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The actual story became irrelevant when I saw it's a ColdFusion developers group. I used to work on that platform in the 90s. That was the Django/Rails/Next/etc

by harel 6y ago

The actual story became irrelevant when I saw it's a ColdFusion developers group. I used to work on that platform in the 90s. That was the Django/Rails/Next/etc. of the day. It even packaged in some ExtJS components at some point (another java script relic). I'm surprised it's still a thing.

wahern 6y ago
> I'm surprised it's still a thing. Because it was a good idea? The whole industry came full circle. Here's some ColdFusion that people now call "Mustache JS": <h1>{{Subject}}</h1> <ul> {{#names}} <li>{{name}}</li> {{/names}} </ul> The problem with ColdFusion was that it went in the wrong direction. It tried to copy the trends of the industry by inventing and emphasizing CFScript when it should have doubled-down on the templating strategies and evolved it. Also, it jumped on the Java bandwagon. And it was proprietary and lost mindshare to free PHP, which also had a strong template story, albeit one that was conceptually more limited. CFScript and the Java integration weren't bad, per se. ColdFusion did have a problem when it came to extending the core engine functionality using traditional software architectural approaches. CFML had the concept of modules, but ultimately to do anything remotely sophisticated you had to drop down into C or C++ (and then later Java, I presume). IIRC, CFScript was superficially similar to Javascript, and if they had evolved it in that direction or just adopted Javascript outright, I think ColdFusion would have had more staying power. But the switch to Java probably made that impractical. A template engine integrated with a Javascript runtime running atop the JVM comes with too much performance baggage, even today. And the Javascript would have felt second-class and the "wrong" way to do things, anyhow, even if people ditched CF for an ecosystem that was that--Javascript or similar dynamic, RAD language instead of a "proper" strongly typed language. I worked for a consulting shop that started with ColdFusion and tried to make the switch to Java but they could never make it work. I think I was the only technical consultant in the whole company with the time and motivation to learn Java. Java (including runtime and tooling) was too complex and sophisticated for both the application developers and the client's needs. That would still be true today. The technical leadership of that company, which at the time had also just became a subsidiary of ADP, drank the Java and then XML kool-aid and drove the whole thing into the ground. For similar reasons (including some similar leadership) ADP lost out to PeopleSoft (later acquired by Oracle) in the race to build and solidify their middleware and web-app positions.
- prepend 6y ago
  I don’t think it’s fair to give credit to CF for templating. In that I think we’d have the exact use of templating today if CF never existed, due to the other templating approaches that existed before CF.
  - harel 6y ago
    As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts" and in particular the first "Application Server".
    - prepend 6y ago
      PHP templated before CF (94 v 95), but I feel like the concept was around long before. I’m not sure what you mean by “application server” but there were in memory modules for web servers earlier than CF (eg, CGI). I think CF was around before ASP, Java, and JSP. But it always seemed like a commercial version of PHP to me. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of application servers [0] there’s quite a few older than CF (Tuxedo in 1983, Maybe CF was the first to be web specific? They were windows only so they can’t be that old. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers
      - harel 6y ago
        Maybe "First web specific application server" in the sense of a server specifically serving dynamic HTML output over the web" is better? I'm not vouching for the accuracy of this statement.
        prepend 6y ago
        Maybe “first sold” as the CGI spec in C came out in 1993 [0]. But this seems more of a marketing spin as PHP was out earlier and was the first, I know of, to have that easy “scripts in a folder that are interpreted by the http server” thing going where there was no compile process needed. My memory of the time was that CF was one of the many commercial web software companies that were selling to companies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

by harel 6y ago

wahern 6y ago

> I'm surprised it's still a thing. Because it was a good idea? The whole industry came full circle. Here's some ColdFusion that people now call "Mustache JS": <h1>{{Subject}}</h1> <ul> {{#names}} <li>{{name}}</li> {{/names}} </ul> The problem with ColdFusion was that it went in the wrong direction. It tried to copy the trends of the industry by inventing and emphasizing CFScript when it should have doubled-down on the templating strategies and evolved it. Also, it jumped on the Java bandwagon. And it was proprietary and lost mindshare to free PHP, which also had a strong template story, albeit one that was conceptually more limited. CFScript and the Java integration weren't bad, per se. ColdFusion did have a problem when it came to extending the core engine functionality using traditional software architectural approaches. CFML had the concept of modules, but ultimately to do anything remotely sophisticated you had to drop down into C or C++ (and then later Java, I presume). IIRC, CFScript was superficially similar to Javascript, and if they had evolved it in that direction or just adopted Javascript outright, I think ColdFusion would have had more staying power. But the switch to Java probably made that impractical. A template engine integrated with a Javascript runtime running atop the JVM comes with too much performance baggage, even today. And the Javascript would have felt second-class and the "wrong" way to do things, anyhow, even if people ditched CF for an ecosystem that was that--Javascript or similar dynamic, RAD language instead of a "proper" strongly typed language. I worked for a consulting shop that started with ColdFusion and tried to make the switch to Java but they could never make it work. I think I was the only technical consultant in the whole company with the time and motivation to learn Java. Java (including runtime and tooling) was too complex and sophisticated for both the application developers and the client's needs. That would still be true today. The technical leadership of that company, which at the time had also just became a subsidiary of ADP, drank the Java and then XML kool-aid and drove the whole thing into the ground. For similar reasons (including some similar leadership) ADP lost out to PeopleSoft (later acquired by Oracle) in the race to build and solidify their middleware and web-app positions.

prepend 6y ago
I don’t think it’s fair to give credit to CF for templating. In that I think we’d have the exact use of templating today if CF never existed, due to the other templating approaches that existed before CF.
- harel 6y ago
  As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts" and in particular the first "Application Server".
  - prepend 6y ago
    PHP templated before CF (94 v 95), but I feel like the concept was around long before. I’m not sure what you mean by “application server” but there were in memory modules for web servers earlier than CF (eg, CGI). I think CF was around before ASP, Java, and JSP. But it always seemed like a commercial version of PHP to me. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of application servers [0] there’s quite a few older than CF (Tuxedo in 1983, Maybe CF was the first to be web specific? They were windows only so they can’t be that old. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers
    - harel 6y ago
      Maybe "First web specific application server" in the sense of a server specifically serving dynamic HTML output over the web" is better? I'm not vouching for the accuracy of this statement.
      - prepend 6y ago
        Maybe “first sold” as the CGI spec in C came out in 1993 [0]. But this seems more of a marketing spin as PHP was out earlier and was the first, I know of, to have that easy “scripts in a folder that are interpreted by the http server” thing going where there was no compile process needed. My memory of the time was that CF was one of the many commercial web software companies that were selling to companies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface