24 hours after pushing Apptacular out, I have over 150 downloads, and only 2 reported problems.

Awesome!

One of the problems was that a user tried to run Apptacular against a database without primary keys. Apptacular and ORM in general have a dependency on primary keys. I should make that clearer in the documents, and error, and I will. But just know that.

In the meantime, keep downloading Apptacular and checking out my materials on it.

Jayesh Viradiya is one of the ColdFusion engineers and he is specifically responsible for the features around AIR synching.

Basically he's created ORM capability for SQLite in AIR. He's got a new article on the Adobe Developer Center about it. Check it out.

I was chatting with someone last night, and they said:

"Most ColdFusion apps are designed to be intranet apps… and boy do they look like it."

It's true. ColdFusion enables rapid application development, but not necessarily pretty rapid application development. However Flash Catalyst enables rapid, pretty, application development.

And let's be clear here, pretty is not superficial. It's not just about chrome and bling. It's about making application that your users want to use instead of apps that your users have to use.

So if you'd like to see how to turbo charge your front end development with effective, pretty, ui's come to my session:

"How Catalyst Will Transform the ColdFusion Developer." Friday 3:15PM - 4:15PM Ballroom D

We'll be releasing Apptacular soon on labs.adobe.com, but I'm tired of saying "It's coming soon."

You want Apptacular: Go get it: http://bit.ly/Apptacular

If you have any issues, please report them using this site: http://bit.ly/ApptacularIssues

If you want to participate in building Apptacular, you want to look at the source, and tests, etc. Check it out on GitHub: http://bit.ly/ApptacularGitHub

If you want to know more about what Apptacular can do for you, check out these tutorial videos:

• Apptacular - Introduction
• Apptacular - Scaffolding
• Apptacular - Aesthetics
• Apptacular - As a backend for Flex
• Apptacular - Unit Tests
• Apptacular - Plans
• Apptacular - Working with Images
• Apptacular - Working around database conventions

So, hey, how are you doing? You're here because you said something about ColdFusion, and questioned if anyone uses it, or something to that effect. If you're genuine in your questioning of ColdFusion use and not just flamebaiting, let's talk.

I work for Adobe, and I am the evangelist for ColdFusion. I can say categorically that people do use ColdFusion.

But what are the hard numbers that we can quantify? From our sales, community and web teams I can grab the following numbers:

• 12,000+ companies are customers of ColdFusion
• 350+ ColdFusion user groups are in existence
• 11,000+ copies of ColdFusion Server and ColdFusion Builder are downloaded every month.

Number of developers is a trickier issue. There is no direct way of tracking this. We can look at sales, but there isn't a typical ratio of server to developer. So we have to rely on estimates. We have recently had some conflicting data here. Third-party numbers that we have access to say one thing; our internal estimates based on older models say another thing. Both agree that we've gained developers, but the numbers are too far apart to be useful. We are in the processes of doing a ColdFusion developer census using a new method, so if you are a ColdFusion developer please participate.

Numbers are great, but let me introduce you to the community of ColdFusion developers.

First, you probably met some when you dissed ColdFusion on Twitter. As you discovered the ColdFusion twitters are passionate, but you may not have seen how helpful they are. Ask a real question about ColdFusion on twitter something like:

• Do #ColdFusion Excel features let you work with xls files only, or does it handle xlsx?
• Does outer joining work for objects work in HQL in #ColdFusion?
• What's the CFscript equivalent of cfquery tag in #ColdFusion 9?

I assure you, you'll get the best responses 140 characters can buy.

Also check out the community on StackOverflow. We also have one at Dzone. And at github. We've got a small but growing presence in all of them.

Now, you might notice that participation is constant, but not a tremendous amount. That's because the ColdFusion Community tends to be a bit insular. As a whole the community is working on it, but when you look at ColdFusion only resources like CFTalk and ColdFusionBloggers.org you'll see constant volume.

Finally, if you look at the number of open source projects available at Riaforge.org, you'll see again that there are definitely OS collaboration around ColdFusion.

Finally check out the list of ColdFusion conferences. A third of them are new conferences and have popped up over the past 3 years. We're seeing a shift from huge national conferences to smaller regional conferences in the US, as well as a few more international events and activities mostly in Europe.

All of these point to a vibrant community that is engaged and loves using ColdFusion. Are we the biggest community? No, and no one will dispute that. But we are a community; we're evidently still growing in numbers, and still branching out into new social networks. We use ColdFusion, and we love it.

