One of my big complaints with Macromedia has been their lack of any kind of public relations push for ColdFusion. As I’ve gotten more familiar with the “scene” I’ve come to the conclusion that part of the reason they haven’t is because ColdFusion couldn’t compete with other alternatives. ASP.NET was more powerful, more widespread and essentially free for companies who used IIS. There is also a dearth of developers for .NET because it’s a Microsoft product. For smaller sites, PHP was a good free alternative. ColdFusion, in my mind, didn’t really do anything to distinguish itself from the pack.

Now, with MX 7 it seems like they’re finally starting in that direction. Ben Forta blogged about an eweek article that reviewed MX 7 and found it “enterprise” worthy. It’s a good review and highlights many of the things that MX 7 can do for enterprises. With it’s focus on OO programming (in the form of CFC’s), the great web services inclusion and the addition of a report builder, Macromedia looks like it’s playing with the big boys.

I also didn’t think Macromedia did enough to leverage its fantastic adoption of Flash into marketing ColdFusion. I’ve always felt that if they could show that Flash and ColdFusion go hand in hand, or that using ColdFusion could make Flash development better and smoother, that the technology would sell itself. Now, finally, with the ability to use the cfform tag to create Flash forms, they’re starting to do it. I see a Macromedia trifecta of rich web applications with ColdFusion, Flex and Flash.

Good job Macromedia.