I’ve just got back from London’s installment of the Flex 3 / AIR pre-release tour at the UK Flex user group in Shoreditch. Around 200 people turned up to listen to James Ward and Serge Jespers from Adobe talk about the upcoming Flex 3 and AIR releases. During the two hour session, BlazeDS was also covered for an hour (for some strange reason).
However, something got me (and a few of the other guys there) and that was the way that the Adobe guys talked when referring to the server-side. Only once throughout the entire session did either of the Adobe evangelists mention the C word (i.e. ColdFusion). To add to it, two demos were done of server-side interaction with Flex. One was in PHP, and the other Java. At no point was CF mentioned when in both cases it was an ideal platform (and a sister product).
What’s with this? Adobe had the perfect opportunity, a room of a load of Flex developers, few of which were CF developers, who could have been told that CF was the ideal companion to Flex….or do Adobe not see it that way any more? Would they rather not mention it outside of the CF community?
I was also somewhat surprised afterwards when talking to some of the other Flex developers at the session. When told I was a ColdFusion developer most of the time, the response was generally one of surprise. Some of the comments made implied that these guys (who are surely in the Adobe / MXNA arena quite regularly) were somewhat surprised CF was still actively used.
This got me wondering, why is this? Well, I took a quick look at indeed.com’s job trends graphing system for some sort of ideas as to the usage level with what seemed to be flavour of the night, PHP.
Here’s a chart showing the mentions of three technologies in job ads in the US over the last three (ish) years, ColdFusion, PHP and ASP.NET. Something for me stands out here, things are on the up for PHP and ASP.NET. Now bear in mind that the market is growing every day, more and more web developers are working worldwide than ever before so I would expect to see a growth. But…CF is a flatline. Surely this means that the number of ColdFusion jobs out there is actually diminishing as a percentage share of the web development market? Surely this means that ColdFusion is going backwards? I would hazard a guess that all those guys in the CF arena are those who have been using it for more than 3 years, and are perfectly happy with it, as they should be. It looks to me like there is no growth in the ColdFusion job market, and after seeing how the evangelists market it outside of the community, I’m not surprised.
Now, I’m not planning on kicking off a whole new “Is CF dead?” thread, they are largely a waste of time, but I do wonder if sometimes Adobe would rather it just went away leaving them to reap the rewards from the Flash Platform (the reason they bought Macromedia) and PDF and the creative tools.
As a footnote, I’m a ColdFusion developer, I have been for years and I like using it. I also have no problem finding new jobs.
Interesting. I just saw Ben Forta give the same presentation last night. He did ask who used ColdFusion and about 1/2 the audience raised their hands. And he also mentioned it a few times during the preso - but didn’t really dwell on ANY of the back end servers…
But I agree - I know they don’t want to alienate the others but still - you’d think they’d eat their own dogfood and push ColdFusion whenever possible.
There are lots of ways to do backend technology no just CF. We are reaching out to developers on AIR/Flex outside our core. To do this effectively we talk about all sorts of backend technology. If we limited Flex and AIR to just CF we would be limiting its potential. That said CF developers know exactly how powerful combining CF, FX, and AIR is. AMF is there by default with CFC’s and now LCDS is there handling messaging.
CF is very important and will be ever more so moving forward. Have patience, we are focused on Flex/AIR right now and these are client technologies.
Yes, I agree CF Rocks the Llama!!!
My 2 cents,
ted
IMHO it depends on who is talking about Flex, I suppose.
Ted Patrick is a known PHP person. I doubt he’d feel capable of talking about a server platform he doesn’t use every day.
I’m in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. I’m like you, I like CF and have never had a problem finding a job doing it. I recently activated my monster.com resume by accident and got 5 emails and 5 phone calls over the next couple days. PHP is free, and ASP.NET is too if you are already paying microsoft in other ways, I think that has a lot to do with your growth curve above…
Al
Barry has it right - lots of the Flex people just don’t know that much about CF or care to talk about it. For that matter, most of Adobe doesn’t really understand CF. Internal marketing has been an uphill battle for the CF team.
At the Prerelease event in Philadelphia both Tim Buntel and Dave Gruber spoke a good deal about ColdFusion and Tim used it as the back-end for all of his examples. So I think Barry is correct, it all depends on who is doing the presentation.
Yeah, in our Flex3 Prerelease tour half raised their hands, and some of the questions at the end were about CF integration.
That straight line just kills me though. There’s no doubt that relative to the rest of the industry, the number of CF jobs isn’t keeping pace. What’s impressive is that CF has been on the rise on the Tiobe Index. In other words the amount of information on the web about CF is growing relative to other languages, while the amount of jobs isn’t. Seems like some of the 3+ year programmers you mentioned are starting blogs of their own, and becoming more advanced cf developers and it’s skewing the scale perhaps.
As I wrote in May of last year, ColdFusion might be the preferred backend, but don’t think for a second that Adobe is not going to provide extensive Flash/Flex support for .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, and Python.
Because if Adobe is going to take over the RIA space, they can’t afford not to do so. They need those people to adopt their tools, and the ColdFusion developer base simply isn’t large enough.
Besides, come on too strong about CF/FF integration, and the non-CF types will assume that you HAVE to use CF and lose interest.
It’s a problem.
See: http://www.cfinternals.org/blog/2007/05/will_adobe_do_a.html
Hi Neill,
If you were under the impression that we were “hiding” CF, than I apologize. I think it’s more what Barry says, it depends on who the presenter is actually. We all have our own style and flow of doing this presentation and we can also talk about so much in that given time.
Yes you are right, CF is also a perfect companion for Flex. That’s also why I mentioned it in the appropriate demo.
I do hope you had a good time last night and hope to see you at these types of events again.
Take care,
Serge
Neil, I was at the event as well last night. I agree to you that the mention of CF was minimal. I had expected more mention of CF there. But As Serge explains, their reasons for catering to the rest of the industry in an attempt to promote RIA, are valid as well. But still, it was a good opportunity to promote CF with AIR/Flex as well, I think.
I certainly don’t have a problem with the flex evangelists touting the backend integration capabilities with java and .net and others. Just, when you present that laundry list of technologies, don’t leave CF OFF the list. It’s one thing to not emphasize it, it’s another completely to attempt to hide it.
Take for example, the integration tutorials that pop up when you install FB3. There is no mention of CF at all. I think it should at least be given parity. I would think cross-sell opportunities alone would rate at least an honorable mention.
I can tell you that when I kicked off the North American tour in Toronto, everyone in attendance heard plenty about ColdFusion. This tour is really focused on the Flex/AIR/BlazeDS (all new products), so CF is not going to be at the forefront. However, I think it’s silly to think that a PHP/.NET developer will not understand the concepts just because CF is on the back-end. After all, ColdFusion is the easiest language to learn and the code is _very_ easy to read (even for novices).