Seriously, people are still going on about ColdFusion…?

No, it was a joke. ColdFusion is by no means a good or smart application server/language/framework (?) to use, however large corporations seem to insist on using it. At this point we are right in the middle of the joke, because everyone knows ColdFusion is still being used but every knows how bad it is as well. The joke is quickly ended with an ellipsis which indicates that perhaps something is missing.

Any other jokes you’d like me explain John?

Personal subjective opinions of dislike are all well-and-good, but let’s settle this argument by using quantifiable metrics. Google trends isn’t scientific, but it’s a good place to start, so let’s compare Coldfusion with relative newcomers like Django and Ruby on Rails:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=coldfusion%2C+django%2C+ruby+on+rails&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

Note I didn’t compare CF outright with Python or Ruby because no one in their right mind would use CF as a general purpose programming language, and the rankings reflect that.

If you want to see a more dramatic illustration Coldfusion’s increasing unpopularity, you can adjust the trends to compare against jsp, asp.net, and php.

At the end of the day it is the quality of the final application that matters and not the choice of server side programming language used to develop it.

As developers we should be concerned with whether the client and, more importantly, the end user are happy with the application? The server side programming language used to the develop it is of no interest to the end user and is rarely of interest to the client.

I’m a big fan of Coldfusion, but I’m well aware that I could have used PHP or Ruby to develop exactly the same application.

That said I am really impressed by Sava.