To Open Source or Not? - What's the future for ColdFusion

Posted At : October 4, 2007 12:54 PM
Related Categories: Web Development

As a business we've invested lots of time and money in extremely comprehensive enterprise web applications - an excellent coldfusion content management system, document management systems and e-learning engines. They look great and work even better and we're at a point now where we're considering the future of one of the technologies that we use. There's no doubt that ColdFusion is an excellent application development environment but its biggest downfall is the cost. Given the choice, clients will opt for 'value for money' products and when you consider that competitive application servers are open source or free - whether it's ASP.NET or PHP, it's hard to understand why Adobe insisted on increasing the price of ColdFusion for the latest release.

Strategically their thinking makes no sense unless they are trying to kill the product off. The developer community is shrinking and it would seem more sensible to open source the application server and offer suites of well supported add-ons for sale. As ever the developer community would rise to the challenge and a range of well crafted and supported applications would be available for free but this is where Adobe would have the edge with their brand adding consumer confidence to any purchase. Who knows what the future holds for Adobe's application server but I know that I'm getting to a point where I'm tired of having to remind clients that they need to buy ColdFusion in order to use some of our products.