedicate Homesite to CF and improve it and actually sell it. You can't stuff everything into Dreamweaver without ruining it.

John, I wholeheartedly agree. All Macromedia seems to do is go after the existing customer base, and not go after the non-ColdFusion based shops out there. Macromedia needs to do a better job at educating the potential customer, and be able to deal with the objections of the misinformed IT manager. Regarding something I said earlier, and many others seem to agree with, is the lack of a ColdFusion presence in the education system, and I do not mean selling CF to educational markets. I am not a Bible thumper... far from it... but I am reminded of something in the New Testament that says, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach the man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." Although the allegory isn't entirely on the mark, teach someone about ColdFusion, and how to program in it, and I guarantee you that most developers out there would pick it for the bulk of the web applications out there if they just understood CF for what it really is, and not an outdated perception of what it was in 1997. I went around Cleveland State University on Saturday and posted fliers about the Macromedia's worldwide user group meeting on 5/19, and when I got to the areas in Engineering, Business and Urban Studies there where the web and programming courses were being taught, and I saw the courses offered, I saw Java everywhere.... VB.NET everywhere... and even some PHP and Perl.. but ColdFusion... NOWHERE. What does that tell you? It tells me that Macromedia is not doing what it needs to do to grow the base... at the base by educating the developer. The future of ColdFusion does not lie in teaching a designer how to develop in CFML, it's how to teach a Java developer to be more efficient and build apps faster by using ColdFusion for most of the application and use Java only where it's necessary. In the end, it's all Java. One final thing: I have seen this mentioned elsewhere. I think Macromedia needs to reexamine its licensing model. It's been proven that there are all sorts of reasons why teams of CF developers do not develop on their own machines... version control among them. Most shops buy development, testing and production licenses, and often staging, intranet and multiple production licenses in clustered environments. This means that a company needs to make a SIGNIFICANT investment in ColdFusion app servers before a single piece of a ColdFusion application can go live. This puts ColdFusion behind the ball in investment versus PHP, ASP/ASP.NET and even Java. Look at this for a company that BUYS a ColdFusion application!!! You have to buy the application, PLUS all the servers!!! I think that Macromedia needs to offer copies of ColdFusion for use in development, that DO allow for multiple developers to use the same server... FOR FREE. This new license model would allow more companies to EXPLORE the use of CFML for its application development without having to make a significant initial investment... and I believe would sell more ColdFusion servers and develop more ColdFusion developers in the long run.

I really want macromedia to completely remove flash from the coldfusion site design. I absolutely abhore it. I keep having to remember there is a secret url variable to turn it off. I really love the idea of bring cf into colleges. After all so many of us are self-taught, there simply was no education available, or our companies had no interest in training us, (which is still a lot more common than you'd like to think) There are some things macromedia does right, and i'll be glad to mention those as well. 1. All forum messages are posted in usenet, that means we can search it thru google groups. Mega-cool. 2. Hasn't lost site the number one feature of CF is Rapid Development, so we're all about speed, efficiency,stability,scalability and performance. Here is a brand new idea. Instead of web conferences that macromedia uses to share new info or presentations. Why not web presentations from each user group, so we can learn from each other. After all each area has it's speciality and different skill levels at teaching. Live teaching is so important. I would really prefer that www.coldfusion.com went to a different site, not macromedia.com where only coldfusion related material was there. Make it non-flash, i beg of you. Maybe have a weekly scheduled chat for cfers across the world, to come to, and discuss, exchange and learn from each other. My goal is to always learn from others, and share what i know. Messageboards are okay, but live interactivity always enhances learning. That's it from me.

Hi, Here are some ideas and observations: 1. Push for use of ColdFusion in college classrooms. As a person who teaches CF at a post-secondary level, I frequently feel unsupported by MM as well as by the usual textbook publishers. 2. CF marketing is very "inbred" - MM places ads in the CFDJ and MXDJ, but that is preaching to the choir! 3. Improve the performance and quality of Dreamweaver. 4. Improve the performance of CF. Ex: Java's string operations far outperform CF's, yet CF is Java-based! Something NOT to do would be to make the release of the next version of CF in any way similar to the release of Studio MX 2004! It is in everybody's best interest to make CF a finished product that is functional, that has working components, and that has complete documentation.

I am very disappointed by Macromedia in France. I used to work in the UK where the CF community is small but efficient. In London you can find plenty of job in CF for instance. However in France, Technical directors barely know CF and think that it's absolutely useless in comparison to PHP or JSP or ASP. To find a CF job in France is more than difficult. I cannot believe that Macromedia is doing nothing positive for its product. Now with CFMX we can do so much as CF developer by interacting with Java, it's a very good and efficient combination. There is absolutely no presence of CF in national advert, technical magazine or some campaign to advertise CF. Guys unless you are not interested by the French market, you have to do something for CF or it will die in France and the others technologies will survive.

> The exchange doesn't suck because of Flash. > Not sure why others think it's slow... > it's plenty responsive for me. Flash driven exchange alters the behavior I expect from my browser's back button and my mouse's scroll wheel. If it doesn't suck because of Flash then it sucks because of the way it was implemented in Flash.

I like just about every aspect of ColdFusion and what it offers. I do think there is one area that could be better. Recently, I have tried to interact with two Web Services written in .NET. The web service did not return simple value types. Because of this, I was unable to work with them. I would like to see CF work better with Web Services no matter what it is written in or what data types are returned.

