My response to ‘Does Adobe really care about ColdFusion? Doubt it’

Posted on by

Alan Williamson went on the attack in an attempt to call out Adobe for their lack of ColdFusion updates/support. I commented on his blog but wanted to replicate it here. I hesitated to do this seeing as it would bring light to a tasteless marketing effort but think it could be worth the discussion.

So here is my response to Does Adobe really care about ColdFusion? Doubt it:

I’d say OpenBD is behind Railo. I didn’t even know OpenBD was still working. I thought it was dying slowly [not being funny, absolutely serious here].

You’re taking Ray’s posts wayyyyy out of context. DateTimeFormat is a simple improvement we’ve all dealt with for years through two function calls: DateFormat, TimeFormat. Ray is pulling simple upgrades out of Zeus and posting about them. Maybe if that was the only update this post would be spot on but it is just one of the smaller niceties being provided.

If you want a list of big features, Charlie did a preso recently [October 2011] where he outlined what’s new.

Here are some I’d say are “slightly” larger than DateTimeFormat:
- Automated Hotfix Mechanis
- Restricting Admin Access by IP Addres
- CSRF Protection
- XSS Protection
- Completely rethought scheduled tasks [too many updates here to list]
- Web sockets support; other HTML5 goodies too
- Closures
- Implicit CFC constructors
- CFC method chaining [no more 'return this;' required to method chain]
- Tomcat replaces jrun
- SOLR improvements
- Better java integration; auto-load jars and cfc access in java [see CFCProxy] are my favs
- jQuery used in Admin [death to java applets]
- Per-application VFS
- Web Services are now AXIS 2; adds REST support and is brain-dead simple yet very powerful

Those are just some of the highlights from Charlie’s preso. Does that change the scope of your post?

As for it taking a very long time for such a simple update, I think all software has a similar issue. It isn’t like DateTimeFormat was all that hard to achieve through a UDF.

But…for the sake of discussion, OpenBD isn’t free and clear here either:
Issue 33: cfprocessingdirective in the error handler page

That’s been open since 2008. This one is 2008 as well.

Maybe the issue tracker is outdated but until your house is clean…you might not want to talk about someone else’s.

;-)

PS – I deploy mainly Railo these days so don’t think I’m an Adobe fanboy defending the mothership.

It is always good for the community to take up a cause and get a company to improve a product but for a competitor to lambast and claim they are the clear leader they must: 1) Not have the same issue(s), 2) literally be in the lead, 3) Do so with legit points showcasing where an impending update is a poor one.

As another side note, I mention Railo as my preferred CFML engine [namely because it is free and blazingly fast!!!] but lately I’ve been in Rails way more than CF.

  • Mark

    Probably good that you re-posted here, as it is not showing on the comments of the original blog posting.

    • http://www.johncblandii.com John C. Bland II

      Exactly why I did it. :-D

  • Zarko

    Who ever cares about CFML and ColdFusion knows that Zeus feature list is nice, but not single person I spoke with was excited about Quartz or Tomcat or famous death to java applets. C’mon! Not a single thing there is awesome enough to speak about ti for more than 5 seconds.
    I work with Flex and ColdFusion for the last 6 years and I must say I wish Adobe didn’t buy Macromedia, those guys were so much better! Adobe is incapable of keeping up with others in everything except CS Suite.Btw, Adobe refused to sent someone over to CFCamp in Munich because Railo guys were there, presenting their new features in version 3.3 (you see the dot in between? that’s right new features in “point 3″ release)Charlie Arehart really tried hard to give us some insight, say some good words about Zeus, but Adobe forbade showing examples and other material on non-Adobe conferences.Well that’s interesting, multi-billion company is afraid that some guys from Switzerland are going to give them home work for next 2 releases.Railo is the reason why CFML will survive for some years more, not Zeus. 

    • http://www.johncblandii.com John C. Bland II

      I choose my words carefully. What I “labeled” the list of features was simply one’s I thought were “slightly” bigger than DateTimeFormat: “Here are some I’d say are “slightly” larger than DateTimeFormat”. I wasn’t going for awesomeness and not at any time would I discuss features of a beta I’m on, for fear of backlash.

      Macromedia had a different culture for sure but the acquisition has brought some quality updates, namely PDF features. Some things haven’t worked out so well [looking at you cfwindow] but we’ve had a solid backing for CF for years and it continues to roll on!

      I can’t speak to CFCamp at all. I have no clue what that conference even is nor do I work for Adobe so I’ll bow out of that one. To me it doesn’t seem like something they’d do though, seeing as both are at CFObjective every year.

      Them “forbading” Charlie to show examples isn’t new. They control their marketing to a T when it comes to what is and isn’t shown. I doubt it had to do with Railo being there though [see statement above about CFObjective].

      Railo is a quality server. It has some growing to do but it is quite enjoyable.

      • http://charlie.griefer.com/ Charlie Griefer

        Adobe wasn’t at cf.Objective() this year.  

        Railo was :)

        • http://www.johncblandii.com John C. Bland II

          Oops. I didn’t go this year so assumed since they were there in years past. Bad assumption. :)

          Thx for the correction.

  • http://charlie.griefer.com/ Charlie Griefer

    My favorite part of Alan’s post is that he ends with, “Open Source is never having to wait”… then noticing that comments are moderated :)

    • http://www.johncblandii.com John C. Bland II

      Not only are they moderated but they are slowwwwwwwly approved, if at all. Mine is going on 24 hours in the queue. lol.