Adobe's recent decision to fold CFDJ upset the ColdFusion Community, as the magazine has been an institution among the community, and the source of the biggest collection of ColdFusion articles and quality information anywhere for almost a decade.

Before Adobe, SYS-CON had been publishing two custom titles for Macromedia: MXDJ - MX Developer's Journal and CFDJ - ColdFusion Developer's Journal. CFDJ's history goes back to Allaire Corporation, and was described as one of the competitive strengths of the product during Allaire's IPO (a very similar story  took place with PBDJ - PowerBuilder Developer's Journal during Powersoft's IPO more than 13 years ago). On the other hand, MXDJ was launched as a custom title during the Macromedia period. After the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia, MXDJ was renamed as WebDDJ - Web Developer's and Designer's Journal.

SYS-CON recently relaunched WebDDJ as Flex Developer's Journal and announced its plans to relaunch CFDJ as Silverlight Developer's Journal during the upcoming AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, both of them being independent magazines, with independent editorial advisory boards. Friday's announcement was read by more than 2,200 over the weekend and the news was discussed in length in the blogosphere. The reaction to the news was mixed but the general feeling was that people were upset.

"The biggest problem here is that it looks bad for ColdFusion. The first print magazine dedicated to it has left the building," says Michael Dinowitz in his blog about the Adobe decision to kill CFDJ. "The very fact that they're moving the magazine from ColdFusion, an Adobe product, to Silverlight, a Microsoft product, can and will be used against ColdFusion."

Other bloggers directed their disappointment toward SYS-CON, the publisher of the magazine, rather than Adobe, which made the decision to kill the title.

"The magazines were jammed full of advertising - and the Website has been absolutely abysmal for ages with auto-play pop-up videos," writes Sean Corfield in his blog entry.

"Many have already commented on the CFDJ announcement this weekend, and every post I have read has correctly seen this for what it is - sour grapes," wrote Ben Forta, who also points out that there are other sources of ColdFusion information on the Internet. "Fortunately, the demise of CFDJ leaves no real ColdFusion information void as we've not been relying on them as a source of authoritative information for many years now. Between the Adobe ColdFusion Developer Center, all of the ColdFusion bloggers (as well as those aggregated by Goog and MXNA), and of course community sites like House Of Fusion ... So, goodbye CFDJ, we'll not be missing you at all."

"SYS-CON's only challenge while serving the CF community was to deal with some members of that very same community, " said industry blogger James Hamilton. "People like Corfield and Dinowitz could not stand any sort of advertisement in CFDJ. They wanted their magazine delivered for free and hated the adverts that made this possible for them, as if they were two characters from the Dr. Zhivago movie."

Dinowitz writes: "SYS-CON is a printing company. They are not interested in community support. They are not interested in language advancement. They are interested in money. They are interested in enough money to print a magazine, give it away to thousands and still make a profit. Looking over the number and cost of ads in their magazine, they must want a BIG profit. And those advertising dollars are partially guaranteed by Adobe's support."

Hamilton said: "My question is if Adobe does not care about their own community or their own language advancement, why should they expect an outside magazine publisher to do this job for them, and at no cost? Magazine publishers are not in the "community business" or in the "saving the dolphins business,"  neither is Adobe. It is just simple old business. Everybody should just move on. Anyone who has a question on this subject should direct those questions to Adobe, not the publisher of CFDJ, IMHO."