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.
