Okay, I have searched Hotjob, Dice, Monster, every single resume/employer database site on the internet, and spent already over $2,000 searching them for 1 great Coldfusion developer, and I have found NOTHING. Do GREAT Coldfusion developers exist? Yes, okay, I know you think you're great. But what I mean is, are there developers that actually know how to develop in a 3-layer environment? (UI, Business, and Data Access layers). I don't think I see one developer code like this in my entire life. It seems as if great Coldfusion developers are these days .NET developers. I take a look at .NET developers that really understand development architecture and design, and some may say that they "were Coldfusion developers" before they migrated to .NET. It seems as if, once you get good at this language, you are no longer developing in this language. Please prove me wrong. Because we are looking for that 1 GREAT developer. We can offer 50k annual salary, we can offer 120k annual salary - we still get the same resumes.
Well, there's just not as much demand out there for CF coders - so most people learn a more in-demand technology like PHP. You may actually have some luck hiring an experienced web developer who may not be a CF expert and training them. The concepts are all pretty much the same, it's mostly syntax difference.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I was thinking of taking a very good .NET developer and handing them all my books on Coldfusion and let them learn it as they go along. It's just too bad that the Coldfusion syntax is actually not similar to PHP, ASP, etc.
ColdFusion is a more niche language than some others. There are certainly some really amazing developers, but it is a small group. I know hundreds of enterprise level developers like you are speaking of, but it is certainly not the norm. While ColdFusion has become an OO language with strong methodologies stemming from the Java world, and embracing design patterns, Bean/DAO/Gateway patterns with a Service layer, MVC applications, Dependency Injection/AOP frameworks etc., the percentage of developers that put these into practice is unfortunately small, likely less than 10% of the community IMO. The bright side is that for those of us that are passionate about it and push our selves to be the best, we can practically demand whatever salaries we want. I have been a ColdFusion developer since 99, and have never once been short on work and since the community is somewhat small it is *very* easy to get visibility and to be sought after. While I have written in other languages such as .NET, and PHP, nothing else is as fun or can produce the kind of rapid development that ColdFusion can. When I attend the yearly conferences, the number of developers are certainly increasing and the product is maturing, but the unfortunate reality is that it will likely never be mainstream.
another point... the really good developers are already working, which explains the resumes you are getting. If they are not working and looking for a job, they are probably worth every bit of the 50K you are offering.
I would say there is some truth to that if you write top down procedural code with a query-as-you-go mentality. However, in my opinion, there are some *big* differences between the languages if you are talking about more enterprise level development, writing caching routines, using application frameworks, managing object composition/polymorphism and such. I think that you might find some people that disagree with your statement that the differences are primarily syntactical. But... everyone has an opinion, eh?
If you are looking for an employee, disregard. If you want contract work, I can highly recommend T&C Database ( http://www.tcdb.com/ ) I've worked with the principal for the last 20 years at his day job, which he is leaving in the next few weeks. He's a seasoned Oracle DBA and ColdFusion expert; incredibly talented. I've no idea if he is taking on new clients or not, but you might drop him a line.
I used the CF for the first time in 2000 for a school project. Haven't left since. All my websites have .cfm extensions. Bazzles me why CF never really got popular...maybe i really like it cause i'm shitty at most other languages and don't wanna bother to learn them CF rules.....i think!
Thanks, bookmarked! Finding good developers for contract work is even harder actually, atleast for myself. I think CF is a great language. I believe it has a bad reputation because of what it used to be and people are too ignorant to give it a second chance today.
It's ok. But it's hard to compete with things like PHP when it's proprietary. I had to learn it years ago for a project, and still maintain that site - but that's the only CF work I've encountered in about a decade of building sites. No wonder CF developers are hard to find!
What about an open source alternative that offers complete MX7 support minus Flash forms (which no one in their right mind uses anyway!) http://www.newatlanta.com/corporate/news/bluedragon_opensource_announce.jsp Why not now?
Started Coldfusion back in 2000 and haven't stopped using it. Love it. Wish there was a bigger community. What did you mean by "I believe it has a bad reputation because of what it used to be". What was the reputation? Expensive?
I would say it is a bit multi-faceted. One of the early complaints I used to hear was that it wasn't fast enough and it wasn't scalable. These complaints had very little to do with the capabilty of ColdFusion and *everything* to do with the capability of a large percentage of the developers that used it. ColdFusion is a very accessible language that is easy to jump in without a programming background. While this could be viewed as a strong positive, it also allowed enormous quanities of crappy applications to be developed by people that had no business writing applications. There were no real design patterns early on and "best practices" were relative. Granted there were some great applications written with pre-MX ColdFusion, but I think they were the exception more than the norm personally. Regardless of whether it was fair or not, there was a stigma against ColdFusion that I think was related to this point. Secondly, before ColdFusion was turned into a Java application there were some interesting architecture things going on under the surface. Until 4.5 it was written as a C application, which of course means that all the current native Java funcitonality and interoperability that we enjoy today was not available. Version 5 was even a weirder release. There were some nice enhancments, but under the covers, half of ColdFusion was written in C and half of it was written in Java as they prepared to move towards MX. 6.1 was a beautiful release and 7 and 8 have just layed more sweetness on top of it, including awesome Adobe contributions in document genration, image manipulation, multi-threaded support, native .Net support (for those MS people! ) and on and on and on.... Unfortunately, many people will never see any of this stuff because they have no idea what has been going on in this space. I have been guilty of the same kinds of predjudices and I completely understand. I used to despise PHP due to my early experiences, however I recently worked with CakePHP and was blow away at how far PHP has come as well. It is unfortunate that we let our predjudices get in the way of discovering cool stuff!
Thanks for the reply I started doing CF back in the Allaire days... and back then I didn't really know what was good back then anyhow. I really enjoy some of the features of the new versions but i have to admit I still don't get much crazier than alot of the basics I started with. As far as it being scalable and the speed... I thought it was always great with that. I always thought people didn't want to pay for CF Server so they thumbed their nose at it. With that being said im just starting to dabble in php and some asp just because so much has been developed with those languages...
Well, I was remiss in not mentioning cost as that is definitely commonly thrown in as a point against ColdFusion, but that is really a silly argument for a few reasons. First, Adobe's license is not free, but there are other processing engines available such as Railo and Blue Dragon, both of which have free versions and BD7 JX is now even open sourced. However, many customers will only use Adobe's ColdFusion engine. In that scenario, when it comes to building enterprise level apps, it would be very easy to make a case that the development time saved with ColdFusion could offset licensing costs by a long shot. For example a standard license is 1800, which is a hair over 20 billable hours at 85/hr if my math is right. All that said, the cost argument is a little irrelevant imho.
Yea but that is just a single license, if you run a production company you would want something that is going to handle many domains.. now you are talking $5,000 ... Then again, Godaddy still only costs like 80 bux a year for CF hosting. lol Unfortunately back in the day there really wasn't necessarily cheap rates.