Correction: I mistakenly attributed TerraForm's author as Matthew S. Terraform is made by Matthew Walker. Sorry Matthew.

There are many "features" and "bug fixes" that I'd like to see in the language itself, but I think there are greater problems with Macromedia. Here are a few that I can think of now. 1. Macromedia seems to have dropped the "ColdFusion/Flash/Dreamweaver" solution slogan. They seemed to have stopped pushing ColdFusion to the Flash developers, and have seems to have stopped a whole solutions. I see many more flash developers using PHP, probably cause its "free".. hmmm... 2. I'd love to have a Macromedia sponsored site where I can get a blog going, and where every Macromedian would have their blog. Microsoft sponsors such sites, so does Sun! Also Macromedia as no website to evangalize ColdFusion (maybe www.coldfusion.com could be similar to www.asp.net). http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/ is too obscure and formal. 3. Very little, if any, ISV support and partner program. Actually the partner program itself is very poor. Every year at DevCon/MAX we are promised it will get better. I've given up on the partner programs now and no longuer attend the events. 4. Macromedia has great development platforms, yet they ALWAYS see the need to compete with their partners instead of working with them. This has become increasingly obvious with Breeze and at a lesser extent Contribute. It's beyond me that they can come out with great products (such as Flash Communication Server), expect you to develop applications based on these platforms and they railroad you with their own multi-million dollar product. 5. Lack of a descent IDE. I'd like to see at a minimum one "stable" fast IDE. What does it tell you when Macromedia ships Homesite+ with Dreamweaver. Homesite isn't much better though as it often crashes on me. 6. Free version of ColdFusion would be nice to have. I don't care about the bells and whistles. I'm willing to pay for those and so are most of my clients. But I'd like to see a stripped down version of ColdFusion back again. Eric.

I think that your team should get JRUN out to the public for free. Other J2EE application servers are becoming free and it's only time before JRUN and others like it are forced in that direction. I do understand that there is probably a team for JRUN but coldfusion and j2ee are married, and it would be nice to have the application server for free, and hopefully you could win the market, make money on support and draw more people into Coldfusion and Flash.

Since there are lots of comments already I just want to second a few... 1. Get the hosting providers costs down. PHP and ASP are winning because the hosting costs out there are cheaper and people/companies know that when they are ready to go to dedidcated servers that their software costs will be cheaper then too. It is almost impossible to get someone to switch away from an affordable PHP or ASP hosting plan (even if you rewrite their app) if you have to tell them that the monthly cost will go up $30 a month. 2. Get in front of the Execs because they don't always listen to their techies. More presentations, articles and advertisements on why CFML is better, faster, cheaper, whatever need to be in front of the people that make the decisions. 3. Environments are often dictated by the other major products that are purchased. For example, I work for a very large company and this year we may by a very large product that runs on Websphere. Guess what all the talk is... Java and Websphere. 4. Education should be FREE. Academic versions of the software are still overpriced. If you can't make them free, then you need to make them dirt cheap. We have all been students. Who has $100 when they can barely afford 39 cent Tacos? Get into the schools (highschool and college) and offer them the software (CHEAP or FREE) to get classes using it and students learning it. Right now a class could teach Java all day long with no cost using FREE servers and FREE IDEs. I remember in college when we learned VB. Our textbook included a slim version of the MS VB IDE all for the price of the textbook $49. There you go.... bundle Dreamweaver with a textbook for $49 and promote it to Universities. Good luck with this effort. I have been using CF since v.2 and really love it.

Hi, In the UK CF is being used less than before even with the intro of CFMX (cant rember the last time i saw a job looking for CFskills). Java is all you seem to see. Judging by the lack of marketing of CF I imagine most of the tech bosses in the UK don't even know the first thing about CFMX J2EE. If that product made more inroad into the J2EE market here, then it would very much help the rep of CFML as a scripting langauge.

Troy Pullis made an interesting comment that I would concur with. The Cleveland MMUG, my new group (it's only a three hour drive from Detroit, Ben! I know because I drive back and forth to Windsor every weekend!) is going to miss out having you speak... as well as my former MMUG, the West Virginia Macromedia Users Group, that I am still involved with. Both groups, although called MMUGs, have definite CF slants, and it would have been great to have you... but we were never asked! :-( I hope you will make the trip to see us soon!

Troy Pullis made an interesting comment that I would concur with. The Cleveland MMUG, my new group (it's only a three hour drive from Detroit, Ben! I know because I drive back and forth to Windsor every weekend!) is going to miss out having you speak... as well as my former MMUG, the West Virginia Macromedia Users Group, that I am still involved with. Both groups, although called MMUGs, have definite CF slants, and it would have been great to have you... but we were never asked! :-( I hope you will make the trip to see us soon!

