CFUNITED: Wrap-up

 
Jul 20, 2005

by Michael and Judith Dinowitz

Now, about three weeks after the conference, we've finally recovered enough to finish the coverage and wrap up. There's not much to say that others haven't said already (and we'll be providing links to what has been blogged on CFUNITED in a separate article.)

The message we got from CFUNITED is that ColdFusion is on the rise again, and that the future for CF is bright. Over the last few years, there's been a decrease in programming jobs overall and with that, a decrease in ColdFusion jobs, but now we've seen signs that the marketplace for ColdFusion is growing tremendously.

One positive sign on the growth of ColdFusion is also a controversial one. New Atlanta, who has successfully marketed themselves as an alternative "CFML" engine, has been aligning themselves with Microsoft and rather large sites. Their presence at CFUNITED was accompanied by their new keystone site, MySpace.com, which recently moved from ColdFusion 5 to BlueDragon.NET. New Atlanta's marketing of this move, along with Microsoft's presence, caused a great stir at the conference, both positive and negative. We ourselves have tried to stay neutral in that, but others have blogged their feelings, both positive and negative, on the subject.

From our perspective and the perspective of others, Microsoft was actively courting the ColdFusion community, both with New Atlanta and on their own. Each conference packet contained a 2003 version of VisualBasic .NET Step by Step, as well as the 2003 version of Visual Basic .NET standard. Some saw this just as something to throw away. Others saw this as Microsoft's courting of the ColdFusion community. Still others took this as an insult, saying "We don't rate C#? They don't think we're good enough?" Still others noted that the products were all years old and chalked it up to Microsoft cleaning out their closets.

On the whole, we think that Microsoft doing this (for whatever reason) is wonderful, because it shows that they are taking the ColdFusion world seriously. Their support of New Atlanta lets them into the ColdFusion world and allows them to say to companies that have spent huge amounts of money on ColdFusion and are not looking to change to .NET, that they can still do all of their ColdFusion work on .NET but future work, if they would like to, can be done in .NET. It's their choice -- I.E., use ColdFusion now. Move to .NET later.

So they want to convert us, they want to convert the sites we use, they want to show (through New Atlanta and MySpace's moving to BlueDragon.NET) that really, big major sites are doing it and you should too.

We love Microsoft's ability to throw money at a problem. : )

Beyond the Microsoft positive and negative look was the MySpace one. MySpace, an Internet portal site, popular with the younger crowd (i.e., 16 to 24) was run on ColdFusion 5 and moved up to BlueDragon.NET for their servers. This was hyped by New Atlanta as a positive move, both by MySpace and by New Atlanta themselves. (For New Atlanta's perspective on this, see our article, "BlueDragon.NET and MySpace: An Interview with New Atlanta." This was tempered by the revelation that MySpace really doesn't have any sort of quality control and development cycle. When Peter Amiri from MySpace got up and talked about their development process of simply writing some code and throwing it up on a server, it really showed people why they had problems. Throwing more hardware and a better server onto their site deals with the problems (for now). During the presentation, MySpace did make claims about their attempt to work with Macromedia support and their failure to get the JDBC drivers working. We were concerned over this allegation, so we followed up by asking Tim Buntel if MySpace had ever approached Macromedia about this.

Tim said that a customer's support history is confidential, but he himself had never had any contact with MySpace and was never approached about any problems with them. "Generally, if there are large customers who are having trouble with their applications, a sales representative is assigned to them and the rep usually informs us," said Tim. "The product team will usually see a lot of what customers are doing. I personally didn't speak to anyone at MySpace on any of their applications on any version of ColdFusion." He notes that the community knows that the product team is always available and willing to help. As Tim points out, "If a customer is having problems and then doesn't tell us, there's nothing we can do."

The marketing message of the MySpace announcement was that BlueDragon.NET is better than ColdFusion. The marketing message that was hidden was that BlueDragon.NET is better than ColdFusion 5. They never claimed, even though they did imply it, that BlueDragon.NET is better than ColdFusion MX 7. Those that pay attention to marketing hype disagreed with that as well. Still, it is better to see MySpace going to BlueDragon.NET than leaving ColdFusion altogether for another technology. Getting MySpace onto Blue Dragon was a major marketing coup for New Atlanta. Congratulations!

In this issue, we have an interview with New Atlanta on the MySpace upgrade and their initiatives, which includes links to the blogged reactions of people who attended their keynote.

As is standard for a conference where House of Fusion is running (or participating in) a Community Area, the conference ended with a wild Book Auction, with books ranging in price from 10 cents (don't ask!) up to $50 and $60. The auction, which went on for over an hour, also featured continual thanks given to the sponsors, pointing out the book companies that were actually at the conference for people to buy the books that they missed in the auction, and a general good time. Everybody walked away happy.

As has been said in several blog entries, CFUNITED is a definite must for anyone who is remotely interested in learning ColdFusion and enjoying it!

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