To sum up this long answer to your short question: Do people still use ColdFusion? Hell yeah.

Now, you might be changing your argument, from "no one uses it" to "well it's not good because…" Well if that's the case, I have another blog post for you to read.

Get it? FUD for thought… I kill me.

I was all fired up and started writing some stuff up about FUD, and why you shouldn't do it, and what not.

So I started writing, and it felt really familiar, like I read it somewhere else… so I did some searches for key phrases and turned up this post on not resorting to FUD. It quotes me… talking about FUD in my forthcoming book.

I just totally almost plagiarized myself. Here what I had to say about FUD:

FUD stands for "fear, uncertainty and doubt." Though the phrase was coined in the mid 1970's, the concept has been around since the first caveman traded a rock to another one "in case the mastodons come back." More recently it's been marketers, public relations flacks, and sales guys who use this on you. Basically, the idea is to tell you something that will make you afraid of a rival's tool, enough so that you invest with the FUD'er.

At a smaller level, this happens in the workplace a lot. Developers with experience with proprietary tools spread rumors about crazy license implications of open source tools. Open source adherents spread horror stories of hidden code in proprietary tool kits.

It's ultimately self-defeating. At best it can win people some sort of short term gains, but in the long term, it is a road to nowhere. Eventually people wise up to be bullied repeatedly and some people speak out. This spread of information inoculates the rest and the technique becomes ineffective. [from chapter "Create Trust"]

I stand by that. FUD does ruin credibility. It hurts you, it hurts your listeners. Even if your product is better, talk about why your product is better, not why the other guy's is worse.

I've seen a variety of opinions on the announcement that this year will be the final year for CFUnited. Some are lamenting, some are worried, and some are FUD that I'm sure will be turned into self-promotion. I figured as ColdFusion Evangelist I should weigh in.

Disclaimer: I never attended CFUnited before I joined Adobe. I am a long time Max attendee, and a cf.Objective fan. Those were my gateways to the community. So I'm not trying to say you shouldn't be nostalgic for CFUnited, but I am not.

CFUnited's end is decidedly an event on the ColdFusion Community timeline. Adam calls it the end of the Silver Age of the ColdFusion community, referencing the comic book era.

I see it as a bit of creative destruction. See in the past few years, we've seen the rise of smaller regional conferences:

• RIAUnleashed
• NCDevCon
• cf.Objective ANZ
• BFusion/BFlex
• RIA Adventure Cruise
• D2W
• CFDevCamp

They aren't limited to ColdFusion, but all include it, and put ColdFusion in front of more new eyes than CFUnited.

This is of course in addition to our long-standing specialized or regional conferences with ColdFusion content:

• webDU
• cf.Objective
• Scotch on the Rocks

The great thing about all of the conferences I mention here both new and older is that they are cheap for attendees and sponsors, attract new people, and have a low barrier for entry. That means that people who aren't long-standing members of the ColdFusion community can break in and get a chance to speak despite not being a "name."

I see CFUnited's end as an opportunity for Adobe and the ColdFusion community to invest in more of these local specialized and regional events. We now have more resources collectively to do that together.

So I issue a challenge to everyone lamenting CFUnited's demise. Show up for CFUnited's last hurrah, and then invest in one of the other conferences. Or start your own…

Hi, how you doing? Your day going okay? Cool. I'm not looking to fight you. It got a little heated on Twitter. I know our community is passionate; sometimes that "passion" becomes "an angry mob of flame warriors."

You think bad things about ColdFusion. You're certainly entitled to your opinions, but I think you're mistaken. I think it's possible you haven't tried ColdFusion in the past few years, or ever. If you haven't, I invite you do so.

But let's be civil. We can disagree without it being a whole flame war thing.

Let me respond to your issues, we'll see if I can't persuade you to see things from a different view. First, let's start with why you say you dislike ColdFusion:

"ColdFusion encourages spaghetti code."

It doesn't. Unfortunately, it enables it, just like most other languages. However, we do have a number of features and community driven projects around enabling well-architected applications. Those include:

• Custom Tags or encapsulated views.
• CFCs, which are analogous but not equivalent to classes in Java.
• Easily Created SOAP based web services.
• Various community REST based web service projects.
• Various frameworks.

All of these combine to make it easy to create well-encapsulated, modern projects in ColdFusion. Here's an example of some modern ColdFusion code I used in a recent project.

"ColdFusion is just tags."

