The entire stack described in the post is the stuff of nightmares. ColdFusion, IIS on Windows Server, PHP. Things that make you wake up in a cold sweat.
Years ago I worked for a company that had an application, written in Delphi, running as a DLL in IIS (on Windows obviously). To more easily deliver certain features fast, open source PHP code was run in parallel, e.g. some customer wants a visitor counter, so that just got bolted on using PHP.
There are some absolutely insane systems out there.
When I was in undergrad we used CF quite a bit for the custom university applications. I cut a lot of my wed development teeth on it. But everyone hated it. So we were actually quite excited to get a PHP server. It could run open source alternatives to Blackboard after all!
I played around with PHP quite a bit in my senior year and got a job as a developer working for a PHP shop when I graduated. Boy was I absolutely disillusioned within 12 months. PHP nearly ruined my love of computers. It was an abusive relationship: I would spend my working hours writing horrible little patches to ancient systems that were made of spaghetti 10 miles long, then go home and night and weekend try to write beautiful code in PHP. The more little patches I wrote the more I felt the need to somehow make them right.
I escaped to Python and JS and have done a lot of therapy since. Doing much better these days, thankfully. My addiction to C seems like such a minor vice in comparison.
I have ported programs from PERL and PHP. I think it is a personal preference but I didn't care for them. I did like Ruby on Rails immensely and did a couple of projects in it prior to it reaching version 1.0. But the jobs at that time were with CFML so I migrated back.
My user group recently had a presentation on Wheels, which is a CF version of Ruby on Rails. Its been around for a few years but never quite delivered what it promised. But it has a new project leader and has been totally rewritten. There will also be a book coming out. It uses another open-source project RustCFML which is an interpreter that converts the code to Rust. CF is pretty fast all by itself but this is lightning fast. You can also now run CF programs on Cloudflare. So the community does keep moving along. Lots of AI work being done as well.
ColdFusion has a very lively community and there are two open-source versions: Lucee and BoxLang. The language has also stayed very modern and something like two thirds of the Fortune 500 are using it. Also there are a few well-known startups like DistroKid using it.
I've made a very good living with ColdFusion consistently since I picked it up in 1997. There are now several really nice MVC frameworks for ColdFusion out there. If you've not used it in decades, it has a fully script-based syntax now, and there is a strong free CF engine (Lucee).
The newest integrations with AI are definitely interesting.
I've been pleasantly surprised to see some inklings of growth in CF adoption, though I'm comfortable saying that most new code in ANY language is going to be written with AI going forward.
With the latest PHP vulnerabilities - ColdFusion is actually a selling point: "Gee, it doesn't run 60+ percent of the internet, but it's actively maintained and can be configured to be secure."
What does this mean? This being a revelation for a web tech solution strikes me as strange. I saw a tiny bit of CF like 25 years ago and perhaps mistakenly thought it did this back then.
Ahh. Yeah. Well that sparks a memory of why I quickly went another direction after looking at it back then when I was learning web dev lol. Tbf a lot of people were, probably still are, using PHP and JavaScript way back then too. It just made sense for me to do some MVC style separation long before I found out there was an acronym for it.
"Yo dawg, I hear you like security vulnerabilities..."
CF was an interesting path. I used the Python equivalent, Zope, extensively back in the day. Both could glue together some really powerful components and allow you to write whole web apps more or less declaratively.
That said, we collectively tried that experiment ("we" includes you, my JBoss compatriots) and realized this is not The Way Forward. That doesn't mean they're valueless, not at all! And it's the sort of experiment you have to try or else it's always going to be nagging at the back of your mind: "what if we tried this... and it was amazing?" But we did try it, and it was not amazing.
If you have to maintain CF or Zope or JBoss today, godspeed. Just know that life is easier elsewhere. It doesn't have to be this way. It's not this way for everyone.
ColdFusion did a lot of things right for its time, but it can only be appreciated if one understands the engineering challenges of the time period (e.g. perl cgi-bin). Using HTML templating and good support from a small and agile company had a lot to recommend it, and many people built a living out of it, both inside and outside Allaire.
You just gave me flashbacks as a teenager using Allaire HomeSite to build websites for friends and family. Man what a good piece of software before they bolted CF to it and sent it off to Macromedia>Adobe hell.
I caught a lot of jokes for sticking with CF over PHP into the 2010's (before moving over to clojure) -- I'm sure they all forgot by now, but I've been pretty satisfied with my past choices this last week. Before the move I mostly worked with Lucee and FW/1 [0]. I still think its a better alternative to PHP or Ruby(rails).
