So I did some self learning, did a Red Hat certification, played around with various other technologies also. A company in Australia called Firmware from memory was sending me info and CD's on ColdFusion every month. The first few months just went in the bin, I got a lot of junk. But one day, I popped in a CD and had a play, before I knew it I was writing a simple app that pulled data from an Access database. I immediately thought, wow that was easy, compared to some Perl work I had done in the couple years prior especially.
Needless to say, that 9 months of boredom in, I left and took up a CTO position within a division of one of Australia's largest public companies. I was in charge of delivering a $2mil web development which was very big back then. Unfortunately it had already been outsourced and signed and I just needed to get it delivered. It was a large complex ASP application (Pre .NET). And while it worked and did what the spec said it should do, it was a piece of rubbish. It was supposed to have an admin module which it did, but it was a VB app.
I convinced the CEO that we should hire some staff and rewrite the admin module internally. This was far more cost effective than the external company maintaining the existing system. So having recently discovered how easy and powerful ColdFusion was, I thought, we could do this in ColdFusion very fast. We hired two developers and 3 months later had rewritten and deployed the admin functionality, web based and 10x the functionality.
ColdFusion did what it does best, delivers a solution quickly. The business loved it and me for recommending it and the rest is history. Unfortunately it was another DOT.COM and didn't last too long.
I have been a CTO now for 12 years across 3 companies and always found a use for ColdFusion, it might be a small development, it might be something large, but ColdFusion still has a place.
I do use and recommend other technologies also, I don't think that ColdFusion is the only solution and its not for every application, but I don't think I'll stop using it any time soon.
3 comments:
Interesting to hear that coldfusion is still being used pretty strongly... I come from the Flash community, and I have used C#, php and soon Scala for back-end stuff. Where do you personally seeing Coldfusion fitting into all of this? What does Coldfusion offer, or have that appeals vs just using php, python, etc. I am not trying to be a jerk, just really curious... I almost never, ever hear of people speak of coldfusion.
We use ActionScript, Flex, C# also. ColdFusion still has the speed and simplicity factor going for it. Although these days the other languages are getting simpler, while ColdFusion gets more complex, this the gap is bridging.
To be totally honest, if I was to start everything fresh again today. I probably wouldn't choose ColdFusion. Not because it isn't good, more because it isn't mainstream and is getting very hard to find people etc.
Still its a good language and nothing compares in terms of speed. I dont think its going away any time soon and we have a lot of legacy apps using it so will continue to maintain and enhance them.
Interesting story. Thanks
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