On 30/05/2007, at 10:15 PM, Simon Haddon wrote: > Portability speaks for itself... many (all?) hosting companies have > IIS or PHP servers, but the number of them that support CF is > dwindling. The number of companies supporting or developing in CF is > also dwindling. If our customers want to take their website to someone > else, they will be severely restricted in where they can go - some may > see this as a good thing, but we don't believe in making ourselves > indispensable to the detriment of the client. It's the same deal with > ASP (not ASP.NET) - a lot of companies simply aren't supporting it > anymore. > > Where do you get you figure from? Or don't you have any.
I'm sure I mentioned this a few months back, but in some work I was doing for a client I wrote a scanner to count ColdFusion domains and servers on the internet. Over the last 3 or so years the number of .au ColdFusion domains has risen from 2,100 to well over 4,000. Long time readers of cfaussie know I can't resist sticking my oar into threads like this. Here's the 11pm and tired version of my response: 1. There is a shortage of devs of all types at present, and has been for about the last year and a bit. This is a natural outcome of the slump after the tech wreck which discouraged people from getting into Comp Sci courses and the like (Sydney U CS has lowest intake since the 1970s). Every CF shop I know is flat out at present. 2. Apart from a short while at Crows Nest TAFE, ColdFusion has never been taught by a university or TAFE. In the case of Computer Science courses I think this is perfectly ok - Any web specific technology is too vocational for this purpose. In the case of TAFEs, A lot depends on the staff at each TAFE. If you became a TAFE instructor you could probably choose to make a course out of it, but then you could be out earning programming dollars (see 1). 3. ColdFusion isn't for everyone - that's fine. It's best point has always been RAD, and if CF winds up in a stable part of your application stack (e.g. I suspect this is the case for Gary's team) say as middleware for some other presentation technology and with a very fixed set of back ends to integrate with, and little new development, then the RAD aspect is less important and a Java solution may be more cost effective. Another way RAD can become less important is if you have a good framework in the other technology (and you actually use it - that's the hard part). Good architecture evens out the differences somewhat, but the level of discipline required is pretty rare. BTW interfaces have been mentioned for Scorpio, although I don't think you're ever going to see strong compile time typing in CF - that's not what it's for, and Java integration is easy. 4. Apart from situations like (3), I've never bought the cost argument for a second. 90% of project costs are developer hours. In a RAD environment CF servers pay for themselves in days or weeks. If your business can afford 20,000 in development time and not 1,600 for a CF standard license (not to mention all the hosting options) something very weird is going on. If you can't justify 80/month for decent CF hosting, perhaps what you're doing is more a hobby than a business. Robin ______________ Robin Hilliard Director - RocketBoots Pty Ltd Consulting . Recruitment . Software Licensing . Training http://www.rocketboots.com.au m +61 418 414 341 e [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "cfaussie" group. To post to this group, send email to cfaussie@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cfaussie?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
