Adobe reports Coldfusion 10 was a success

Adobe reports ColdFusion 10 brought sales and positive feedback to the highest point since 2008.  They just had their best quarter at the end of 2012.

Adobe has released a road map for 2 more major versions of the ColdFusion server and the Eclipse IDE, ColdFusion Builder.  They project to offer support for security and bug fixes for these new products until around 2020.

Coldfusion road map
http://blogs.coldfusion.com/assets/content/roadmap/ColdFusion%20RoadMap.pdf

Adobe blog ColdFusion announcement
http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-news-initiatives-and-updates-from-adobe

Adobe is close to having ColdFusion work as a scalable Amazon cloud machine image which will be priced at hourly rates.

It is still clear that ColdFusion is not as popular as other solutions like PHP and Java, but it is good news that the ColdFusion community and the companies building the CFML engines are continuing to grow and support the language. 

The CFML language is extremely fast to program with, often requiring fewer lines of code then other languages, yet it runs very fast thanks to the underlying Java technology and unique caching features.  I consider it the ultimate rapid prototyping tool for start-ups.  Sure, you may want to Java or a C variant system when you scale up later, but a start-up needs a tool that helps them grow and get support early on. 

Railo is the best free open source alternative to ColdFusion and its compatibility is quite close to being a drop-in replacement for ColdFusion 10.   While I love using Railo for our web sites, I realize that a large portion of the community is still running ColdFusion.   I plan on supporting ColdFusion in the future for our open source software releases, but still encouraging people to migrate to Railo to take advantage of its exclusive features, flexible licensing, great community and the open source Java code.

It seems a lot of trends are showing the most popular languages losing market share to other solutions over the last 5 years. 

See Google Trends for some popular languages

Our company continues to invest in building new applications with ColdFusion Markup language (CFML), and we hope to help the community grow through our upcoming free open source release of Jetendo CMS.