The ColdFusion Renaissance
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Developer, Adobe, Internet on
Most years you’ll see an “is ColdFusion dead?” article. Like the infamous bad penny that keeps turning up it’s a meme that just won’t die. So if it’s a story we keep seeing, surely there must be a grain of truth in it?
Spend 30 minutes with Adobe’s Ben Forta, and you’ll know that’s not the case. Ben’s been working with ColdFusion since the Allaire days, and he knows the product (and its market) inside and out. Sure, there are fewer pages that show up with that tell tale .CFML extension these days, but that’s more because the underlying technologies of the web have changed.
Where we might have used a page markup language to dynamically generate page content, we now use AJAX - or even Flash. Today’s dynamic HTML pages talk directly to application servers and database engines, using REST and JSON to fire up their AJAX display components. It’s a much better architecture, separating business logic from display. That doesn’t mean those in-page dynamic content engines have gone away. They’re now in the background, handling database queries, managing and marshalling the new asynchronous connections between server and web browser.
That’s where you’ll find ColdFusion today. Sitting on top of Java, it simplifies the process of building and deploying web-facing Java applications. You don’t need to build complex new application server applications, wrapping Java classes in servlets - all you need are a few lines of hidden CFML to parse incoming XML and JSON, and to mediate the response from the server. Your browser (and the various site sniffers that people use to get the data for web technology surveys) won’t see the ColdFusion middleware layer - just the smooth Web 2.0 user experience we’ve come demand.
Cold Fusion’s also making quite a lot of inroads inside the firewall. Too often businesses and government lock up essential data in inefficient Access databases. Cold Fusion applications can take that data and make it available to any one on the network, with quick wins and rapid application development.
Adobe’s MAX event in Milan showed off a product codenamed “Bolt”, which will help developers work with ColdFusion in this new middleware world. It’s Adobe’s
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Loading ...Comment by - December 3, 2008 on 7:05 pm
Excellent article.
FWIW - the proper spelling is one word: ColdFusion.
Comment by - December 3, 2008 on 7:08 pm
Nice article. 
It’s unfortunate that the name of the product ColdFusion (correct spelling) is miss-spelled throughout the article. I’m guessing that’s the editor’s fault.
Comment by Alfio Raymond - December 3, 2008 on 7:09 pm
Bolt isn’t the first IDE for ColdFusion either, its the second after ColdFusion Studio which was made by Allaire.
Comment by - December 3, 2008 on 7:11 pm
Also, BOLT isn’t the first IDE for ColdFusion, it’s at least the 2nd after ColdFusion Studio and arguably the 3rd or 4th since both HomeSite/HomeSite+ and many versiuons of Dreamweaver included support for the language with syntax highlighting and other features.
Comment by - December 3, 2008 on 7:17 pm
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a “.cfml” extension, “.cfm” has been the rule everywhere I’ve worked.
Comment by - December 3, 2008 on 7:17 pm
And you’ve all failed to mention CFEclipse, the open source and free Eclipse plugin lovingly maintained by Mark Drew. CFEclipse has become somewhat of a standard among the diehard CF coding community, and will continue after Bolt’s release as well. Competition is good.
Comment by - December 3, 2008 on 10:47 pm
was coldfusion on the endangered list?
Comment by - December 4, 2008 on 3:20 am
Every time I read ‘Cold Fusion’ instead of the proper ‘ColdFusion’ it reflected negatively on the thoroughness of the writer’s research (if any).
Comment by - December 4, 2008 on 4:14 am
I realize my comment is against the grain a bit but I would rather see a positive article with some minor inaccuracies than one with CF correctly spelled etc that has one major inaccuracy; the death of CF.
Comment by johans - December 4, 2008 on 4:49 am
Nice article - ColdFusion vs Cold Fusion - come on people is it really such a big deal
Comment by Jayesh Viradiya - December 4, 2008 on 7:59 am
That’s the passion in the CF community, zero tolerance even if the product name is wrongly mentioned. This passion keeps the product alive.
Comment by - December 4, 2008 on 9:20 am
Steve Bolt!
Comment by - December 4, 2008 on 4:55 pm
Apologies for the typo folks - I’ve corrected it and have done due penance.
–Simon
Comment by Bruce Stenberg - December 4, 2008 on 7:17 pm
Although a few years ago I would have said I didn’t see that many companys using Coldfusion… For some reason recently I’ve been seeing it used on a lot more sites. I’m not sure if it’s just me looking more at what technology each site uses or if the user base is growing.
I do think it’s interesting that in CF9 they will be adding ActionScript support. I’m assuming this will only add more users familiar with AS such as flex/flash developers as well as challenge those CF developers to start learning ActionScript because you’ll be able to use it not just in CF but also in Flex/Flash.
Because of this shift I have decided to dedicate a lot more of my training time on learning Flex/ActionScript for this reason.
Comment by kristin - December 4, 2008 on 8:12 pm
i see that someone mentioned cfeclipse - very nice - but it was created by rob rohan and then collaborated with mark drew, spike milligan and oliver tupman - though mark drew is the lead developer (and all around cool cat) - http://www.cfeclipse.org/about.cfm - WAY before bolt was ever a gleam in adobe’s eye. happy holidays!
Comment by Michael - December 4, 2008 on 10:24 pm
Thanks for the nice article. I agree w/Mike Brunt. A year or two ago I would’ve scolded the writer/editor for the misspelling of ColdFusion. That doesn’t really matter to me so much as getting the word out there that CF isn’t going anywhere and is in actuality growing. CF is great, it’s what I exclusively code with, but let’s face it–it’s the minority. People who don’t know/care still think .Net or PHP or Ruby is the best thing since sliced bread. We, as the ColdFusion community, have to break down that barrier, put our arrogance behind us, and be thankful for positive exposure to the product. Let’s hope for more articles like this one instead of “ColdFusion is a Dead Language”.
Comment by - December 27, 2008 on 9:47 am
good.
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