Can Adobe make ColdFusion hot (again) or not?

Computerworld - There was CGI, Java and even C. But for building Web sites during the dot-com boom, nothing was hotter than ColdFusion.

Created by Allaire Corp. more than a decade ago, ColdFusion enabled Web 1.0 developers to quickly build sophisticated Web sites whose Web pages -- easily identified by the .cfm at the end of the page name -- were generated on the fly via a back-end database, rather than hard-coded using HTML.

ColdFusion also won over developers by letting them "get to a higher level of abstraction above the code so they could build things faster," said Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at The Burton Group. "The Allaire brothers were way ahead of the curve."

At its peak, ColdFusion vied with JavaScript for popularity with Web programmers, according to a 1998 survey by IDC.

But while JavaScript -- the 'J' in AJAX -- is still hot, ColdFusion cooled down rapidly after the dot-com crash.

As dot-coms went out of business and were replaced by thriftier Web 2.0 start-ups, ColdFusion's relatively high cost hurt.

Though ColdFusion has long had a free developer edition, production licenses for the latest ColdFusion 8 cost $1,299 for the standard edition and $7,500 for the enterprise edition. Both allow use for up to two servers.

Meanwhile, a multitude of free or open-source tools existed for the languages that gradually supplanted ColdFusion. They include PERL, Python, PHP (the 'P' in the LAMP software stack for open-source Web servers), Ruby on Rails and even ASP.Net, Microsoft's own entry into this space.

"The market went nuts for ColdFusion and Java in the 1990s. Then there was a backlash, with everyone embracing scripting languages as being 'good enough,'" O'Kelly said.

According to TIOBE Software's ranking of programming languages, ColdFusion is only 28th in terms of estimated popularity. "If you join an organization that isn't already using ColdFusion, it would be tough to convince them to start," said Josh Grauer, a systems analyst and ColdFusion developer for Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business.

ColdFusion also slipped after Macromedia Inc. acquired ColdFusion in 2001.

Recognizing that the "application server was being commoditized," according to Buntel, Macromedia right after the acquisition focused on rebuilding ColdFusion into a Java-based (J2EE) application server.

The problem, acknowledges Kevin Lynch, Macromedia's and now Adobe Systems Inc.'s chief software architect, is that "there weren't a lot of new features coming out, as we were just making it work with Java."

Not dead, just ... stealthy

Back in May, Computerworld listed ColdFusion, along with cc:Mail and OS/2, in an article titled "The top 10 dead or dying computer skills."

The article generated heated comments and blog posts from ColdFusion loyalists.

Indeed, ColdFusion is still used by about 400,000 developers, according to Tim Buntel, ColdFusion's longtime marketing manager, during an interview at Adobe's MAX user conference in Chicago earlier this week.

Changing user demographics -- as consumer Web start-ups abandoned ColdFusion, enterprises and large organizations kept using it for private intranets -- created the perception of a greater decline than what actually occurred, Buntel said.