Why we're moving away from ColdFusion
posted under category: ColdFusion on January 13, 2017 by Nathan
Many of you know me and where I work. If not, let's just say it's a big place with lots of smart people who all have their own motivations that generally align with making money. Over the past couple decades, we've had an increasing number of ColdFusion applications, mostly on the company intranet. At this point we have literally thousands of CF sites and apps, developed by hundreds of skilled and unskilled ColdFusion developers. We also have a heavy investment into server architecture to support this. It's not been cheap or easy to get here.
Why, then, did we make the decision to leave ColdFusion?
Over the past few years, our Enterprise Architecture department has been trying to reduce the amount of variation in applications around the company. It makes sense because having a more homogenous server and application architecture can reduce costs. So what did they pick instead? The new application infrastructure is going to be nothing but Java, especialy with Spring MVC, and ASP.NET MVC. That's it. Nothing else.
We know from lots of experience that neither Java nor ASP.NET is actually a cheaper solution because of the cost of IDE software and other various servers and components to match the functionality in ColdFusion. Also, a Java developer has a more demanding salary than someone who does a little more than HTML, or an analyst who dabbles in dynamic web programming. Long story short: We're not doing it to save money.
Is it because ColdFusion is last decade's technology? Well, what does ColdFusion do? It puts web sites on our intranet while connecting to every type of other system we may have running. Okay, it's not tablet apps, but it can let you create mobile web apps. It stands as a sturdy back-end to JavaScript applications. This is not old technology, not by a long shot.
Are we dumping ColdFusion because of a rapidly shrinking talent pool? Maybe. It's hard to say because we haven't been hiring a lot of people over the past few years. However, if you've ever seen ColdFusion, you know it's essentially HTML-plus. CF's unbelievably low barrier to entry means anyone with HTML skills and 15 minutes of playing around can write CFML on their resume. Complex CF applications are something else, but are generally along the lines of any MVC application on another platform. Also, as I said, we already have hundreds of ColdFusion-literate people - we're not short for talent.
No, instead of all of this, we are moving away from ColdFusion because of Gartner's IT Market Clock for Programming Languages. I've read it - Gartner does a very strong analysis of the market as a whole from what information they can learn on the public internet. They check the job sites and question boards like StackOverflow, and they determined that ColdFusion is on the brink of obsolescence. In our proactivity, we are jumping off before it gets ugly.
So why are we moving away from ColdFusion? In a word: Gartner.