Marketing, marketing, marketing. Macromedia is not speading the word about ColdFusion to a broad enough market. Just like those who mentioned above about the .Net and Cisco commericals and magazine ad placements. Those media avenues sell the idea to executives. Executives say whether or not you can buy the ump-teen licenses it'll take to buy a J2EE version of ColdFusion to run on a company's development, QA, staging, and production environments. Speaking of licenses.... Hey, if a company buys an enterprise or J2EE license for their production environment, why should they have to buy even more licenses for their development, qa, and staging environments. Yes, ColdFusion is inexpensive, but three to five servers can really add up, especially when it's sold by the CPU. After all many other software companies do this, including Microsoft, Sun, and IBM! I'm not saying give it away, but make it worth while for businesses to operate annually. But then again, ColdFusion does need to be given away or at least strip down version of it. It needs to be given out to those who will not use it for commerical gain. After all, .NET is free, so is PHP. But the lack of an editor will drive folks to buy Dreamweaver. From that point, Macromedia will gain. Web Hosting Providers should be given huge discounts for loading up ColdFusion. Macromedia should work with the WHP's on how to offer all of ColdFusion's features without jeopradizing security. Once again, this could drive sales of Dreamweaver up because more people can have a dynamic web site for less cost than the Microsoft technologies. Macromedia should promote ColdFusion as a Java based RAD for the Web. And promote it big time. I've been able to build web apps faster in ColdFusion than most .NET or ASP developers can produce with the Microsoft tools. Let's not even discuss JSP and Struts.... There should be more high level documentation on how to build a solid web application using ColdFusion. No, FuseBox doesn't count, nor does Mach II. Those are for folks who don't have clue on web application architectures. I'm talking about how to use ColdFusion as the GUI and utlizing EJB's to a middle tier app server like WebLogic or WebSphere without having to have the J2EE version of ColdFusion. How to utilize remote scripting technologies without using Flash Remoting. There should be even more articles on how to mange and administrate servers, especially in clustered environments. Articles on how to integrate with other products like linux and mail servers would be very practical. ColdFusion's xml feature lag in speed drastically. The new function xmlSearch() is so time consuming, I'm trying to figure out how to uses a Java object to do xslt translations to improve output performance of the html. But the advantage of the ColdFusion's xml is that it does harness the ColdFusion's structure and arrays objects wonderfully. This makes it very easy to navigate. The xml features just needs more speed and more options opened up, especially with xmlTransform(). Another worth while feature would be the ability to write JavaBeans and access them like they are CFC's. This could really get the ball moving in the Java world. Allow cross application development and promote more usage of design based tools for GUI that Macromedia does such a superb job or providing. To sum it up, ColdFusion is a niche market. Developers have to move from city to city keep working with the technology or switch to Microsoft, PHP, or a whole new field altogether. I'm on my third city in six years with ColdFusion. I'm tired of moving because of Microsoft's hollow promises of scalabity. Better marketing would keep me in one place better. Three other ColdFusion developers I work with will also agree who also have move to same city I'm currently in just to do ColdFusion. Who knows, maybe a better, broader marketing strategy will open an opportunity back up where I am originally from. It would be nice to go home and stay home...

I agree with almost everything I have read here. I’ve been using CF since 3.x. I have been a (devoted) senior CF developer for the last 3 years. My issues: Product Representation Better Online Support Developer Education PRODUCT REPRESENTATION The company that I work for recently went from 4.5 to MX and now they are telling me that I will soon be rewriting the application in .NET. The company has shifted from using Java, MS and .NET is now our corporate standard. After I registered MX, there was not one follow up from MM to my manager or myself. It seems like MM isn't even putting up a fight. Why isn't MM doing more to pursued corporations to consider CF to .NET as a company standard? It seems that MM is hoping that the loyalty to Java will give them some kickback. I recently sat in a meeting where some .NET guy in our company had solicited the guys from Blue Dragon to attempt to convince me that we should run our CF application on their approaching .NET version of BD. Why in world would I do this? Why in the world would my managers even consider this as well? Where the hell is MM? I would much rather use a MM .NET version of CF than trust some smaller company that may not be around in the next few years. MM needs to do more to represent themselves and change the negative IT perceptions that have fostered due to a misunderstanding of CF. Unfortunately, it is frowned upon and not taken too seriously. BETTER ONLINE SUPPORT The upgrade had its ups and downs. I was quite frustrated at the amount of digging into the MM web site I had to do to find info and fix inherent issues. I agree, ditch the Flash where it isn’t needed. DEVELOPER EDUCATION Based on what I have seen at a recent CF conference in Irvine CA, I feel that the majority of CF developers here is southern CA have a soft understanding of OO or modular programming and web development in general. This may be one reason why CF isn't taken seriously by the more adamant IT groups. I think MM should change its focus from rapid development to robust development and stress the importance of the UML paradigm and formal development processes. Too many times, I have seen CF pages that are well over 500 lines long and self submitting. Although this may not take too long to actually develop, if it is an important app, all you get is headaches in supporting this and trying to extend it. CF developers need to become more serious in their approach to design and development and MM needs to help bring this awareness to them through the product. Although it seems that this was the original intention with the release of MX, MM seems to have since dropped the ball.

Wow. Some great ideas here - I hope Macromedia is listening (and acts upon it) I like the idea of making www.coldfusion.com a seperately focused site instead of buried in Macromedia. I agree with the .NET comments as well. I'm evening seeing this internally - we've always been a CF shop but lately I've had some management members ask about .NET - because they see Microsoft pushing that in the press while Macromedia/ColdFusion are absent. In regards to Flex I was extremely disappointed when I saw the price. After seeing example here at Ben's site I was excited about the possibility of using it but at that price range I'll never have the chance. jim

This is an invaluable thread, and lots of folks are paying attention. I have not replied to any responses yet, as I don't want to get into a discussion or debate and somehow affect the direction it is taking. But please, keep posting, this is all being read, and I (and others) will respond.

