Hal's Vision for ColdFusion

Hal Helms is known by many in the ColdFusion community. He is a smart guy, and certainly has a vested interest in CF and its future. I was surprised and really pleased at reading his article for Fusion Authority.

Many people would say that CF should be a better OO language. That Adobe promote CF to directly compete with .net and java... that we need features that are very advanced.

While I wouldn't mind all of that, I completely agree with Hal that CF is about something a bit different. It is about building powerful web applications quickly and easily. It is incredibly easy to build out prototype sites to prove concept, then build in the beefy application backend to keep it online.

Some people think a product must be complicated or require multiple engineers to be enterprise. CF can show people that it can do both, but first it must be promoted properly. People should be excited to try building an app in CF first to understand just how quick and easy it is. Then they should have the resources and material to understand how they can then make their app scale. (Training, documentation, tutorials, example sites).

Many may argue that CF really isn't promoted at all (not in a general advertising sense) or isn't promoted to the right people. My real concern is that when you look at all of the open API services from Amazon, Yahoo, etc they have examples in a few languages and almost never CF. Ray Camden and others have build their own CFC's and utilities to communicate with Yahoo and the others, but you need to do some searching to find it. Perception is important and for someone to not see CF as a default language for yahoo sample code sends a message.

My second concern is that CF might promoted as the innovation language for making prototypes to the extent that it isn't seen as as the language you use for apps that will last (not have to be rebuilt after proof of concept).

I love ColdFusion and really have no interest in learning a new language. However I along with others will always be concerned about its future. Not because we think Adobe will abandon it but because the marketplace is fickle and shifts. And for our language it moves in 'web' time. A company must be very focused to maintain its reputation, grow its base and keep its customers happy as there is no way to slip behind without some other upstart taking your place.

I guess what I am saying is that it would be great to hear from an Adobe person about exactly what focus CF has for the future. Not so much in terms of feature sets, but in terms of 'we want to own this term [easy | powerful | whatever] as our own, and our development efforts and marking efforts will continue to drive for that'.

It doesn't matter what we, the developers who already use CF, think the descriptive word is for ColdFusion. Right now it matters what Adobe thinks it is. And that everyone at Adobe involved IN CF is on the same page. It would also be super if we were allowed to ease drop in on the conversation. I don't need a voice. I just want to hear what is being said.