Is somebody using Coldfusion today or is it dead?

I mean seriosly, who is using Coldfusion this days? 0.02 percent of all web project are based on this solution? Thanks for your opinion. Regards

 

I use Coldfusion on a daily basis and is by far my programming language of choice when it comes to data driven web sites.

 

http://www.coldfusionforum.com/ Plenty of current posts. And that's just one site.

The US government is a huge user.

 

It's not dead, just not as popular as others. US Gov and Myspace are some notable uses and it would probably be a neat one to learn for fun. Just expensive.

 

That's the problem - expensive. Very few people will pay $650 to play with something.

But if you need a secure site (security that makes PHP on Apache look like Swiss cheese without the cheese), CF is the way to go. (Just the fact that so few people know it makes it more difficult to hack in some respects.)

 

With a 30 day trial and a Developer Edition that never expires, both of which are free, playing doesn't cost a dime.

 

I've never noticed that one. Thank you very much for the information. I've downloaded it. Now I can do even more work when I'm not at the office :::groan:::.

 

Another note : hostek.com has great CF shared hosting at a very reasonable price. I've personally moved to my own dedicated server, but if you need Shared Hosting w/ Coldfusion already setup I highly recommend them. When I first started looking for a cheaper solution to hosting Coldfusion sites I was pulling my hair out.

 

I use CF daily - best language for the sites I develop and support.

 

I too have used it daily for the past 2 years now. Been using it as a development platform since the early 4.5 Allaire days as far back as 2001. Still works well in many ways although I got worried when they went to a Java-based architecture in 5/6. I don't think it's quite as speedy as it used to be but it's definitely more flexible and feature-rich now.

 

It's like PHP, except you pay for it.

You can embed queries directly in a template and then loop over the result set directly outputting HTML, just like you can with PHP. Or you can use a framework and ORM to build your application in a more structured manner, just like you can with PHP.

Sure, it has some nice features (like cfdocument for PDF generation) but in my experience many of the nice "built-in" things would break down/exhibit bugs when used in an a complex way, and you'd either have to write your own replacement or work around the problem somehow.

It has its annoying quirks (and I am definitely happier to be coding in Python these days), but so does any language. It's not horrible. I just wouldn't recommend it for new projects.

 

Coldfusion is expensive but authoring in CFML is not because of the open source alternatives to Adobe's Coldfusion Blue Dragon and Railo. I've converted a couple of Coldfusion sites to Railo with very good results. I've never used Blue Dragon, though. There was something called The Smith Project which I don't know anything about and when I just checked their website it was unavailable. Anyone know if it still exists?

CFML a very fast tool for development, which saves money, and it's easy to pick up.

 

ColdFusion is definitely not dead after Adobe has just released CF10 and Railo have said they will keep CFML alive for the next 10 years: blog.getrailo.com/post.cfm/railo-at-cf-objective-the-evolution-of-railo

@jonnyewing The Smith Project - never heard of it, but will keep our ears open for it!

 

I've been using CF for several years. Funny, but I decided to convert a CF program to PHP which I just learned last week. CF servers can be a pain, and that's why I did it.

Not sure I'd recommend PHP for any complicated or involved programs after seeing how PHP handles undefined and global/local variables. Unless I just missed something in php.

 

You probably did. PHP doesn't handle undefined variables, it just throws an error. (A variable is declared when it's on the left side, it's not declared if it's on the right side.) And locals/globals are pretty trivial - just declare your global in your function or you're declaring a new (and local) variable of the same name.

 

Ohhhhh! Thanks sooooo much! I didn't think to try to catch exceptions! I know about them from Java, C++, etc., but didn't think of it for PHP. That would be a big help.!!

 

Declaring your variables before you use them would be even better, huh?

 

Let me tell you why coldfusion Rocks….

Why ColdFusion

ColdFusion is the fastest and easiest way to build complex web applications. ColdFusion application development involves lower cost, less development time compared to any other web technology available in the market.ColdFusion is available in two editions: Standard and Enterprise.ColdFusion Enterprise Edition is the perfect solution for web application development, it delivers multiple web applications on one or more servers or on existing J2EE application server installations. It has all the capabilities of ColdFusion Standard Edition plus special features for managing multi-application environments. Read More

 

Coldfusion is very powerful and definitely not dead. It's just not commonly used for personal sites because it's expensive. You pretty much need a dedicated server to effectively use it and large scale projects seem to be the main use. There aren't too many blogs running on ColdFusion, but there are several very large well known sites that use it.

 

I'm in CF world since 1999. I'd been selecting which langugae to learn and started with CFML. Love it, all my production servers run Blue Dragon, never experienced any hack attempts (while bots and hackers all the time try to hack via php and perl)