As a developer I have to really wonder how much "in the family" Cold Fusion is. First thing I notice is that when you install Studio MX is that CF is installed in it's own directory. Might seem small, but I've also noticed that there is a very, very big push to show that CFMX can integrate with the .NET environment. I think that a MS can make this argument, but when I hear it from MM it sounds as though you are at least thinking about conceding the CF arena. I see a lot of advertising promoting Dreamweaver as an ASP.net tool, how about a CF tool as well?. Don't like DW, never have, probably never will. Too much stuff I don't need. WYSIWYG has been mucho bad for the web development crowd. Too many folks who have no clue about the code underneath (can you say Security?) On the Macromedia Website Mr Forta is no longer a CF Evangelist. He's now a Macromedia Evangelist (Waters down the argument a bit). Although the Flash integration looks really nice I'd like to see some CF tags do some of these things. They are trying to market CF as "faster development" and with many websites this is true, especially when you are using the tag base. However, if you do a website with Flash Remoting, development time is pretty much the same as doing it in .NET, and it adds one more layer that you must worry about security issues. Dump it into a lot of Schools for free. The University of Houston sells it for cheap in their software store, but ask any Faculty about it and they act as though you need to see the Foreign Language Department. Yes, I do the .NET thing too. I'm breaking into PHP as well. I do like CF, although this CFMX 6.1 and JDBC drivers in SQL Server is low-budget. Shouldn't have to fight creating a DSN. Reality is, if you are looking for work, and a lot in this Industry are, the CF jobs are pretty lean.

I am in University studying computer science. When I tell people that I create websites using ColdFusion I usually get one of two reactions: (1) either a blank stare indicating they have no idea what it is or (2) questions asking me why I don't use a *real* programming language. Amongst my peers at university, there is a real feeling that CF is a toy, akin to creating a website or a program using Visual Basic. "Real programmers do not use ColdFusion, they use php or Perl of C." In addition, there is an attitude of why should I use CF since php is free and even more powerfull. In addition, php is easier to learn and it constitues *real* programming. At my school it is the new media students who learn ColdFusion programming, not the computer science students. Amongst the faculty there is also the attitude that they do not use packages. Therefore, they would never buy or start teaching something like CF because is constitutes a package. There is a real hostility when it comes to pre-packaged applications like CF. However, all the computers have Visual Studio .NET installed on them, which is used for all of one course throughout the entire CompSci program. Macromedia needs to do something to change this attitude. I am just not sure what.

Ben, Marketing and Support. All I hear from former local ColdFusion shop's is that they are going .NET. With the high turnover of IT staff and officers in this industry, not enough is being done to hype ColdFusion with/vs .NET. They see .NET on TV, they get a Microsoft Salesperson, they are on board. One example yesterday, A large company is on CF 5.x and going to .NET...they didn't even look at CFMX. Why wasn't a sales person on the doorstep long ago? Once more Macromedia had a Yahoo advertising banner with a typo. I notified MM and never got a thank you. the banner was still displaying on yahoo 4 days later. Also the support service...Even Microsoft gives free setup phone support. When I was installing CFMX MM said I could pay $600 or fill out a web form and receive help within 24 hours. I was upset and I have been a ColdFusion advocate since ver 3.x! There is not one CIO in the world that will pick ColdFusion over .NET or PHP if they think the support isn't there. The local sales rep might want to call and keep tabs with me as I am a local manager and could give them several leads. Sorry for the rant but evidently they won't listen to me. Manager Central Indiana CFUG

I agree - I agree - I agree Replace all of the Java based elements (like CFGrid and etc.) with Flash based versions including grids, file browsing, trees and so forth. Posted by MediaStorm at 5/13/04 4:44 AM

