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.
Ahh. Yeah. Well that sparks a memory of why I quickly went another direction after looking at it back then when I was learning web dev lol. Tbf a lot of people were, probably still are, using PHP and JavaScript way back then too. It just made sense for me to do some MVC style separation long before I found out there was an acronym for it.
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.
I caught a lot of jokes for sticking with CF over PHP into the 2010's (before moving over to clojure) -- I'm sure they all forgot by now, but I've been pretty satisfied with my past choices this last week. Before the move I mostly worked with Lucee and FW/1 [0]. I still think its a better alternative to PHP or Ruby(rails).
"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.
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.
Edit: No we don't oh please god no.
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.
What gives me cold sweats are custom application servers that no one knows how they work.
[0] https://github.com/framework-one/fw1
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.