My company's IT architects have mandiated that ColdFusion be phased out. Some of their reasoning comes from Forrester Research Inc. Does Adobe have any comments on the following? Has they spoken with Forrester Research about their views on ColdFusion?
"[J.R.] asked Forrester, where is ColdFusion product life? Should it be a strategic product for our company? You can asked your experts if should have ColdFusion apps is part of their critical solutions which are the most important to the company.
Response to the above question is from John R. Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst of Forrester Research Inc.
Forrester stopped doing research into ColdFusion several years ago, as it is no longer considered strategic by clients. To be sure, clients still have ColdFusion investments (the National Park Service, for example, is a big user), but these applications primarily run straightforward (non-transactional) Web sites, not strategic applications.
In recent years, Adobe has driven ColdFusion into enterprise Java development. Adobe responded to the gap that exists between the productivity of Microsoft’s .NET and the typical Java environment. CF, as a dynamic scripting environment, can fill that gap. Adobe has found enough growth to keep investing in ColdFusion. The product is now at Version 10, and I expect Adobe will keep plugging away as long as the installed base produces attractive maintenance revenues.
But ColdFusion’s time has passed. Most clients now look to newer dynamic scripting languages rather than CF, including PHP, JavaScript (browser primarily), Ruby/Rails, and Python. You won’t find big new Web businesses being built using CF now, but you will in the other languages.
The thought of our company relying on CF for business-critical apps is just a little scary. It doesn’t horrify me. If the engineering practices behind that code are sound and tuned to the need, then so be it. *Any* language can present problems, as you know, if the code written in it is sloppy. My bigger concern is that our company would continue to invest in what is so obviously a legacy product. Sure, CF works, but it isn’t going anywhere. Investment will inevitably drop and costs to customers rise to keep the product alive – that’s how legacy products typically enter their sunset years. The best developers long since moved to newer languages."