Why Monochrome use ColdFusion

We are increasingly being asked by customers of ours what back-end technology we use for our applications.  Why this is we aren’t entirely sure, but it would appear that people are doing their homework a little more than they used to before asking or agencies such as Monochrome to pitch for their work – a good thing.

So, when asked the above question, we always say ColdFusion, mainly due to the fact that CF is our development tool of choice.  Now, a lot of developers out there would question this – why are we using a costly proprietary technology that considered may be considered by many to be long since dead.  Why are we using a technology that many consider to be well past it’s sell-by date?

Well, in essence, simplicity.  We use ColdFusion because it enables us to do a wide plethora of things without needing to look at any other tools – it’s a veritable toolbox of things that we web developers need day to day.  It gives us image manipulation, it gives us PDF capabilities, and with the upcoming ColdFusion 9 next year, it gives us Hibernate, the ORM tool, out of the box.  All of this is wrapped up in a tool that allows us to make use of the Java platform, whilst writing code in an incredibly simple to learn tag based format.  I have had experience of other web developers converting to coding effectively and productively in CFML in a matter of days.  From the point of view of Rich Internet Applications, ColdFusion gives us unparalleled support for things like AMF,  the native transport protocol for the Flash player, enabling us to have full speed native transport with Flash out of the box with no additional changes to the code – a great winner for productivity.

Day to day we find ourselves dealing with CFML every day.  Unlike some of the many individuals out there who claim to be an agency, Monochrome have a team where every single member is versed in CFML and has many years of experience – four of the team have 45-odd years experience between them, which makes us one of the most, if not THE most experienced CFML shop in the UK.  You name it, we’ve most probably done it.  We’ve also taken this to the point that Monochrome form half of the management committee of the UK ColdFusion User Group based in London and have done since 1999.

So what about the alternatives to ColdFusion?  Well, I’ve spent a large chunk of time over the last year or so looking into what else is out there (as is the pragmatic thing to do), and have reviewed lots of alternatives including Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, Groovy & Grails, PHP as well as a couple of others.  As yet, I’ve not found anything that lets us build our applications as quickly and easily as ColdFusion does, although Ruby on Rails is definitely a strong contender with it’s productivity gains and neat packaging.

So, moving forward, what’s happening with ColdFusion?  Well, Adobe are currently in the process of developing ColdFusion 9 which people were given some sneak peeks of at the recent Adobe MAX conferences, and to sit alongside this is the new ColdFusion eclipse based IDE – Bolt.  Railo is also out there, a free and open source up-coming alternative to ColdFusion looking to support much of the same functionality.  So, going forward the future for CFML is looking rosy, and we at Monochrome are more than happy with that.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 08 Dec 2008