Hi Ryan,

I still think on balance that CF has an edge in many RAD wev development scenarios. Depending on the use case the tag library and language consistency beats PHP. The ease of installation and robustness of implementation gives CF an edge over Ruby (although I think “everything is an object” and the metaprogramming constructs in Ruby make it a more productive language for experienced developers on non-trivial but small team development prohect). That will change when JRuby is a little more robust and performant or when the recommended deployment options for Ruby or Rubunious actually manage to go 6 months (or even 6 weeks) without substantial changes :->

Python is a really neat language, but has (for me) many of the same conceptual shortcomings as ColdFusion (such as headless functions and primitives). Django makes up for a lot if you’re building cms’s, but I think the version of Python to watch will be 3.0 towards the end of this year or early next year.

Groovy is a great thought experiment and I love the syntax and the Java integration. I’m yet to be convinced whether it’ll get sufficient traction to be worth developing on.

For pure ease and speed of development, taking into account years of proven deployment on a Java stack, I still tend to prefer ColdFusion for small to mid-sized projects. The combination of the built in templating language, decent object support, easy deployment and good integration with Java plus a range of really useful tags for everything from PDFs to image manipulation still make it a really compelling choice. (In case it isn’t obvious, as team size grows, I think Java is often a better solution – or C# if you swing that way . . .)

That said, as Ruby deployment becomes easier, JRuby becomes faster and Python becomes a little more OO (and possibly as Groovy takes off), it’ll have much more of a fight on its hands. ColdFusion will always be an obvious choice for a set of use cases which take advantage of things like the PDF and Image functionality and its AJAX tags certainly make creating AJAX feature very easy for the casual developer. The out of the box integration with LCDS and easy Flex remoting support are also useful.

However to remain competitive I think it needs to provide a full scripting syntax for classes and methods, and it would be great to have better meta-programming support, less headless functions and in an ideal world some way of compiling down to Java byte code that didn’t have to create an annonymous inner class for each method!

I think CF8 was a breakthrough in terms of features and capabilities and it’ll be interesting to see what Adobe can pull out of the hat for CF9 to make ColdFusion relevant and interesting to a wider development community while still providing a solution that works for the existing developer community.