This interview at CFJD made the rounds yesterday. Since I love ColdFusion and I was nervous about its future, I wanted to chime in, but I wanted to take a bit of time to think about it. The article is great, and if you haven’t read the whole thing yet, Steven Erat has a good summary. After I read the article, I spent quite a bit of time checking out LiveCycle and I’m impressed with the product. I also think ColdFusion has a bright future for both developers and shareholders.
The article touches a bit on the integration of Adobe’s products and ColdFusion, but I think the greatest benefit to ColdFusion is something else. With LiveCycle, Adobe presented a great solution to business problems. Their Intelligent Document Platform has a lot of clients, and really addresses a problem that businesses have – document management. This may seem small to those of us who work in development, but it’s a huge deal and a lot of big companies are using LiveCycle to solve that problem.
I realize this post takes a very ColdFusion-friendly slant (perhaps unrealistically so), but imagine ColdFusion running all of the back end processes of the LiveCycle suite. Not just integrating some of the features, but actually running them. That would be instant, large scale penetration for ColdFusion in a meaningful way. ColdFusion is already a great product without LiveCycle, but I think it suffers because Macromedia didn’t have the clout that Microsoft or Sun have. The merger with Adobe helps that, and by integrating it closely with LiveCycle, gives ColdFusion more credibility at the enterprise level.
A look at the Adobe system integrator partners shows that a ColdFusion/LiveCycle solution would be working with big time companies who would require a lot of ColdFusion developers. I wasn’t here for the transition from Allaire to Macromedia, but from what I’ve heard, it was a nervous time followed by a renaissance. I think we’ll see that here. Adobe’s relationship with large firms across a variety of industries is going to be great for ColdFusion.
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