CF needs some of the more useful .NET features like REAL grids (*NOT* Java), Events and etc. Lets forget about all the Flex and Flash hoopla and concentrate a little bit on bringing CF back to the front of the pack. I agree with the other postings that TerraForms should be builtin (anything from Matthew in fact would be a welcome addition). Spend some time bringing HomeSite+ (CFStudio, or whatever you want to call it) up to date as DW is NOT nor ever will be a replacement. DW is bloated, slow and nearly requires multiple monitors to work with any productivity at all. Granted, DW is a nice tool but the target audiences are different and Visual Studio 2003 kicks the crap out of DW for productivity for more 'traditional' developers (like those that actually use HomeSite still). Hire Nick to bring it back to life again if needed. Better .NET integration aka Black Knight functionality should be included in CFMX Enterprise. Include a secure method of compiling and protecting source code that is long overdue. Provide a way to package and distribute CF applications without having to purchase a full blown CF server package. .NET is far, far ahead of CF in this area. Maybe this is done as a developers toolbox version of CF or something so MM can still generate income without the canibalization of the CF server marketspace. Include FLEX and leave the pricing structure of CFMX as is (or lower it even) to make it more competitive in its' marketspace. This would include marketing CF in non-CF related venues. CF users already know why CF is great and don't need to be re-sold at every corner. Agressively pursue new marketshare. MM markets Flex in the enterprise segment and CF should be promoted to that same audience. Include the majority of the DRK components and apps with CFMX. Provide a freaking way to add java resources that don't require you to restart CF and/or JRUN constantly to help reduce momentary outages for these configuration additions/changes. Enhance graphing to include more chart types and animated graphs. Include the ability to generate Flash Paper output and other file types such as PDF and XLS without jumping through hoops. FOP is a good place to start for PDF. Replace all of the Java based elements (like CFGrid and etc.) with Flash based versions including grids, file browsing, trees and so forth. Get rid of the Macromedia is king attitude and listen to developers better. MM has gained quite an ego lately. Fix the MM website so it is more productive. Searching forums and etc. is so painfully slow that it is nearly unusable. The RIA based versions of the developer exchange suck compared to the old versions. At a minimum, provide a webservice to allow developers to create their own interface to the exchange instead. Pretty graphics and design layouts often conflict with usability factors and while the MM site is visually appealing the usability stinks. It's ridiculus to have to login to various parts of the site over and over because the integration on the backend is lacking. Send update and hotfix notices to subscribed users. What is the point in having the option to be notified when there are updates when you never get any notifications? Provide an easy way for managing MM product licenses and subscriptions from a central location. We purchased CFMX Ent upgrades and subscriptions, multiple MX Studio copies and subscriptions and a month later DevNet is released and we are left in the cold unless we want to pay more $$ which is difficult because we had to fight for the subscription funds in the first place and have to return a month later with our hands out again. Since there are no notices sent out when subscriptions are close to expiration and no place to check subscription details on the MM site it makes it a huge PITA. Purchase an MSDN Universal (or even lower level) subscription from MS and compare the level of service differences between the two and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. MM charges significant premiums for the CF platform and as such should provide much higher levels of service across the board. Learn how to do the existing products well at all levels before stretching limited resources on various new stuff like Central, Flex and etc. These are all great additions but have come at a cost to CF focused resources as well. MM as a whole may be making steps forward but CF in general has been slipping more and more over time. CF had a significant time lead over .NET and MS has taken significant steps to quickly close the gap. We all love CF but it is tiring to constantly battle to protect its usage and maintain a positive light in a corporate environment when it comes at a significant cost. All platforms have bugs here and there but when CF stumbles it really stumbles and often leaves supports with some damage control issues to cleanup which detracts from its' overall lustre.

11. Get <cftransaction> to work across more than database. 12. Controls similar to .NET's controls (e.g. Datagrid, etc). 13. Insert/Delete/Update commands in a <cfquery> to return # of rows affected. 14. Digest authentication for Web Services consumption.

1. Complete ability to manipulate the http Request and Response streams in an obvious manner. 2. <cflocation type="server"> 3. Introduction of null. Would be controlled via a <cfsetting> 4. <cfcontinue>, please 5. Interfaces in CFCs 6. Removal of all "magic" variables - e.g. cfhttp, cffile 7. Session onend event. 8. Ability to create threads. 9. In CFCs, "this" to work like "this" in Java/C#/C++ 10. Place all CF tags in a pseudo-XML like namespace. e.g. (<cf:output>)

This is incredible first of all. Want to spread the word to all Minnesota CFer's to check out http://www.colderfusion.com. I think the big mistake all occured when the merger of alliar/macromedia happened. It sounded like a good idea, to bring two industries together. But in reality it's not that great. Because you really don't understand well enough the mind set, culture and economy of an average CF Developer. 1. Most of us are self-taught, so learning the basics is such a struggle,that we never have the opportunity, other than thru years and years of experience to learn the best practices. From databases, cf admin, commenting, documentation, project management, sql, caching, com objects, source control. This is what coldfusion.com should be about. In fact, all cfugs should be a subset of coldfusion.com, that way we can all share all our data and presentations,and have one global interface to learning and sharing about ColdFusion. 2. Dreamweaver really sucks for coding, for design it's nice. But I am always having to clean up the html from anyone using dreamweaver or any other WYSIWYG. Go back to homesite, or make a deal with a text editor like Textpad, editplus or any of the other great text editors. Some of us will never even waste our time or money on dreamweaver or cf studio or homesite. 3. Ramp up the Marketing. One of the great things about allaire.com's website was all the case studies of successful sites use coldfusion, as well as walk through's of what changes they made. If we want CF to be dominant like we know it can be. WE MUST SHOWCASE OUR SUCCESSES! Be in colleges, be in corporate offices, i want people who are thinking about new, existing sites to only think of CF. 4. ColdFusion Store - Let us buy t-shirts, polo shirts, hats, any and all kind of gear that promotes and style-izes us as cool and hep cat Cold Fusion Developer's. 5. Get our own instant messenger tool, so fellow cfers can instantly talk to any other cfer over the internet. COMMUNICATION BABY!!! That's it for now. Biggest One is to have coldfusion.com to be a seperate non-flash site, that has everything we want in it!!! Please listen to us, we want you to be successful.

