I used to code ColdFusion, it was great! Really easy to understand and easy to build custom web sites. I saw it more as a framework than a launguage and it tried to push what a framework could do, making it's own browser widgets. Being Macromedia/Adobe they weren't very good and there were other limitations but you could also make use of it being Java under the hood. It was very popular with the US government and there are still a few (but decreasing) number of developers maintaining these old CF sites.
I still support a few apps in ColdFusion. It wasn't that long ago that I was speaking at CF conferences; I still am the manager of the Houston CF user group. I started my career at a time when it was a super fast option to build a web app (1999).
It's still a solid language, but there just isn't the ecosystem that Rails (and others) have, which is where I'm mostly parked these days.
I had a job 5 or 6 years ago where I needed to maintain/add to a website using ColdFusion. I actually kind of liked it, compared to PHP. That said I wasn't doing anything especially complex, which might have changed my mind.
No. Avoid ColdFusion - it's a language from a bygone era when Adobe was trying to be what Microsoft is now. They failed and the ColdFusion community will die. The community, while made up of great people that I am still friends with, by and large was not interested in improving, learning new techniques, or growing beyond ColdFusion. They wanted to learn a skill and cash in on it for a long time. The language is dead and their skills are becoming useless as a result.
Maybe in 15-20 years ColdFusion will become like COBOL or ADA, where there's a bunch of code running some necessary systems and nobody knows how to maintain them. But it's a long bet for a payoff that would be much higher if you spent your time somewhere else.
Nothing is stopping you from learning ColdFusion. Websites built in it will still work just fine. The fact that everyone else is doing complicated stuff doesn't mean that you have to.
If a new non-youngster developer wants to pursue the legacy app/niche language strategy described in the article then I tend to agree. ColdFusion is easy to learn but at the same time it's really just an abstraction layer for Java. If one finds they want to dip into the guts then that's certainly available. As you note, there's a respectable number of legacy apps, often in the US federal government sector. One still has to learn SQL, CSS, JS, etc.
reply