Crazy amount of bugs was the major and main issue, i say crazy compare with .NET/Java/PHP at that time; if u want to talk about the capability of being OOP, CF was just a joke — don’t tell me u had method and object in CF, OOP is much more than just this.

The way how i see CF, it is a fast development tool to make ideas into application; easy to learn for those who have no/little programming knowledge.

CF is not that bad, it is the people that make CF looks bad. A lot of CF developers has very little programming knowledge, they write ugly codes.

i agreed that CF was low in scalability, but that was my CFMX knowledge so it may not apply to today’s CF.

1. Pricing does remain an issue to SOME. I support a product that has a subscription rate of around $30k a month so pumping out $600 a server for CF8 was no big deal. Especially when due to CF we only have to have 1 developer (Me! :-)

2. Still not seeing this one. Adobe and the CF crew are fanatic about their support.

3. Actually it was 2 versions ago and about 5 years.

4. Um well what do you call scalable? The ability to handle millions of users across hundreds of servers is what I have experienced… but then again I may not know what scaleable means.

5. Ok… Windows, Linux, Sun, 32 and 64 bit… heck even OSX… am I missing some? I mean you can’t run it on a Commodore 64 but I don’t think we can mark that against it as not being cross platform.

6. Yes it does run will on Windows… but last time I checked windows rules most of the tech world, so is this an issue?

7. See #1

Oh well I guess I just disagreed on all your points :-)

The bottom line is that you have to use the tools that make sense to you and help get your job done. I started coding with ColdFusion about 10 years ago, and it has been my language of choice ever since. That seems to be the case for many people like myself who never had any formal background in programming. Those who came to web development by way of C or some object oriented language seem to prefer the structure that PHP and the like offer.

Of course you also have the die-hards who frequently drink the open-source kool-aid. They turn twelve shades of red if you even mention using a commercial product. “Ease of use be damned…we aren’t paying for it!”

More often than not, the people screaming the loudest are the ones with the least experience and understanding…of their own tools, let alone a competitor. Bad code is bad code, regardless of the language it is developed in. You can write crap CF code and end up with a MySpace, or you can write beautiful code and end of with a Bank of America. And in the open source world, for every BaseCamp you’ll find a Twitter (which I adore as a service, but despise it’s reliability).

ColdFusion’s reputation stems from one thing: It’s low learning curve. It is so incredibly easy to write code and have a dynamic website with very little effort. As a result, we end up with a lot of people getting only the basic understanding, and writing really bad code that doesn’t scale. The basics are a great place to start, but you can’t make a living there.

If you can’t stomach a shared server, there are a bunch of companies that already have a CF license that can set you up on a dedicated server or a VPS. Generally the cost of their license is rolled into their fees for hosting. Obviously this will cost more than a shared server, but you get the whole server (or a segment if VPS) for yourself.

So, there is always a way to get CF involved even on a low-budget or no-budget project. Personally, I’ve never directly paid a cent for CF, and I have an application running on a shared server that I pay around $20/month in hosting for, that generates around $800/month in income.

Some people say “never run CF on a shared server” but with server monitoring advances in the last few years (SeeFusion, FusionReactor, plus CF8’s own server monitoring), this is much less an issue than it used to be.