Industry Analysis

As someone who stands in front of audiences and evangelizes ColdFusion, often times I not only find myself preaching to the choir, but I sometimes find myself defending the product to misinformed or disheartened individuals. In the role of developer I, and many of our readers, find themselves in the same predicament.

In fact, the real battle to dispel myths and misconceptions about ColdFusion is not taking place at conferences and user group meetings. It's happening in the workplace, and every ColdFusion developer shares the responsibility to dispel any misconceptions or myths they encounter and to defend the use of their beloved product. Fortunately, one thing that's certainly true about ColdFusion developers is that they are enthusiastic, even fanatic, about the product; so there's no shortage of people to defend its use. Unfortunately, we don't all know what to say or how to respond to every objection thrown our way. That is what this article is about - to justify the use of ColdFusion or even its existence within an organization.

Each of the myths and misconceptions surrounding ColdFusion could be classified into one of three categories:

1. Misconceptions about its capabilities
2. Misconceptions about its community or corporate support
3. Misconceptions about its cost

The majority of the misconceptions about ColdFusion surround its capabilities. We've all been there; having to defend against the notion that ColdFusion is a toy; that it's not capable of delivering enterprise solutions; that CFML is not a "real" programming language. All of these ideas derive from a lack of understanding about what ColdFusion is, not about what ColdFusion is not. Let's start from the beginning: ColdFusion is a J2EE application. What that means is that the ColdFusion server is a Java application designed to run on top of the J2EE platform (a J2EE application server). ColdFusion is a Java application that parses CFML, its proprietary tag-based language, in order to generate and run Java code under the hood. CFML, the tag-based language that ColdFusion developers use to write applications, helps to make common development tasks trivial. This, more than anything, is what makes CFML the most rapid development environment on the Web. What all of this ultimately means is that ColdFusion is the most rapid environment for developing Java applications.

The idea that ColdFusion isn't suited for enterprise applications is absurd - unless you believe Java isn't suited for enterprise application development. ColdFusion supports all of the functionality in Java (you even use Java to extend the server via the ColdFusion Event Gateway framework) and scales as well as any Java application. In fact, you could argue that it's better suited than "plain" Java as an enterprise application platform because CF offers faster development and debugging times (and easier deployment), which can be a major factor in the success of large-scale enterprise applications.

Another common misconception about the capabilities of ColdFusion is that it isn't secure. There's no foundation for a statement like this - the server itself is very secure, and applications written for ColdFusion are as secure as the author chooses to make them. Sure, it's possible to create CF applications that aren't secure just like it's possible to create vulnerable .NET, PHP, PERL, RUBY, or Java applications as well. This is a question of the competency of the developer, not the platform. Speaking of which, I'll lay to rest the misconception that bothers me most: that "real developers" don't use ColdFusion.

Are there poorly written ColdFusion applications? Sure. Are all ColdFusion applications poorly written? No - far from it, in fact. The truth is that because ColdFusion is somewhat easier to learn than "traditional" programming languages (largely due to its tag syntax), many CF developers don't have computer science backgrounds. There are plenty of us who write extremely advanced code and specialize in developing complex applications. Of course, a vast majority of the applications on the Web really don't call for this level of complexity, so the number of developers who specialize in developing very advanced applications is small in proportion to the total number of people using ColdFusion. The fact that ColdFusion is so easy that anyone can learn it is a testament to the language, not a drawback. I've worked on many ColdFusion applications alongside Java developers who were skeptics at first but who, after spending a few hours talking with me and a day or two writing CF code, became converts and avid fans of CF. Where is it said that because something is easy, it's no good? Isn't that the point of IDEs (and computers for that matter) - to make life easier? Show me a developer who wants their job to be more difficult and take longer than need be, and I'll show you a fool. ColdFusion developers are no fools.

It's also worth noting that there is a much larger number of well-written large-scale enterprise applications written in ColdFusion than most people realize; this is because a huge percentage of the organizations using CF are doing so behind corporate firewalls and on secure networks for intranet and other internal applications. In over 10 years of ColdFusion development for both private and government entities in and around Washington, D.C. (somewhat of a mecca of CF development), I can state with authority that there's a lot more ColdFusion out there than people realize. Many government and large corporate sites, behind their public-facing static HTML façades, are relying on mission-critical CF applications to get things done on a daily basis.

Another misconception is about the price of ColdFusion - some people don't like the fact that you have to pay for CF. Whenever I hear this argument from somebody, I always tell them that the best things in life aren't free. No, this rebuttal hasn't worked for me yet, but it gets the occasional laugh. In reality, what needs to be understood is that nothing is free. People will often question why .NET or PHP or PERL don't cost anything but ColdFusion does. There are two things that people with this misconception need to understand.

First, ColdFusion has a huge number of features out of the box. If you tried to create a .NET environment with all the same features (Verity searching, PDF generation, Flash Remoting, etc.) the cost would be much higher than the cost of a single ColdFusion license. Note that I said "tried to create…" - good luck getting .NET to run on all of the same operating systems that ColdFusion supports, or getting it to natively support Flash form generation the way that ColdFusion does.

The second thing that people with pricing concerns need to understand is the immense savings in development time you get when using ColdFusion. Ignoring abnormal assignments, a typical ColdFusion project involves anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 of billable man hours writing code. Given the rapid nature of ColdFusion development and debugging, it's a safe assumption that the savings in development costs for a $25,000 CF project will more than make up for the cost of buying an enterprise license of ColdFusion. The bottom line is that CF is cheap - development isn't. When faced with the "we can't afford CF" argument, my attitude is generally one of "you can't afford not to use CF." For those folks who have seriously tiny budgets, there is always the option of hosting the site on a shared server and not taking on the cost of buying a license at all.

Before addressing the last category of misconceptions about ColdFusion, along the lines of cost there is one other thing to consider - are those "free" platforms really free? Most of them are, if you ignore the extra development/debugging costs, but there are some considerations with regards to .NET. .NET, the most frequently used alternative to ColdFusion, is often regarded as free. True, the platform does not cost anything, but there are further costs. In order to develop .NET applications, every developer working on a project will require a licensed copy of Visual Studio .NET - and that is not free. If you want to do ColdFusion development with Dreamweaver, it will cost about the same as a copy of Visual Studio, but you also have the option of using Eclipse for all ColdFusion development, and Eclipse (and the CFEclipse plug-in) is available for a free download (it's also my preferred IDE as well as the preferred IDE of many other developers). In order to run .NET on a production server you will also need to buy a Windows server license (2000 Enterprise or Server, 2003 Enterprise or Server, or 2003 Web Edition) - again, this is not free by any means. If costs are a real concern, ColdFusion is supported on many operating systems, including Linux (which is free). These additional costs associated with .NET aren't usually a factor in the decision-making process when evaluating CF versus .NET, but they're worth noting.

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