As most of you know, I have been running cfmldeveloper.com (formerly cfdeveloper.co.uk) for neigh on 10 years now, yet despite the fact that it has been going for so long surprisingly a lot of people don't know about it or indeed many other ColdFusion resources or communities.
One of the topics you will see regularly in forums, lists etc is people bemoaning how Adobe don't do enough to promote ColdFusion, and suppose I can agree up to a point, although I don't claim to know what exactly they do not do not do to promote CF. I can however say that I don't personally see ColdFusion mentioned or promoted very often in generic web development communities, websites or magazines, which if you think about it is quite odd as other Adobe products such as Flash and dreamweaver will get constant attention. You would think seeing as these products integrated best with ColdFusion that it would get preference over PHP, but no.
One might therefore assume that Adobe and others therefore don't seem to do anything to promote ColdFusion outside the already existing ColdFusion user base and communities, which seems a bit odd as what is the point in promoting ColdFusion to people who already use it?
Perhaps one idea might be for Adobe do not attend (non CF) developer conferences and promote CF or work with magazines to publish articles and have their community managers spend time on other web developer sites like Sitepoint.com or internet.com promoting CF. So there is a suggestion or two for anyone looking to do a bit of promotion, get out there and write a few articles.
(nb: I have since been informed by Matt Gifford that there are some CF articles being published in mags as he in facts writes them himself. However these are quite few in the grand scale of things and I have not personally seen them.)
This is one area where Railo Technologies seem to have got it right, as this is exactly what they have been doing, pushing Railo at non CF events.I know some people at Adobe are not big fans of Railo and this may rub them up the wrong way, but in my view Railo can only be good for the community and growing the existing user base, which is also good for Adobe and ColdFusion surely?. While Railo may rule the open source roost, and be perfect for shared hosting, Adobe has never been really been targeting those markets, they only really target enterprise customers, and those people looking for enterprise solutions are still likely to choose ColdFusion as it still has many advantages feature wise over Railo plus the support of a large well known and successful corporation behind it and well established community with a ton of useful support documentation that Railo can only dream of right now. Plus the self contained installer and effortless deployment of new sites is also a big plus for many, if only they could do away with the need of the virtual directories it would be perfect.
So while Railo may be reeling in the new users with the open source bait, Adobe can still reap the rewards with enterprise conversions that may otherwise never have even considered CFML, a fact perhaps the Railo haters may have overlooked. After 10 years running cfmldeveloper.com I certainly feel I have done my bit :-)
Of course Adobe are free to do as they wish marketing wise, and certainly no-one can say they have done a bad job with CF that's why we all love it and there is certainly no shortage of resources if you know where to find them. So perhaps those doing the moaning should also pull their fingers and get out there and spread the word a bit if it bothers them so much.
Spreading the word however can be more difficult than one might expect as I discovered recently when I tried to do just that. I decided to go and signup on several other generic communities/sites and do a bit of ColdFusion promotion and answer a few questions only to be met with what I felt a very sour anti-community attitude over at sitepoint.com. It seems you are not allowed to post links out to or promote any other community or forum. I can understand the need for anti spammer/scammer measures, but to treat other communities in the same wasy seems a bit OTT to me. So clealry you need to be quite subtle your promotions and not quite so blatent as I was.
Oct 19, 2010 at 2:13 PM I agree with you Russ - CF is virtually unheard of here in South Africa.
One of the reasons is I think the prohibitive cost of entry ( I'm not talking railio or Open Blue Dragon)
Where things like PHP are free.
In php's case Zend have done a wonderful thing with the Community Edition Zend server. I think if Adobe did something similar CF would become a more attractive option.
Oct 19, 2010 at 2:14 PM Hi Russ
Interesting post. I wanted to add my thoughts into the mix based on the content above.
I'm not quite sure of the context for this post.. on one hand, it looks as though you are attacking Adobe, then it appears as though you rally the troops with efforts to promote CF on other forums, with a bit of Railo thrown in the mix.
I cannot comment on the success of advertising or promoting / raising the awareness of your site, but I can comment on the promotion of ColdFusion within UK industry magazines, and the work of the general CFML community.
Having written ColdFusion tutorials, articles and segments for two of the biggest UK web magazines over the last year or so, I can happily say that yes, ColdFusion is being represented, along with AIR and Flex / Flash Builder. In fact, we have more articles to work on to send in to them, so there will be more publicly accessible content covering ColdFusion, pushed towards the wider web development community.
True, other products from the Adobe family are included almost religiously, after all, Photoshop (certainly), Flash and Fireworks are all so synonymous with modern web development techniques and practices that they NEED to be included; for many, they are the tools necessary to get the job done.
