Some thoughts on ColdFusion Evangelism

In one of the comments to my Friday post, Barry B asked for my thoughts on ColdFusion's Strengths, and how they could be leveraged to get more companies on board with CF development. In my mind that called for more than a simple comment response. Below is the last of a series of posts exploring the topic.

In my last post, I talked a little bit about why I am a ColdFusion Developer. In my final post for this series, I thought I'd throw out some ideas on how Adobe can better evangelize ColdFusion. Bear in mind that these are just thoughts, and as such may or may not truly be viable ideas. I hold no claim to ownership on these ideas, so Adobe, or whomever can feel free to use them as they see fit. Mainly this is meant as a jump off point for discussion, rather than fully realized ideas.

The first thing Adobe can do is to better advertise. I receive regular mailings from Microsoft advertising .NET, as well as seeing their ads regularly in publications like eWeek, Baseline, etc... More importantly, my boss (who ultimately decides what we buy) sees those same ads. Sure, I receive emails from Adobe when new products come out, but my boss does not. Beyond that, the fact of the matter is that when I do receive one of those emails, I tend to file it away to look at later, and move on to the more time sensitive emails. Two guesses as to how often I get back to the Adobe mailings. As a direct result, while we would be good candidates for using Flex, I don't see that happening anytime in the near future. I've mentioned it a few times, but it's been difficult to put together a compelling business case for a product that my boss has barely heard of. (Reminds me of the old catalog service "Everything you've never heard of but can't live without".)

The second thing Adobe can do is put Livedocs out of it's misery, and replace it with something better. One would think that between Flex and ColdFusion, Livedocs would be a showcase of how to build a compelling rich internet application. Livedocs was great back in the day, but it's getting more than a little long in the tooth at this point.

My third suggestion would be to recreate the CF Pet Market application in competing languages (PHP, .NET, Ruby, etc..) using best practices in those various languages, then posting a series of articles highlighting specific areas where CF shines.

My final, and probably most controversial suggestion is for Adobe to release a free version of CF server that can be used in a production environment. I'm thinking something that sits say below Standard edition, with support for maybe 95% of the tags (i.e. no reporting, no pdf work, no image work, etc..), and reducing the number of built-in database drivers (perhaps keeping only mysql and access). The idea here would be to put CF on an equal footing price-wise with the PHPs of the world at least for getting in the door. Once users have an investment of time in CF, I suspect the cost of upgrading for the more robust pay version would be less of a concern than it is today. It might also mean more developers learning CF in the first place.

Well, there you have it, during this series of posts, I've discussed Why CF is not dead, why I use CF, and finally with this post, added some thoughts on how Adobe can better evangelize CF. Hopefully you found some of these ideas interesting.

Labels: .NET, Adobe, CF Is Not Dead Yet Series, ColdFusion, Evangelism, Flex, Microsoft, PHP, Ruby

posted by Luis - 5 comments