The Thinking Lemur

I absolutely love Adobe ColdFusion. I have been using it since version 3 and fell head over heals the first day I saw how easy it was to create a search directory, or send an email, or just about anything the average web application developer could want back in those days. It has matured tremendously in the past few years and with the release of version 8.01 can no longer be ignored as a fully featured web application platform. In my day job we use CF as our plaform for a site that gets a lot of traffic and since it is an integral part of the business we spent the money for CF Enterprise, but it was A LOT! As a small business owner as well, I am faced with the problem of developing with CF because of the pricing issue. Sure, shared hosting is an alternative and the prices have been coming down slightly but who wants to use shared hosting? We are real developers! The current movement to grid hosting has not engulfed the CF community thus far with no hosts that I know of making this offering. Again, I believe it is the licensing issue that is preventing this.

Another issue is the lack of affordable talent (or lack of talent in general) for ColdFusion development. Now, I am not saying that people shouldn’t be paid adequately for their talent but on average CF developers are quite a bit more expensive than say a PHP or Ruby developer and from a business standpoint it makes sense to use the more affordable option. The pricing point for ColdFusion Standard is not that bad but in my experience it is much better to use Enterprise in a J2EE deployment to achieve maximum stability on high demand systems.

So where does this leave me? PHP is a solid option, huge developer pool, it’s free, it works. Ruby is excellent as well. Companies such as 37 Signals have shown that Ruby can drive high demand applications. Java, is always an option but probably costs as much as ColdFusion to implement and support. I am really torn on this issue but financially I may have to move away from ColdFusion and focus on one of the free tools that will enable me to generate income and end with a positive bottom line. Adobe, please help us!