This morning I was reading a post from Brian Meloche regarding “Promoting ColdFusion to non-ColdFusion Developers“. I did answer via the comments, but I thought that I would post something a little more susbstantial.
Generally I believe that what is there makes sense, but I’m not overly keen on the aspects mentioned within the “Build demo apps” section of the list. Two main points are things that I feel the need to discuss:
1) “put this on RIAForge”
To start with, I want to make something clear: I think RIAForge is a good thing. It is a call to action for the open-sourcers in the community and provides a centralised place to go for everything that they kick out, be it frameworks, browser tools, pre-baked applications etc. However, I do feel that in the context of the above post something needs to be considered.
Take a look at the categories on RIAForge. Note that every single one is an Adobe product. This means that a user would probably have some sort of vested interest in Adobe products before visiting the site. This achieves two things: It helps Adobe developers find stuff quickly and it segregates the Adobe community from everyone else. Therefore, I fail to see how this would help promote CF to non-CF developers.
Put yourselves in the shoes of “another” developer (be it .NET, PHP, Java whatever). What motivation would you have to go to RIAForge? The end result is that whenever you go to Sourceforge, Freshmeat et al, that you don’t see much in the way of CFML, as it’s all over on RIAForge, nicely grouped together.
So, whats the answer in the context of the original issue? Well, for me it has to be populating the centralised, vendor agnostic sites with CFML. Get CFML onto Sourceforge, Get CFML onto Freshmeat, Get CFML on Hotscripts. It is only by generating activity in CFML on these sites that people will realise CFML is still active and doing well. Hiding it away on a CFML-centric site does exactly the opposite.
2) “promote popular application types (blogging, bulletin boards, etc.) written in CF”
OK, for this I want you sit in your managers seat - the one that pays the bills, and more importantly, buys CFMX or Bluedragon licenses. Now, think like they would think for a second. What are your key interests? For most, there will be only one: the bottom line. How much money can I make the business this year.
So, now think about CFML in the same way - what are the important aspects that you need to consider?…
Productivity and cost.
So, managers want to know how CFML can help them get their jobs done with the minimum outlay in the quickest time. Therefore managers need to be demonstrated this to take any interest in CFML. They need to be made aware that for them to get their end-of-year bonus they need to invest in CFML. OK, so the license costs are an issue, but we’ll leave that one for now. They need to know that decent-ish CFML developer can do what a good Java developer can do in half the time. This is what is important when thinking about the bottom-line.
Now think about this from the non-CF developers view-point as well. You have similar interests. You want to know that you can do the stuff that matters to you in the shortest time possible as easily as possible, thus getting the aforementioned manager off your back.
So, what does this mean with regard to the point on promoting popular application types? Well for me, showing a developer/manager that they can do the easy stuff in CFML in a pointless task - they can already do this with whatever tools they are using, and someone has probably already done it for them. What I beleive we need to show the community is how to do the stuff they do every day (ie the boring corporate stuff) - but show them how much quicker they can do it with Coldfusion.
Make a big point about how easy it is to generate and consume webservices, do AJAX, do database work, use event gateways etc. With this, CFML will seem a lot more attractive to everyone (thus making the license costs harder to swallow).
But what about the stuff that CFML can’t do (yet)? Well, don’t describe CFML as an island. Make it abundantly clear the CFML is Java (or .NET). Make it clear that CFML can be extended and reinforced. Make it clear that CFML is a way of making hard things easy.
So, hopefully I’ve described myself clearly enough. Any thoughts from anyone else?
[...] An interesting post here talks about getting CFML applications and projects on Sourceforge rather than RIAforge. I think both are good, but being an open source proponent I spend quite a bit of time over at Sourceforge and think it would be a great idea. A lot of people who work with the web aren’t developers but need to find forum scripts and similar. If I need free software then Sourceforge is the first place I look. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Neil,
I wholeheartedly agree with your points. Especially about keeping CF from becoming an island. I see the attractiveness of organizing ColdFusion open source, and I love RIAForge. That said, I think we can do more to promote ColdFusion products and applications in commonly accessed intellectual spheres on the Internet.
I’ll be consulting with the other members of the Kalendar team about what we can do to promote Kalendar in other arenas.
DW
I blogged about #1 awhile ago - the CF community needs to preach about the wonders of ColdFusion OUTSIDE the CF community
I’ve been surfing DZone, Ajaxian, etc lately and you rarely see a CF related post - actually there is no ColdFusion tag on DZone (!)
Just to be clear, the recommendations came from those who participated and not yours truly. I only set up the BOF to help make the recommendations.
That said, I personally agree that RIAForge is not the best place. In fact, there shouldn’t BE a single place. We should post things everywhere, but in a concerted and coordinated effort, targeting anywhere that non-ColdFusion developers congregate on the web.
Another thing, the group was focusing on developers, not IT managers. That was another group. That group’s results aren’t fully flushed out, but I’ll probably post their bullet points on my blog.
Folks, I’d like to add a comment here, since I was a member of the team Brian’s blog entry was referring to (one of 3 groups in the room that day).
First, with respect to the option on building demo apps, while there’s a point there saying “put this on RIAForge”, that was not the intent. At least not mine, and it was my idea. The key bullet said “look at Yahoo! UI stuff, integration with Amazon.com web services, etc.–anything that shows how you do things in Java, PHP, .NET, etc.–we should duplicate this in CF”.
I meant very definitely that we should build those apps ON THOSE SITES so that folks seeing them there would see them being done in CFML. Everyone in the group agreed with the value of that approach. I think Matt (who was taking notes) may have added the RIAFORGE point as someone else spoke it. He was having to type pretty furiously.
That leads to a second important point about the list: these points were not “a strategy” but rather they were a summation of the brainstorming that the team did. I mean, yes, Brian had asked each group to come up with a strategy (picking the top 2 ideas as voted by each group), but again Matt went ahead and wrote more (nothing wrong with that, as long as the intent is understood.)