I'm a relative newcomer to ColdFusion. I've only been using it for a couple of years. My first exposure to CF was ColdFusion MX. So I may have a little different perspective than the long time users. To echo several comments. More marketing. I know that Macromedia does not have the marketing dollars that Microsoft has but it sure would be nice to see some mainstream advertising. High Education: I work at a state university and this is the perfect environment to promote ColdFusion, both in the classroom and as a solution for the IT departments at universities. Look at Microsofts MS Campus Agreement Program. For the cost of the media ($5 per CD) I can get any of the major MS applications for work use or personal use. I know MM cannot likely do this but they could certainly make it more economical for universities to use their products. Dreamweaver: I use DW excusively and like it a lot. For me personally it is the right development tool. I would like to see tighter integration with ColdFusion. The components inspector is great. I like that I can instantly see a list of CFC's. I would like to see something similar to this for Custom Tags. I would also like to see code hinting for custom tags as well. How about a version of Dreamweaver called DreamweaverMX ColdFusion Edition that has all of non-CF server behaviors stripped out of it? Forms: Build into ColdFusion robust form creation capabilities. A few people have mentioned TerraForms and while I've not used the Custom Tag I have looked at the sample apps and that is definitely the direction I'd like to see Macromedia take. CFLogin: Personally I love this tag. That is how I secure all my apps. In addition to being able to assign a user to a role I would also like to be able to assign permissions to a users which I think would make the CFLogin tag even more flexible. I'd also like to see Macromedia promote this tag to the ColdFusion community a little (It was nice to see the Security CFC using CFLogin in DRK7). I think it is one of the hidden gems in ColdFusionMX. Custom Tags: I have not been using custom tags very long but recently have begun to use them on a regular basis. I would like to see a better way to manage custom tags (I sort of get at that in my comments about Dreamweaver). Some kind of inspector for custom tags within the ColdFusion Administrator that list all the custom tags in the Custom Tags directory would be great. I would also like to see Macromedia provide more articles, tutorials and sample applications using frameworks such as Fusebox and mach ii.

Advertising campaigns cost a LOT of money. Trust me, you will more for your money if you paid Wouter Demuynck http://www.nucleuscms.org/contact.php to port Nucleus from PHP to ColdFusion (and keep it open source). He's a 23 year old Dane and author of an incredible open source CMS/Blog application that is easy beyond compare to install on LAMP or Win/IIS servers, shared or dedicated. I'm sure he would port it for a "song" compared to the cost of an international advertising campaign. Maybe there is another Open Source tool out there (phpbb, gallery, phpcollab, oscommerce) that would garner more interest than Nucleus, if ported to ColdFusion. That decision is best left to the marketing/demographics folks. Real-world solutions that people can use and tinker with are a lot more interesting than ads saying how great a product is. If it is so great and easy, then show the world. MySQL did not reach its status through advertising campaigns. Read the article linked below for info... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4715 With an excellent Open Source tool written in ColdFusion thousands of people would demand ColdFusion support from their hosting services. Another idea is for MM to provide the support needed to make FarCry install easily in a shared hosting environment. FarCry is an amazing tool that would spread like wildfire if people could install it on a $10/month hosting service! Implementing these suggestions will take CF adoption a lot further than a million dollar advertising campaign.

Documents on Macromedia.com should be dated. Especially DevNet articles. Products change. Dating articles would make it much easier for users to quickly discern which version the article's content may apply too.

Recently started learning and using ColdFusion and here is what I have found. 1) Visited 2 different bookstores recently and found 0 books at one bookstore except for 1 book on Version 5 in the 50% off rack. At the other bookstore there were about 4 books on ColdFusion. I see 50-75 books for .asp, PHP on the bookshelves but hardly anything for ColdFusion. Why aren't there more books in the bookstores for CF? 2) Several of the website hosting companies I started dealing with when setting up my site have not upgraded to MX. They continue to use 4.5 or 5.0. Check with a few of the national/regional web hosting companies for yourself and see what version they are running. Also, I am finding that it is more expensive to find a hosting company that hosts for CF as opposed to asp or PHP. 3) Marketing of your product is lacking. Not enough people know about ColdFusion. Need to step up your advertising of what ColdFusion is and does. 4) Very few in town if any classes run on training in ColdFusion but yet I see several classes offered for Microsoft, Cisco,etc. We had to have a class created which took several months for them to setup at one of our local training centers in order for our people to get training in CF. It's a great product, you need to get the word out more. Just my two cents.

I notice almost every book store including BarnesNoble as well as web related training has ColdFusion MX in the category of Web Design. I would suggest Macromedia get a team together to address this problem. How can we get new developers to the web app technology if it is not presented as such.

What I'd really like to see is for CF to directly market itself as a .NET and JSP alternative. A March 2004 Netcraft survey (http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=e&entry=1109) showed the rapid rise of ASP.NET as a scripting technology. Assuming current growth rates, .NET will overtake CF at about this time next year. It's fair to assume that the huge number of ASP-driven sites are adding fuel to the .NET fire by switching over, so perhaps Macromedia can appeal to them as a viable alternative. I've had the uncomfortable feeling that Macromedia has been resting on its laurels in terms of marketing; consider that the increase in servers with scripting technologies far outpaces Coldfusion adoption rates for internet sites and the situation becomes more alarming. If you market it, they will come!

