31 May 2007

ColdFusion hurts ASP & Java

While ASP & Java might get more press and dollars thrown at them. ColdFusion is really hurting these technologies, how so you might say. It hurts them in terms of productivity. Java, ASP & even PHP are just hard work, so hard in fact that you need to either spend a lot of time or employ a framework just to get you almost equivalent to ColdFusion.

It is evident to me that while Adobe need to better market ColdFusion than was done by Macromedia, Java and ASP people are quick to jump in with the it's crap, I thought it was dead type of comments. Funny that these people are even bothering to read such ColdFusion articles, what are they looking for if they have moved on. I know I'm not reading any Dig articles on ASP or Java releases.

They are also happy to jump in with the we moved here and did this and it's been good.

But here is my story, in 2001 I was a CTO in a division of a large public company. Decided to rewrite a 2.6 million ASP development in ColdFusion.
Straight away people were on my back, is that the right decision, ColdFusion is dying. ASP is much better, your making a mistake. Hang on, that's 6 years ago, surely the life support must have been turned off by now and they would have stopped releasing new versions.

More recently joined another public company as CTO and replaced a large and complex Java application again with ColdFusion.

Why would I do this, is it because I don't understand ASP or Java, not at all, have written lots of Java and ASP stuff, have recently studied at uni using PHP and Java, HD in every subject. The reason is that they are just hard work, sure Java might have a good new framework, but that's part of the problem. Had a team of Java developers that were always chasing a moving target and getting nothing done.

What do I mean my moving target, well they had a Java application that used various frameworks and libraries, but there was always a new one that they wanted to use or play with, we want to try hibernate, we want to use JSF.
All this costs development time and money. Even the developers couldn't agree on what frameworks to use.

So when I introduced ColdFusion, they all got scared, telling the business that I was crazy, I didn't know what I was doing and that I was making the wrong decision. But for some reason the business trusted me (The new guy) and not the rest of the team, perhaps I was very convincing when I pitched the idea of starting again to the board.

Now pitching to rewrite large applications, is not an easy pitch, it's not an easy or inexpensive process either. But to me it's simple, I've done this before, it works and the business will see the benefits.

So after spending the past 2 years rewriting all the applications (not
personally) in ColdFusion and building a 100% new development team, what is the result? A very good one, the functionality is superb, the development time is very low, there are less development staff required. And ultimately the business is happy.

We use 99.9% ColdFusion, there is one Encryption JAR that we wrote. But other than that it's all CF, pure OO CFC's with no framework, which I choose not to use due to the issues I've explained with Java framework moving targets.

In summary, I use ColdFusion because it works, it's easy and it's good for the business. I look forward to ColdFusion 8 and future versions, Adobe and the CF team have done a great job on this release and CF is now even further ahead of the competition.

30 May 2007

ColdFusion 8 Public Beta Released!

As predicted two days ago, many a hint were to be found.

Coldfusion 8 Public Beta has been released, not sure but is this the first ever Public Beta? First one I recall.

Enjoy

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion8/

28 May 2007

ColdFusion 8 Public Beta Coming!

A public beta of ColdFusion 8 codename Scorpio is about to be released. This will undoubtably be one of the biggest releases of ColdFusion and Adobe's first. I'd love to see that stats of number of downloads.

While the closed Beta has been running for Months, the public Beta will mean that Adobe will be able to lift the wraps off the features. Here are some of the key features that have already been announced.

CF8 Will Have a Debugger on offer as a CFECLIPSE Plugin

CFDBINFO - Tag to ease obtiaing info about a database
CFFEED - RSS Tag
CFIMAGE - Image creation and manipulation
CFTHREAD - Multithread support
CFZIP - ZIP and Archive tag

There is a LOT more, and I mean a LOT. I just picked what I think are some of the Key features that have already been anounced.

Stay tuned for the CF8 public beta, you are sure to be impressed.

25 May 2007

What ColdFusion needs to survive!

Ok,

You might think this is just my opinion, but I think these are the facts, these are the things that are needed if ColdFusion is to survive the next 5 years.

1. Standard Edition Must be FREE for commercial use.
2. Enterprise Edition should be LESS expensive.
3. Charge for the IDE CF Builder.
4. Have ability to write code 100% without tags (CFSCRIPT) perhaps .cfs extension.
5. Market 1, 2, 3 & 4 heavily with some serious dollars.

I think that 1, 2 & 3 would produce no negative sales benefit. There are a lot more developers than servers thus you sell a lot of IDE's.

To stop the YUCK factor that .NET and Java people experience when viewing code, developers must be able to develop code without using tags, it's that simple, and from developers that I talk to, if they could they would.

And if Adobe can offer 100 million for Flex stuff, I really expect to see some serious $ for Coldfusion 8 out of Adobe, I think they get one shot and this is it.

PS: I love ColdFusion and want it to survive, have replaced ASP and Java solutions using it with much benefit and time saving. I really don't want to have to go back again.

PPS: If you want to comment, comment on if you agree or don't agree on points 1-5 not on if I should have written this or not.

23 May 2007

Joost for All

Ok,

So I have a lot of Joost love to give. If you look up my email address, which you can do here

http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=MTRrNxEAAADmTh4PiwOMsRp4h2CvmN9NdPDdXUjlbOn07G5UBWfiIg

And send me an email that contains the words Joost and ColdFusion (Caus I like ColdFusion) then i'll invite you.

22 May 2007

I Want My Joost TV

Money for nothing and Joost for free.

Well lots of people are posting offers for Joost Invites, still haven't got one so thought i'd post asking for one.

So if anyone has one spare, send it my way.

PS: I'm happy to offer up an invites I get in return.

16 May 2007

Vista & Flash Sound Issues & Delays

I have noticed that since moving to Vista there are sound delay issues. When playing sounds from flash or other players such as Media Player there is a noticable delay before the sound starts playing.

Further investigation hasn't turned up much, but there must be heaps of Flash people out there that play sounds in time with animations that are having this problem.

If anyone has any clues, feel free to comment


EDIT: I have found the problem, turns out Vista is trying to be too clever and enhancing my sounds, disable sound enhancements and all is good.
See Screenshot Below: It's under Control Panel, Sounds, Speakers.


8 May 2007

WOW! You can afford CS3

Having already owned Studio 8 which was an upgraded from Studio MX.

I was looking at my upgrade options for CS3. I was able to upgrade to CS3 Web Premium for only $500.

This is a great deal, even though I only really use Flash & Dreamweaver I get a host of other goodies that are of value including.

Acrobat
Contribute
Fireworks
Illistrator
Photoshop

I've always wanted Photoshop but could never afford it. It's a smart move by Adobe as they are bringing in long time Alaire / Macromedia people into the rest of their product suite. I've made a conscience decision to drop my current graphics program (Ulead PhotoImpact 12) and do everything in Photoshop. And the stuff I used to do in Corel Draw I will now do in Illistrator.

Why, because I got them for free, they are good products which are the industy standard.

Well done Adobe

1 May 2007

Blog Moved from BlogCFC to Blogger

While I liked BlogCFC the user interface did my head in, having no ability to format posts nicely or easily include images and lists was just hard work.

My main pet hate was when I wanted a break between paragraphs, BlogCFC decided it knew better and stripped them so I'd have to resort to double blank lines or using other tricks.

I really hope Ray uses some of the new Scorpio stuff to improve this. The ability of blogger to easily customize the look and feel of a blog is obviously much better in Blogger and I appreciate that the may have spent more time on it than Ray.

So the additional work, installing, configuring and customizing BlogCFC would have been OK, if the posting entries had been better, after all that's what a blog is for.