Adobe ColdFusion Reviews

I develop applications with Coldfusion to service the requirements from my clients and help them grow their business.

Especially the integration with the client-sided programming is really friendly. Of course, other languages have improved a lot and this valuable features is getting less and less important for choosing ColdFusion.

When I started using ColdFusion, I only had experience with PHP, and compared to that language, I was amazed by the simplicity and the structure. From that moment forward, I got experience with Java, JavaScript, Mendix, and more. And compared to other server-side languages, it has a way more developer friendly approach and a less steep learning curve.

My major concern is the fact that Adobe is not actively pushing the development of ColdFusion since they bought Macromedia. However open source development initiatives like Railo, Blue Dragon and Lucee are picking up the pace and making sure development stays possible.

With larger applications I had issues.

I had no issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

Never had direct contact with Adobe ColdFusion customer service.

Technical Support:

Never had direct contact with Adobe ColdFusion customer service.

PHP for about 6 months, I switched because my employer utilized ColdFusion, however after using it for a couple of months I was sold on the product. And that's why up to today I keep on using the product.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We implemented it by using an in-house team and my own personal experience in later projects.

I believe that developing with ColdFusion saved me about 25% time compared to Java and PHP projects. ColdFusion has a lot of useful built-in functions that the others lack by default. Although via scripts created by others you will still be able to implemented those.

I have been developing (and teaching) ColdFusion for more than 20 years. I have used it for almost any possible web-based application imaginable (and even some non web-based), but my main use case was to develop CMS (Web Content Management Systems), including solutions for Haymarket Business Publishing and the Brazilian Post Office. ColdFusion is a multi-platform, so it does not really matter what environment you are deploying. Among the most valuable features are an almost unlimited set of tags (ready-to-use components), which accelerate development in at least 50%, compared to other development languages that I have used (PHP, JavaServer Pages, .NET, and Node.js).

Apart from providing a mature, reliable, consistent platform, Adobe also offers outstanding customer service and product support. It is a shame that Adobe does not provide ColdFusion Training anymore, but there is a network of Training Partners where you can find basic and advanced ColdFusion training anywhere.

No need to import libraries from outside the environment.

ColdFusion and CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) provide almost everything that a web developer needs, which is  probably a lot of things that they do not even know that they need, such as integrated Solr, ORM, the capacity for creating APIs, the frictionless integration with SMS by the ColdFusion SMS event gateway, and so many more: cfmail, cfftp, cffile, cfhttp, etc.

• Be able to inject Python, Java, Groovy, or PHP code into a CFML page.
• CF Git, CF Ant, and maybe CF Subversion would be nice to have.

Most of what I wanted seems to already be built into the new Public Beta (ColdFusion 2018 release): https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2...

Anything that I might have found over my years as a ColdFusion instructor and software architect was due to bad code or bad practices. Some issues were easily fixed with the help of Adobe ColdFusion enterprise support, which was expensive, but worth every dollar.

Not at all. I used ColdFusion to run the Brazilian Post Office website, and it serves many millions of pages really fast.

When needed, the Adobe Support team was helpful, quick, and solved our problems (mainly cluster configuration issues) really fast.

We used Perl and some others. However, ColdFusion proved to be faster and more reliable than anything else.

Next > Next > Next, and that was it!

We implemented using an in-house team, which I led.

It is hard to calculate this, but considering a US$400K project cost where 80% of the cost was coding ($320K) and considering a very modest 15% increase in learning/productivity over the main competitor (PHP), you can easily get to US$48K which pays for the developers' tool (CFBuilder) plus training and support, and even the software (3 x US$8.499/2 CPU servers).

If you really want to save money, there is a free open source CFML engine (former Railo, now Lucee) out there. 

We evaluated .NET, PHP, Node.js, Ruby and Python.

I recommend trying it for a little bit. It is not for the classical Java/.NET developer though, since it is more like developing in PHP without all the syntax confusion and lack of consistency. However, the learning curve is smooth and fast that you will be hooked very quickly. 

The OO features are a must and the best you can get in any web server-based technology.

I use ColdFusion to build internal and external applications for a major oil company. We had several teams totaling about 100 developers using this tool at our client. 

This tool was very easy learn, yet powerful enough to manage many sites on a single instance. 

We save enormous amounts of time in development using this tool.

The ability to write SQL queries was very helpful as we did not need to bother our DBAs in writing stored procedures for simple tasks.  

I have since moved into a management role and have not kept abreast of changes with this tool.

None.

None.

We did not use a different solution. We did use .NET for some applications, but I preferred CF.

Installation of the server software was formidable due the number of configurable options.

The client had the software running prod but did not have dev or test servers. I was tasked with setting those up after the fact. It took some time to get the dev/test server to match prod, but that was not an issue with the tool. This was not setting up the environments properly.

I was part of a vendor team that did this for a client.

It was not determined.

It is a very effective solution and worth the price.

Not applicable.