Bring CF to the students and the ISP's for free and you will see a lot more articles and overall use of Coldfusion on the internet.. let's face it.. CF is used mostly as an intranet tool and not so much as an internet tool, the reason why a language like PHP and ASP are so damn popular is only this.. the ISP's are offering it for a low price. For example.. my ISP didn't know about Bluedragon 6.1 (sorry...) and after i said it was free they had it running on there server for the same hosting price as an PHP package. Since then there are a lot of CF sites running on that server with users that already used Coldfusion in there working environment but had there personal sites in ASP or PHP. I think that coldfusion will only get bigger by name, if they focused more on the personal use instead of the corporate use, and this said.. that can only be done by offering Coldfusion to ISP's for a low, low, really low price. The more Coldfusion will be used for personal sites the more it will be used for corporate applications.. let's face it.. the kids of today are the decision maker's of tomorrow

I have also seen the number of CF books in local bookstores dwindle over the past couple of years. I honestly don't think MM has much to do with that though. If people aren't buying them, why would the bookstore fill their shelves with them. What you do see is a ton of books on .NET and the like because there is a greater demand. I do like CF and I think it has it's place for some small apps. But from a personal and professional point of view, .NET is a better alternative. I'll reiterate what's already been said: 1. Pricing is outrageous when you consider you can get PHP, PERL and ASP.NET for free. I know that MM couldn't possibly give away CF so they have to compete on another level. The sad thing is is that I don't know what that level is. 2. I stopped using the exchanges a long time ago because they were very difficult to use and I was tired of wasting my time. I concur with the other poster who stated that Flash should revert back to animations and splash pages. I think the whole RIA thing is vastly overrated. It will be interesting to see what impact "sparkle" will have (if it ever comes out that is). 3. PDF creation functionality. 4. Ditch cfgrid and the like - applets suck and are useless. 5. Compile and deployment of applications like .NET

It would be nice to see more articles on real-world ColdFusion development, keeping developers engaged and on the right track. The articles seem to have slowed to a slight trickle. I also like how Microsoft is keeping customers informed on the next release of Visual Studio/ASP.NET. The preview release is more of a tease, but the articles about the new features are welcomed and help me align current practices to the upcoming release. I think a similar approach to ColdFusion would be welcomed as well.

Sorry for the spam. Jsut to add to point #1. If Execs are educated on CF being J2EE and saving ton of money in development. They won't be so clueless when a P.O. is dropped in front of them. It also re-assures current shops alreayd using the product that CF is not being left behind.

3) Be much more aggressive in education market. Even freebies etc. Microsoft floods schools with their tools...early branwashing ;)

1) Strong advertising push at Exec level on cost savings of CF developemnt. they need to be educated!! (trade magazines etc) 2) MM press releases (breeze presentations) it seems CF is always played down...or not mentioned at all. I think that's one instance of 'giving the wrong impression' that can be rectified easily. Great responses

While I am a devoted follower, I have observed (and fought against) a lot of anti-CF sentiment, so I can make useful comment. Many developer frustrations are caused by show-stopping bugs or instabilities that, from the developer's point of view, take too long to fix. The odd issue has been picked up from the forums by people like Stephen Dupre (i.e. the most important ones like the recent JDBC driver hotfix) and given a lot of attention - if that happened more often more confidence in the products would return. Interactive feedback on these issues is the key (IMHO) as the developer can then go back to the manager breathing down their neck and say, "Yes, MM is working on it - see!" Without this the manager says, "We are going to replace CF in the near future as the product doesn't work," even though said manager has never written a line of CF in their life. Said developer then has the extra job of CF salesperson, trying to convince the ignorant powers that be that CF is far better than they have been told by the last Perl guru they spoke to (who also has never written a line of CF in their life). (Yes, I speak from experience) I'm willing to discuss personally, if there is any use in doing so - just email me Ben.

Ben, I already posted but I also wanted to throw this out there too. A lot of people including myself have mentioned that Macromedia really needs to target high education as a way to expose students to ColdFusion. I work at a public university and would be happy to put someone at Macromedia in contact with our CIO. Shoot me an email if you're interested. Ray

I would like to see the CFMX Administrator provide an option of hotfix/update checking and installation. Uses Microsoft's Windows Update as inspiration. 1) Macromedia provides a hot fix /update web service 2) A mechanism (cfx java or dll) that checks the installed file versions against the available updates. 3) ability to schedule the update check with notification via email when updates are available. 4) Provide for automatic or manual selected updates. 5) Since some updates will probably require stopping cfmx services, a way to launch an installer program that shuts down the cfmx services, uses the downloaded hotfix information, installs the hotfix (based on the stored configuration parameters) and then relaunch CFMX or restart the server.

If Macromedia Press is going to publish working examples, make them actually work. I bought a copy of Realty ColdFusion, Intranets & Content Management. I downloaded (from your site) and setup the intranet created in section 1 of the book. There are three obvious errors* that could be found in a rudimentary QA walk through. I didn't buy the book so I could learn how to debug an expert's code. I bought the book to learn from the expert. * Three obvious errors: 1) go to admin screen, sign in, list pages, click display link. 2) from same screen above, click on a page title. 3) go to admin screen, sign in, try to create a page. That this book was published 2002-10-01 and these errors have yet to be corrected is a shame. Where was Macromedia QA on this? Why don't you GPL the eduhealth app from the book and let others improve on it and feed it back to the ColdFusion community?