Actually it isn't. In addition to CFML, ColdFusion also supports CFScript. Most of the core features that CFML enables are available here. There are a few view related features (for example AJAX driven html form tags) that aren't implemented in CFScript because they don't make sense to.

One thing I've found about writing in both script and markup is that writing an app entirely in markup is painful and silly, as much as writing entirely in script is. I've come around to the idea that views should be in markup. Views contain hierarchies of content, containers, and other features that are easy to express and understand in markup. On the other hand, when you are dealing with large libraries of functions and business logic while trying to figure out what each piece of code does the less extraneous characters the better. That's why scripting is better on back-end code.

ColdFusion enables both. Do what you like, where you like. You have the choice in CF to do so.

"ColdFusion isn't free."

It isn't. Sure there are open source clones out there, and if you like the rest of what I have to say, but can't get over this, feel free to check them out.

ColdFusion is a productive language. If you look at Total Cost of Ownership versus similar products, you'll see that the cost of licensing is a small part. Development and maintenance is the largest chunk of TCO. Every solution pays this cost, and a language that is more productive will be cheaper in the long run, despite upfront licensing costs.

All that being said, I skipped out on one part of the story here: development is free. The developer version of ColdFusion is free. If you do move to a production environment, shared development, testing, and disaster recovery servers are free too. The IDE, ColdFusion Builder, isn't free, but there are free and open source alternatives. If you are using ColdFusion for educational purposes the server and IDE are both free.

ColdFusion does have low cost hosting out there. Additionally, ColdFusion 9 tweaked the EULA with regards to cloud hosting, making it both possible, and economical.

It's not free. It costs money. But we at Adobe feel that we provide a lot of value for that cost.

"ColdFusion doesn't have any open source projects."

Riaforge.org, which requires included projects to be open source, lists 716 ColdFusion projects and 39 ColdFusion Builder Extensions at the time of this post. Brian Rinaldi's open source list lists 352 projects.

Enough with your arguments let me tell you why I think ColdFusion rocks:

I've already written extensively on this, so I'll sum up and invite you to check out some of these other posts.

ColdFusion makes hard things easy. Most things in ColdFusion are single operations. By "most things", I mean "things that every web programmer has to do but other technology solutions don't integrate at a language level." Send an email? Wrap 2 lines of code around your message content. Talk to an LDAP server? One ColdFusion tag call (or script object.) I don't have to manage database connections. ColdFusion has features that make it easy to work with results from a database. It doesn't take me 80 lines of code to talk do an HTTP get request.

ColdFusion already integrates with lots of technology. Need to talk to LDAP, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office or a Java Portlet server? ColdFusion comes equipped to do so. Need to integrate some Java or .NET project into your application? ColdFusion can talk to either. Need to talk to printers or cell phones via SMS? ColdFusion can do it. The great thing here is that I don't have to search for and rely on third-party code to do so. I can if I want to but for a lot of these commonly used technologies, ColdFusion already talks to them.

ColdFusion can play many roles in a web application stack. Need to build a classic HTML driven web application, or and AJAX driven site? ColdFusion can handle that. Want to build a Flash based rich application? ColdFusion has special protocols that make it a snap to call from Flash, again right out of the box. Need to write a SOAP or REST API for your application? ColdFusion can do that, usually by just writing an easy façade on your existing code. Need to build an IM or SMS driven application without a web based front end… Yep, ColdFusion has you covered.

I hope you made it this far. I hope I caused you to question your stance. I can even hope that I encouraged you to try ColdFusion before you dismiss it.

Looking to get started with ColdFusion Builder? There's an eSeminar on just that very topic today at 11am PDT /2pm EDT/7pm GMT.

Check it out, and while you're at it, check out the whole list of upcoming eSeminars.

We just got done with Adobe Developer Week (recordings here), a week-long collection of web seminars designed to help people get up to speed with Flash Platform tools and services. The only problem with it was that it was a little North American focused in scheduling.

The European team is looking to bring the same kind of event to our European friends. The event is called "Build an App in a Week." The idea is to walk you through all the parts of the Flash Platform that can be used to build multiscreen applications.

I'll be showing how ColdFusion can be used to power the back-end of an application, regardless of what type of screen it is on. My intention is to show how the old ColdFusion mantra of "Make hard things easier" applies in the mobile application world. Feel free to invite other developers, especially ones that don't use ColdFusion

The ColdFusion session will be on Friday June 11th, at 12:00PM GMT.

Make sure you check out the sessions by my coworkers too.