Started with @seancorfield, he was the one behind FW/1 and the way he thought about architecture and would write about just resonated. Then he started migrating over doing these CF/Clojure things like `cfmljure` and kept reading his writing (which I recommend) and that got me to finally look into Clojure -- which led to Rich Hickey talks, and everything he talked about was everything I was overly frustrated with in programming, the mutations, over-engineered/complected objects and data modeling.
I forget which talk it is, but there is one (or more) where he goes into how we modeling the world/data in OOP and his annoyance with confusing identity, value, and state; bundling them up into mutating objects instead of having a stable identifier(label) that has an immutable fact or facts(values) at a point in time(state). And how objects act on each other instead of function working on data. I felt like someone reached into my head and said everything I was thinking in a way I was never able to express or formulate and then instead of just bitching about it he created a solution. I was sold, hook line and sinker.
It all just clicked for me, even reading clojure code (writing at first was another story) came easier than trying to follow some javascript. Maybe it was because I already had years of programming experience, but I knew nothing of Functional Programming, was skeptical of this immutable data bit but really wanted it to be real, and had never seen a Lisp before or knew anything about it (I got hired programming out of high school) -- but it all just made sense and was basically a come-to-Jesus moment that I dove into and it drastically improved my understanding of systems, architecture, data, and the like.
I’m kind of blown away that there are still people out there using ColdFusion. Blast from the past.
ColdFusion has been maintained by Adobe since 2005. Apparently, they think there is future for it:
See “Roadmap for Adobe ColdFusion 2026” for more details: https://www.adobe.com/cc-shared/assets/pdf/products/coldfusi...Everything says that - look at Filemaker: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/agentic-development/
Lawdy. Now we just need FoxPro Copilot to round it out.
Edit: No we don't oh please god no.
The entire stack described in the post is the stuff of nightmares. ColdFusion, IIS on Windows Server, PHP. Things that make you wake up in a cold sweat.
Years ago I worked for a company that had an application, written in Delphi, running as a DLL in IIS (on Windows obviously). To more easily deliver certain features fast, open source PHP code was run in parallel, e.g. some customer wants a visitor counter, so that just got bolted on using PHP.
There are some absolutely insane systems out there.
When I was in undergrad we used CF quite a bit for the custom university applications. I cut a lot of my wed development teeth on it. But everyone hated it. So we were actually quite excited to get a PHP server. It could run open source alternatives to Blackboard after all!
I played around with PHP quite a bit in my senior year and got a job as a developer working for a PHP shop when I graduated. Boy was I absolutely disillusioned within 12 months. PHP nearly ruined my love of computers. It was an abusive relationship: I would spend my working hours writing horrible little patches to ancient systems that were made of spaghetti 10 miles long, then go home and night and weekend try to write beautiful code in PHP. The more little patches I wrote the more I felt the need to somehow make them right.
I escaped to Python and JS and have done a lot of therapy since. Doing much better these days, thankfully. My addiction to C seems like such a minor vice in comparison.
I have ported programs from PERL and PHP. I think it is a personal preference but I didn't care for them. I did like Ruby on Rails immensely and did a couple of projects in it prior to it reaching version 1.0. But the jobs at that time were with CFML so I migrated back.
My user group recently had a presentation on Wheels, which is a CF version of Ruby on Rails. Its been around for a few years but never quite delivered what it promised. But it has a new project leader and has been totally rewritten. There will also be a book coming out. It uses another open-source project RustCFML which is an interpreter that converts the code to Rust. CF is pretty fast all by itself but this is lightning fast. You can also now run CF programs on Cloudflare. So the community does keep moving along. Lots of AI work being done as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIwXMlinJw&t=1487s
Next someone is gonna pipe up and say they used AI to enable them to continue using FrontPage extensions to keep their php+cf sites working
Frontpage on Linux. That was fun to support :).
Frontpage on Linux, backed by file storage on Netware. That was hell to support (student home pages).
They're well-documented, well-supported products.
What gives me cold sweats are custom application servers that no one knows how they work.
ColdFusion has a very lively community and there are two open-source versions: Lucee and BoxLang. The language has also stayed very modern and something like two thirds of the Fortune 500 are using it. Also there are a few well-known startups like DistroKid using it.
Same! I have a huge soft spot for CF. It put a lot of food on my table in the early 2000’s. Then I switched to Java :-)
I've made a very good living with ColdFusion consistently since I picked it up in 1997. There are now several really nice MVC frameworks for ColdFusion out there. If you've not used it in decades, it has a fully script-based syntax now, and there is a strong free CF engine (Lucee).
