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Do you think open source colfusion engines such as lucee[0] are worth using/learning? [0] https://lucee.org/

hoorayimhelping 6y ago
No. Avoid ColdFusion - it's a language from a bygone era when Adobe was trying to be what Microsoft is now. They failed and the ColdFusion community will die. The community, while made up of great people that I am still friends with, by and large was not interested in improving, learning new techniques, or growing beyond ColdFusion. They wanted to learn a skill and cash in on it for a long time. The language is dead and their skills are becoming useless as a result. Maybe in 15-20 years ColdFusion will become like COBOL or ADA, where there's a bunch of code running some necessary systems and nobody knows how to maintain them. But it's a long bet for a payoff that would be much higher if you spent your time somewhere else.
robert_g 6y ago
If you're thinking of learning CF, only do so with the understanding that it's now a niche product mostly used in government and large companies. Learn it either as a hobby or look at the Lucee source for educational purposes. Even my last company is moving away from CF. About Lucee ... I actually helped the company migrate away from Adobe ColdFusion to Lucee due to a chance in Adobe's licensing. We migrated a large, 10yr old, application and all clients over to Lucee in about 1 year. Lucee is a nice platform but I'll warn that it's not as polished as Adobe CF and there's some difference in features. You'll run into rough edges in their documentation and language implementation (especially the scripting languages). One nice thing I really enjoyed was being able to download the source and figure out how my CF code was actually being compiled into Java. It took me a few days to understand the parts I needed but I actually figured out some issues I was having. I also was able to build Lucee from source, just for learning, which was really nice.

No. Avoid ColdFusion - it's a language from a bygone era when Adobe was trying to be what Microsoft is now. They failed and the ColdFusion community will die. The community, while made up of great people that I am still friends with, by and large was not interested in improving, learning new techniques, or growing beyond ColdFusion. They wanted to learn a skill and cash in on it for a long time. The language is dead and their skills are becoming useless as a result. Maybe in 15-20 years ColdFusion will become like COBOL or ADA, where there's a bunch of code running some necessary systems and nobody knows how to maintain them. But it's a long bet for a payoff that would be much higher if you spent your time somewhere else.

robert_g 6y ago

If you're thinking of learning CF, only do so with the understanding that it's now a niche product mostly used in government and large companies. Learn it either as a hobby or look at the Lucee source for educational purposes. Even my last company is moving away from CF. About Lucee ... I actually helped the company migrate away from Adobe ColdFusion to Lucee due to a chance in Adobe's licensing. We migrated a large, 10yr old, application and all clients over to Lucee in about 1 year. Lucee is a nice platform but I'll warn that it's not as polished as Adobe CF and there's some difference in features. You'll run into rough edges in their documentation and language implementation (especially the scripting languages). One nice thing I really enjoyed was being able to download the source and figure out how my CF code was actually being compiled into Java. It took me a few days to understand the parts I needed but I actually figured out some issues I was having. I also was able to build Lucee from source, just for learning, which was really nice.