We need more information on Blackstone developments as they arise. For example, we are considering buying a product such as ActivePDF, but we do not have quite enough information to just wait for Blackstone. As an Evangelist myself, I would like to be able to better communicate the compelling developments in Blackstone to people in organizations that I work with...so that I can sell ColdFusion to them -- this is the best way for MM to increase the server products division -- a huge free salesforce, in place already, ready to spread the word. Keeping _us_ hanging off of our seats is a waste of energy preaching to the converted. Tell us what you know and what you know we can tell.

Lack of ColdFusion books at your local bookseller is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is lack of demand for ColdFusion books. As Rob Brooks Bilson says here... http://tinyurl.com/32eqm His 2nd Edition ColdFusion book only sold 'around 5,000 copies or so in the past year'. According to him it was the second best selling CF book. Ben's ColdFusion WACK being first. It is no wonder that O'Reilly has decided not to publish a third edition.

Sorry - just want to add to that last line: "Like your belt, no matter if your OS is fat or thin, your applications will still hold up"

Ben - there's a huge opportunity with government and companies that WILL switch operating platforms (I know, everybody says companies never switch, but... ...) http://news.com.com/Linux+ensnares+another+European+city/2100-7344_3-5238146.html?tag=nefd.top (government change). Why isn't Macromedia out there yelling "Things change: you clients, your market, even you Operating System. But with Cold Fusion, even if your OS changes, you application continues on without a hiccup." OK - no hiccup is an exaggeration, but isn't the fact that you can build your App right now for your Windows server AND use it IF you switch to Linux? From an IT level, isn't this the sell - "Be prepared NOT to rewrite your applications. Multi-OS. Standard. Adjustable. Like your belt." LOPEDIA . COM

Seems to me that ColdFusion is largely at a disadvantage because of costs. PHP and ASP are free. Yes, BlueDragon offers a free alternative, but if Adobe wants to improve their market share they should do something similar: a scaled back version of Adobe CF w/o several really nice fluff tags (like cfdocument say) thats free for any/all use. Make folks register for that product, and make it ridiculously easy to install and manage (like it is now basically). Then hound your registrees to a degree. Let them know about the features theyre missing, and give them concrete examples of why those are such great things and are worth the money for the upgrade to a business level server. Cost is prohibitive, not in just big organizations who are setting up several servers for production/testing/staging, but for small organizations who have little to no budget and want to develop as quickly as possible for an internal or external application on even just one server. Something else they could consider is a more comprehensive management tool. I'd love to see something as robust as say the sql server management tools, that let you monitoring currently running threads/sessions/applications etc. Then they could market that as the big tool to not only let you develop CF but also to manage your website(s).

Nick, I'm usually a nice guy but you're about the 101st guy who has said this during 07 so I must say that you're flat out wrong about cost issues. I've coded in .Net framework and CF and I must say that ColdFusion wins on total cost of ownership everytime. You've got to understand how to sell your clients on CF, even if it means actually challenging their ASP.Net coders to a race (which I've actually done before and I coded circles around 2 very experienced ASP guys all by myself - and made a waaay better app then they did - thanks to FlashForms). Here's how you do it - say you're in a small to medium market, like I'm in Indianapolis for instance, consulting fees range from $125-150 per hour here. You can get CF for between $1150-1200. If you can convince your clients of any of the following benefits then you've won... 1. Write once, run anywhere - this is a no brainer for people who fall out of love with Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mac whatever - wherever there is Java there shall be ColdFusion! 2. I have personally bought clients ActiveX controls that cost more than ColdFusion and ColdFusion did what those controls did out of the box! 3. I find on average that I write half (or less) actual code volume when working with CF. So, once you've saved your client 10 hours, because CF is all about productivity, then CF has essentially paid for itself and now the client is totally "in the black" as they say for now they will always able to do things like actually see a project get finished, or add on to a project very easily, or leverage their existing infrastructure of CFC's to get new widgets cooking - you get my point - all while saving drastic amounts of money. And for the record, I don't work in ColdFusion because of learning curve issues or any of the other bullshit that Microsnobs will say to you - I do it for the love of the game baby! Seriously though, CF is easy to pickup but at the same time you can get very complex with it if you want to. I like coding in C# but I think that .Net is better suited for thick client, desktop apps at this point when compared to CF. And unfortunately for Microsoft, Apollo may even end up beating them at that game too. Don't ever fault Adobe for charging for ColdFusion, I don't care how many people use ASP or PHP - ColdFusion was first - that's right, the first dynamic web technology that could seamlessly connect to a database and make the browser useful for more than looking at dirty pictures. Bottom line, CF is priced exactly where it should be - I'm glad that they haven't tried to stick it to any of us and really up the ante for a copy of standard. CF8 is coming and if you're not convinced of the value of CF now then you will be!

I think you guys are doing a great job. I'm not sure you get to hear that enough. Now for my wishlist :) the only thing that I could ask for is greater control over the new .js files in CF8. In a hosted enviornment we don't have access to modify the .js files. If there is a way, and there usually, is I don't know it. Also, I like using the cftextarea tag rather than a 3rd party text editor but defining custom toolbars seems to be probelmatic.. I'm sure you are working on it, so I'll be patient... umm, that's it. Seriously great work! as a developer dependent upon CF for a living I too hate hearing that CF is "dead".. I think it's a great platform with lots of power a great future and has a thriving community. So cheers!