Kay Smoljak wrote on 01/04/09 6:48 PM

Thanks for the heads up Adam - it's really encouraging to see Adobe providing this kind of information :)

Jack wrote on 01/04/09 7:21 PM

Thanks for this great post Adam. What do you think about the position of ColdFusion when you compare with Open Source CFML engines? Or Railo? Really wondering.

Joel wrote on 01/04/09 10:31 PM

Thanks.. Seen this report. Got any 'non-biased' info comparing CF8 to ASP.NET?

dfguy wrote on 01/05/09 12:40 PM

how comparing CF to ROR.

thomas wrote on 01/06/09 12:45 PM

The problems with total-cost-of-ownership (TOC) calculations are that they're very subjective, and difficult (impossible?) to define or measure consistently. In attempting to calculate TOC, you're also trying to measure costs that are in many ways hidden or unmeasurable.

Constrast this with up-front licensing costs, which are consistent, clear, and measurable. You have a real up-hill battle here, and I'm not sure it's one that ColdFusion can win.

Rather than continue to fight this battle, wouldn't it be better to give ColdFusion away for free and sell developer tools, as your competitors do (at least Microsoft with ASP.NET and Zend with PHP)? Isn't that also the model Adobe already uses for Flash/Flex/AIR?

Otherwise, what's going to stop Railo and OpenBD from decimating the ColdFusion server market, the same way that JBoss and Tomcat drove JRun (and most other J2EE servers) out of business?

Adam wrote on 01/06/09 8:48 PM

@Jack: I'll save a comparison of ColdFusion vs. OpenBD and Railo for another day. I haven't gotten a chance to play with OpenBD 1.0 yet, but it looks like a solid release and they have a very talented team driving it. Railo isn't open source quite yet, but they are set to make a big splash in the Java community later this year. Of course, any comparison I make would be labeled 'bias' since I'm a die-hard fan of ColdFusion.

@Joel: I should have mentioned that the Evangelism Kit is based on third-party research and data. It's true, I love ColdFusion, but the data didn't come from me. The industry awards ColdFusion 8 won are as unbiased as it gets.

@dfguy: I'd love to see a comparison of CF v. Ruby on Rails as well.

@thomas: You can choose to believe or ignore any study you wish. You might be surprised to hear that ColdFusion 8 is one of the strongest releases to date in terms of sales, so it might be a bit rash to start giving it away. ;-)

I understand what you're trying to get at with your analogy of JBoss vs. JRun, but it's critically flawed. Neither Adobe nor Macromedia ever tried to compete in the JEE space with JRun, so there was really no business to be run out of. I also think IBM and Oracle/BEA would disagree with the 'out of business' statement. They both have healthy JEE businesses and JBoss market share has been declining since 2005 (BZ Research Data). In 2007 IBM had the largest market segment at 36.5% compared to JBoss at 30%.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there, but saying ColdFusion will be decimated by Railo and OpenBD is a bit overzealous don't you think? The presence of a free alternative is hardly the downfall of a successful business. Microsoft and Apple continue to sell their OS in the face of free open source alternatives, why is CF any different?

James wrote on 01/22/09 12:46 AM

There are certainly issues with up-front vs "free" in regards to winning over small businesses. However, in corporate circles, it can often go the other way.

The purchaser usually doesn't feel the need to be as frugal as if it was his own money he was spending, and "free, or open source products are often percieved as being nerdish works in progress which are user unfriendly.

This is why corporations still waste good money on the likes of Microsoft Office, instead of downloading OpenOffice for free. ;)

Rich Sloan wrote on 01/22/09 1:24 PM

We are currently having to justify the use of CF in our environment. The Evangelism Kit has been a great help in getting sold comparison between the major web app languages, however, is there anything like this that talks about scalability of application written in CF versus those in .Net or JSP. This is for upper level management, so I am not necissarily looking for well CF is built on Java and has native support for load balancing. We are looking for something like CF apps have been able to scale to 5 million hits a month and 100K concurrent users, etc. Do you know of anywhere I can get those types of numbers?? I have been surfing around different places and can't find anything.