The newest integrations with AI are definitely interesting.
I've been pleasantly surprised to see some inklings of growth in CF adoption, though I'm comfortable saying that most new code in ANY language is going to be written with AI going forward.
With the latest PHP vulnerabilities - ColdFusion is actually a selling point: "Gee, it doesn't run 60+ percent of the internet, but it's actively maintained and can be configured to be secure."
> it has a fully script-based syntax now
What does this mean? This being a revelation for a web tech solution strikes me as strange. I saw a tiny bit of CF like 25 years ago and perhaps mistakenly thought it did this back then.
It used by be a markup language like:
But now it has its own scripting language like: At least, that is how it used to be :)Ahh. Yeah. Well that sparks a memory of why I quickly went another direction after looking at it back then when I was learning web dev lol. Tbf a lot of people were, probably still are, using PHP and JavaScript way back then too. It just made sense for me to do some MVC style separation long before I found out there was an acronym for it.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I used to write a bunch of ColdFusion with a dude that owned an S2000 :)
"Yo dawg, I hear you like security vulnerabilities..."
CF was an interesting path. I used the Python equivalent, Zope, extensively back in the day. Both could glue together some really powerful components and allow you to write whole web apps more or less declaratively.
That said, we collectively tried that experiment ("we" includes you, my JBoss compatriots) and realized this is not The Way Forward. That doesn't mean they're valueless, not at all! And it's the sort of experiment you have to try or else it's always going to be nagging at the back of your mind: "what if we tried this... and it was amazing?" But we did try it, and it was not amazing.
If you have to maintain CF or Zope or JBoss today, godspeed. Just know that life is easier elsewhere. It doesn't have to be this way. It's not this way for everyone.
We do it’s a nice little niche. There was a lot of Zope around me. Opus has no issues with it at all.
ColdFusion did a lot of things right for its time, but it can only be appreciated if one understands the engineering challenges of the time period (e.g. perl cgi-bin). Using HTML templating and good support from a small and agile company had a lot to recommend it, and many people built a living out of it, both inside and outside Allaire.
You just gave me flashbacks as a teenager using Allaire HomeSite to build websites for friends and family. Man what a good piece of software before they bolted CF to it and sent it off to Macromedia>Adobe hell.
There is so much in this title alone that sounds like a time capsule from 1999...
They're just missing either Shockwave (Director) or Flash as half of their website.
I caught a lot of jokes for sticking with CF over PHP into the 2010's (before moving over to clojure) -- I'm sure they all forgot by now, but I've been pretty satisfied with my past choices this last week. Before the move I mostly worked with Lucee and FW/1 [0]. I still think its a better alternative to PHP or Ruby(rails).
[0] https://github.com/framework-one/fw1
What made you move to Clojure?
Started with @seancorfield, he was the one behind FW/1 and the way he thought about architecture and would write about just resonated. Then he started migrating over doing these CF/Clojure things like `cfmljure` and kept reading his writing (which I recommend) and that got me to finally look into Clojure -- which led to Rich Hickey talks, and everything he talked about was everything I was overly frustrated with in programming, the mutations, over-engineered/complected objects and data modeling.
I forget which talk it is, but there is one (or more) where he goes into how we modeling the world/data in OOP and his annoyance with confusing identity, value, and state; bundling them up into mutating objects instead of having a stable identifier(label) that has an immutable fact or facts(values) at a point in time(state). And how objects act on each other instead of function working on data. I felt like someone reached into my head and said everything I was thinking in a way I was never able to express or formulate and then instead of just bitching about it he created a solution. I was sold, hook line and sinker.
It all just clicked for me, even reading clojure code (writing at first was another story) came easier than trying to follow some javascript. Maybe it was because I already had years of programming experience, but I knew nothing of Functional Programming, was skeptical of this immutable data bit but really wanted it to be real, and had never seen a Lisp before or knew anything about it (I got hired programming out of high school) -- but it all just made sense and was basically a come-to-Jesus moment that I dove into and it drastically improved my understanding of systems, architecture, data, and the like.
Still running a saas I built on Coldfusion/Lucee with a Vue frontend that I started in 2011 that supports myself and 2 employees.
Wayback Machine already has a copy. If the site does not load for you, try https://web.archive.org/web/20261026222905/https://www.grego...
I feel like Ben Forta just woke me up and it's 2002!
Ben actually spoke at last year's CF Summit. It felt very nostalgic!
ColdFusion...now there's a name I haven't heard in some time.