charlie arehart's dashboard

DrDent, it's really not that surprising to me to hear of someone picking up support of a site written in CF. It's been alive and kicking for now nearly 14 years. An interesting question, as hinted to by Steven's comment, is how old is the code you've inherited? And what version of CF is the server running?

With such a long history, there's certainly a possibility that you may have some really old code that hasn't been updated to benefit from any of the many MANY improvements to the language over the years. Even shops running on a more modern version (8, 7, or 6, which was release in 2001) may not have bothered to update their code. Since maintaining compatibility has always been a major goal of CF, many shops have not had to "bother" upgrading their code, and sadly it means that they have not taken advantage of new features, improved coding approaches, and a world of tools, frameworks, and other related technologies.

Like Steven says, so many have a bad impression of CF, and as someone who's been in it for now 12 years, I've seen a lot of that bad PR and lamented it as not deserved, especially not in the past several years. Sure, anyone can write a bad app in any language, and with the complexity of web apps it's also easy to be lax in setup/config/admin of a CF server (and the related web server, database server, and so on) to end up with a sucky system. That's not CF's fault.

I realize that to some ears my words may sound defensive. Like Steven's reply, we just never know who is reading such discussions of CF. Most CFers love it and have stuck with it for years, and many new developers have been come in and will continue to, especially with the new open source implementations, Open BlueDragon and Railo. I realize you've asked "where is ColdFusion going", but it seems important to point out that CF is no longer JUST the Adobe product, which should be compelling to many.

Still, far more are perfectly happy with CF itself, and you've heard about the upcoming Centaur release. BEyond that, Adobe also announced a roadmap for additional releases planned for 2010 and 2011. All this spells a very bright future for CF.