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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

ColdFusion is an interesting referent ... even as an Adobe subscriber I was surprised to just find out it still exists.

Not as popular as it used to be, but definitely still around. The open source version (Lucee, formerly Railo) sees a lot of use as well. As for Adobe, I think it's treated as a step-child they acquired along with the rest of the Macromedia IP. I've actually been to trade shows where one part of the company was there and they didn't even know what ColdFusion is.

I would so love if Adobe would just spin off Macromedia again. I remember working on Flex frontends with CF engineers in the early 2000s and ...I mean, there is no reason that couldn't be updated to be a killer framework now if it worked with modern stacks.

Not surprising, but sad that Adobe flacks don't even know what it is. The world would be a lot more interesting if Macromedia was still a going concern, maybe aligned with Unity or some other ecosystem for game production.

>maybe aligned with Unity or some other ecosystem for game production

I think I recall Flash did try to offer some type of iPhone app development features towards the end of it's useful life but Jobs effectively sentenced Flash to death so most everyone had jumped ship by this point.

We built some games in Flash/Air that compiled to native iOS apps... they basically bundle the whole flash player into the game. It was and still is a working way to make an iOS game, it's just that Adobe no longer supports the plugin version... and you can't really trust them to support anything else going forward, so most devs moved to other languages and stacks like Unity.

ColdFusion is quite useful for internal (intranet) data search and reporting apps/pages that don't need lots of JavaScript eye-candy nor layer-happy frameworks. It makes it easy to stick hyperlinks in HTML data tables so managers can click to drill up, down, and all around to study data from different dimensions. There's also an open-source implementation or two, although I found the charting tools of the commercial version to be more mature.

I'd much rather use ColdFusion than Microsoft Power BI, if I had to choose. (MS-BI is probably a better fit for non-programmers.)

It's a whole weird world that just doesn't die. I worked at a place with ~ half a million lines of CF last year. There is a thing called CF Script which has vaguely JS-like syntax which can be used instead of the XML-based logic. There are even open-source frameworks built on top, with religious quotes in the documentation for some reason[0].

[0] https://github.com/coldbox/coldbox-platform

I know Luis, the creator of Coldbox. It's a great framework, and the quotes reflect his personal values, but other than finding that in the documentation, you won't find yourself being beat over the head with scripture. In years past, there were several other CF frameworks, and none could be characterized as having religious quotes, just the one :-)

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