Tuesday 14 August 2012

ColdFusion Roadmap WTF??

Today I looked at the ColdFusion road map published by Adobe on their blog and had a few things to comment on:

1. Streamlined Mobile Application Development:
Alright, so what do you mean by 'Streamlined', what does PhoneGap, jQueryMobile, Sencha, Parse to name a few already do today. Is it not Streamlined?

Another important question is will I write CFML to develop mobile applications. I hope the team is planning to provide solution around Native as well as Web based mobile app development. Personally, I feel using a server side language to build a mobile based application is a bad thing. I wonder how native applications would work. Would there should be some sort conversion from CFML to HTML that will help in creating a web view.

More important than the above is the pricing. ColdFusion Enterprise is priced at $$8500 and the Standard at $$1000+. Will I pay that much to build a simple mobile application using ColdFusion. Hell NO!! Unless ColdFusion can just read my mind and build everything on its own without having me to write a single line of code. I had already bragged about ColdFusion increasing its price for ColdFusion 10 on Twitter and I hope they don't increase it again in 11.

2. Enabling Enterprise to easily integrate with Social Media Streams:
Hmmm, Social media. Nice buzzword. But what do you plan to integrate? Like box, Tweet box, Share box, Stumble upon box and the list goes on and on and on. I can do this with current solutions with JavaScript. I know it might be a little messy but once done who cares much about it.

3. Improved installation and deployment experience:
Yes please, otherwise I'll also break up with you. The company that I hate the most - Microsoft provides better install experience when compared to ColdFusion. Just include express and advanced installation. That's it. I'm not asking for more.

4. One click multi screen support:
Do you mean media queries? Again an already available solution.

Among other things what caught my eye was 'Pluggable framework'. Are you talking about something like Java packages or something like dependency resolution?

I hope someone from Adobe or from the community comes in and comments here and makes me understand how ColdFusion's road map is really that promising.