As for the inclusion of ColdFusion within these magazines alongside it's family members, as mentioned above it has been and WILL be covered again. In fact, in some cases, the tutorial / article / CF-based content has also been placed in the magazine with a full-page advert from Adobe pushing the benefits of ColdFusion to this wider audience. One of the problems, however, stems from the simple fact that the core audience of these publications tend to be more front-end developers / designers that back-end coders. Having personally spoken to editors myself, they are keen to push our content out, but are obviously aware that it's not their key demographic of readers. They do want to, and are pushing this content out, however.
Do Adobe promote within the community? Of course. They need to inform users of updates, benefits, promotions and sneak peaks to keep them up to speed on the product they use. I dont see this as purely promoting to an existing audience though, although I understand how it can be seen to be the case.
One of the main reasons for the Adobe Community Professional 'system' is for the ACPs to extol, promote and raise awareness of the products to the wider communities, which (from what I have seen over the last year) they are doing.
Could Adobe be doing more to promote ColdFusion outside of the community? Of course. There are always ways to improve on promotion and awareness. There is always a new group of customers or consumers to meet and greet; the next level of developers, designers and enterprise users. Companies can always do more to promote their products.
It's great to see that you have actually highlighted one of the many major facets and benefits to ColdFusion: "[it has] the support of a large corporation behind it and well established community with a ton of useful support documentation". I couldn't have said that better myself. I also believe that the other CFML engines have great documentation, and lets not separate the community into the products that it uses; Railo, ColdFusion, OpenBD.. whichever CFML engine you opt to use, you are still part of the greater community, and one that constantly strives to promote the virtues of the language.
At the end of the day and from what I can see, the entire CFML community is being proactive in promoting the language and the products within the RIA family. They have the support of the product owners (Railo, Adobe etc) and the numbers for CFML Developers are increasing. The community as a whole is doing well, as are the products.
Oct 19, 2010 at 2:35 PM There wasn't really a context MAtt, just some information (factual or otherwise) I know from my own experiences and general recurring comments I see posted on lists and forums.
I am of course a fan of ColdFusion and Adobe products having 10 years+ of my life devoted to them since Allaire and Macromedia and I wouldn't be still running cfmldeveloper if I didn't still feel that way especially considering I now have to pay for ColdFusion out of my own pocket since I no longer get any support from Adobe in that dept, but you have to take the good with the bad and I do feel that the anti-railo attitude of some people falls into the BAD category and doesn't serve any benefit other than to alienate existing users and split toe community into Railo users and ColdFusion users, which as you say is not something we want.
You will note that while I said Adobe could do more to promote CF outside the cf community, this is a general opinion that is floating around in the forums not just mine, and I have also said that it is also up to the community to pull their fingers out and do the same if it bothers them. As I said, they certainly haven't done a bad job, but as your school report used to say, could have done better. :-)
Oct 19, 2010 at 2:42 PM I agree with the stuff about it not being publicly known, i've been working in web development for 3 years now, originally getting a job as an admin assistant for a web design company, if it wasnt for them using ColdFusion, i wouldnt of even known about the language. (Although i had heard of lanugages like php, asp etc etc before i started in the industry - working in a supermarket!)
More needs to be done so the young people like me (coming out of college/uni) join the ColdFusion world!
Oct 19, 2010 at 3:51 PM For the last time, Adobe did *not* withdraw support from cfmldeveloper.com. You denied the free CF 9 license Adobe offered because it was Standard and not Enterprise. Then you threatened to move the site to Railo.
You say you're a fan of Adobe and ColdFusion, but your actions and posts say otherwise. I'm struggling to find any facts in the post. It's all opinions, assumptions and rants.
Oct 19, 2010 at 5:39 PM Adam,
As you know your offer was basically "take cf standard that is not fit for shared hosting and run an insecure server or get lost", which was then followed up with a load of abuse on cfguru because I didn't accept it. Such public displays of abuse and aggressiveness certainly cannot be good for Adobe's reputation and hardly what I would call offering support.
if someone offered me a dangerous car with no breaks I wouldn't accept that either as it is not fit for purpose, and I tried to explain to you several times that cf standard is no good in a shared hosting environment due to lack of security, but unfortunately you did not care nor want to listen.
As for moving to Railo, clearly you have some major issues with Railo if you consider someone's choice to use Railo as a threat, for me it was just a statement of fact, to anyone else it is just a common sense choice, if you cannot use CF, you have a choice between Railo and BlueDragon, simple.
If a Ford owner says he is going to get a Volvo, is this a threat?
Expecting me to pay for cf out of my own pocket but still let the community believe that cfdeveloper was being supported Abobe and also expecting me to be exclusive to Adobe/ColdFusion and not support Railo is just ridiculous, what possible reason would I have to do that? especially considering that Railo Technologies had offered their full support without any ultimatums or conditions. I think anyone would have trouble swallowing such an arrangement Adam.