I've made a very good living with ColdFusion consistently since I picked it up in 1997. There are now several really nice MVC frameworks for ColdFusion out there. If you've not used it in decades, it has a fully script-based syntax now, and there is a strong free CF engine (Lucee).
The newest integrations with AI are definitely interesting.
I've been pleasantly surprised to see some inklings of growth in CF adoption, though I'm comfortable saying that most new code in ANY language is going to be written with AI going forward.
With the latest PHP vulnerabilities - ColdFusion is actually a selling point: "Gee, it doesn't run 60+ percent of the internet, but it's actively maintained and can be configured to be secure."
What does this mean? This being a revelation for a web tech solution strikes me as strange. I saw a tiny bit of CF like 25 years ago and perhaps mistakenly thought it did this back then.
The entire stack described in the post is the stuff of nightmares. ColdFusion, IIS on Windows Server, PHP. Things that make you wake up in a cold sweat.
When I was in undergrad we used CF quite a bit for the custom university applications. I cut a lot of my wed development teeth on it. But everyone hated it. So we were actually quite excited to get a PHP server. It could run open source alternatives to Blackboard after all!
I played around with PHP quite a bit in my senior year and got a job as a developer working for a PHP shop when I graduated. Boy was I absolutely disillusioned within 12 months. PHP nearly ruined my love of computers. It was an abusive relationship: I would spend my working hours writing horrible little patches to ancient systems that were made of spaghetti 10 miles long, then go home and night and weekend try to write beautiful code in PHP. The more little patches I wrote the more I felt the need to somehow make them right.
I escaped to Python and JS and have done a lot of therapy since. Doing much better these days, thankfully. My addiction to C seems like such a minor vice in comparison.
ColdFusion has a very lively community and there are two open-source versions: Lucee and BoxLang. The language has also stayed very modern and something like two thirds of the Fortune 500 are using it. Also there are a few well-known startups like DistroKid using it.
"Yo dawg, I hear you like security vulnerabilities..."
CF was an interesting path. I used the Python equivalent, Zope, extensively back in the day. Both could glue together some really powerful components and allow you to write whole web apps more or less declaratively.
That said, we collectively tried that experiment ("we" includes you, my JBoss compatriots) and realized this is not The Way Forward. That doesn't mean they're valueless, not at all! And it's the sort of experiment you have to try or else it's always going to be nagging at the back of your mind: "what if we tried this... and it was amazing?" But we did try it, and it was not amazing.
If you have to maintain CF or Zope or JBoss today, godspeed. Just know that life is easier elsewhere. It doesn't have to be this way. It's not this way for everyone.
ColdFusion did a lot of things right for its time, but it can only be appreciated if one understands the engineering challenges of the time period (e.g. perl cgi-bin). Using HTML templating and good support from a small and agile company had a lot to recommend it, and many people built a living out of it, both inside and outside Allaire.
You just gave me flashbacks as a teenager using Allaire HomeSite to build websites for friends and family. Man what a good piece of software before they bolted CF to it and sent it off to Macromedia>Adobe hell.
I've made a very good living with ColdFusion consistently since I picked it up in 1997. There are now several really nice MVC frameworks for ColdFusion out there. If you've not used it in decades, it has a fully script-based syntax now, and there is a strong free CF engine (Lucee).
The newest integrations with AI are definitely interesting.
I've been pleasantly surprised to see some inklings of growth in CF adoption, though I'm comfortable saying that most new code in ANY language is going to be written with AI going forward.
With the latest PHP vulnerabilities - ColdFusion is actually a selling point: "Gee, it doesn't run 60+ percent of the internet, but it's actively maintained and can be configured to be secure."
> it has a fully script-based syntax now
What does this mean? This being a revelation for a web tech solution strikes me as strange. I saw a tiny bit of CF like 25 years ago and perhaps mistakenly thought it did this back then.
It used by be a markup language like:
But now it has its own scripting language like:
At least, that is how it used to be :)
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I used to write a bunch of ColdFusion with a dude that owned an S2000 :)
I’m kind of blown away that there are still people out there using ColdFusion. Blast from the past.
ColdFusion has been maintained by Adobe since 2005. Apparently, they think there is future for it:
See “Roadmap for Adobe ColdFusion 2026” for more details: https://www.adobe.com/cc-shared/assets/pdf/products/coldfusi...
Everything says that - look at Filemaker: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/agentic-development/
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The entire stack described in the post is the stuff of nightmares. ColdFusion, IIS on Windows Server, PHP. Things that make you wake up in a cold sweat.
When I was in undergrad we used CF quite a bit for the custom university applications. I cut a lot of my wed development teeth on it. But everyone hated it. So we were actually quite excited to get a PHP server. It could run open source alternatives to Blackboard after all!
I played around with PHP quite a bit in my senior year and got a job as a developer working for a PHP shop when I graduated. Boy was I absolutely disillusioned within 12 months. PHP nearly ruined my love of computers. It was an abusive relationship: I would spend my working hours writing horrible little patches to ancient systems that were made of spaghetti 10 miles long, then go home and night and weekend try to write beautiful code in PHP. The more little patches I wrote the more I felt the need to somehow make them right.
I escaped to Python and JS and have done a lot of therapy since. Doing much better these days, thankfully. My addiction to C seems like such a minor vice in comparison.
Next someone is gonna pipe up and say they used AI to enable them to continue using FrontPage extensions to keep their php+cf sites working
They're well-documented, well-supported products.
What gives me cold sweats are custom application servers that no one knows how they work.
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ColdFusion has a very lively community and there are two open-source versions: Lucee and BoxLang. The language has also stayed very modern and something like two thirds of the Fortune 500 are using it. Also there are a few well-known startups like DistroKid using it.
Same! I have a huge soft spot for CF. It put a lot of food on my table in the early 2000’s. Then I switched to Java :-)
"Yo dawg, I hear you like security vulnerabilities..."
CF was an interesting path. I used the Python equivalent, Zope, extensively back in the day. Both could glue together some really powerful components and allow you to write whole web apps more or less declaratively.
That said, we collectively tried that experiment ("we" includes you, my JBoss compatriots) and realized this is not The Way Forward. That doesn't mean they're valueless, not at all! And it's the sort of experiment you have to try or else it's always going to be nagging at the back of your mind: "what if we tried this... and it was amazing?" But we did try it, and it was not amazing.
If you have to maintain CF or Zope or JBoss today, godspeed. Just know that life is easier elsewhere. It doesn't have to be this way. It's not this way for everyone.
We do it’s a nice little niche. There was a lot of Zope around me. Opus has no issues with it at all.
ColdFusion did a lot of things right for its time, but it can only be appreciated if one understands the engineering challenges of the time period (e.g. perl cgi-bin). Using HTML templating and good support from a small and agile company had a lot to recommend it, and many people built a living out of it, both inside and outside Allaire.
You just gave me flashbacks as a teenager using Allaire HomeSite to build websites for friends and family. Man what a good piece of software before they bolted CF to it and sent it off to Macromedia>Adobe hell.
Still running a saas I built on Coldfusion/Lucee with a Vue frontend that I started in 2011 that supports myself and 2 employees.
There is so much in this title alone that sounds like a time capsule from 1999...
They're just missing either Shockwave (Director) or Flash as half of their website.
I feel like Ben Forta just woke me up and it's 2002!
Ben actually spoke at last year's CF Summit. It felt very nostalgic!
Wayback Machine already has a copy. If the site does not load for you, try https://web.archive.org/web/20261026222905/https://www.grego...
ColdFusion...now there's a name I haven't heard in some time.