ColdFusion and the Web Application Market

>  You are so completely missing the point! I did *not* say there was >  "less work" in ASP. I said more job openings mean more competition >  which usually means more candidates and therefore it's harder to get >  the jobs. Which is why I have been hell bent on trying to point out to you, coldfusion jobs in Australian is slim. So all those developers have had to move on to other technologies just to survive. The increase in ASP and .Net jobs in Australia is increasing, and that is what makes it hard for someone like myslef to continue using CF. If there are no jobs for that technology what does that say!! >  Hello? FarCry? OpenXCF? And a number of other SourceForge projects. >  What about Fusebox - freely developed for the community - and now Mach >  II? Ok farcry is there, but what else is out there? Compared to the rest of the langauges, not to mention a little too late! > By that logic, you'd give away all your applications... Should you sell >  an application for $100 or $1,000? It depends on the market. If all >  you're doing is selling one-offs, you should charge *more* not less. If >  you're doing a lot of repeat business, you can afford to charge less >  and make more money. Our code is shared between clients that is how we keep their costs down and are able to devliver quality work to them, what we charge gets us the repeat business.. But still the intial costs are always questioned when setting up a CF server.. >  ColdFusion the language? Yes, they are. ColdFusion the 'official' >  product? Maybe, maybe not. But this all started with "ColdFusion is >  dying" and I'm saying that's nonsense - the fact that there is >  worthwhile competition in this market shows that ColdFusion is far from >  dying. Companies don't enter a dying market if they want to make money. >  Why do you think New Atlanta are in this business? They're not a >  charity. And they're not the only alternative CF engines. New Atlanta are playing on the fact that they are offering what CF should have had in the product, plus they are leveraging of the fact that developers know CF and for deployment it is cheap and means that the developer could potential keep using CF as a langauge not as a software, as their software has enhancements that WILL not work under normal CF servers. >  Someone else commented that ColdFusion probably has one of the most >  negative communities of any language out there and I'm beginning to see >  signs of that. PHP for example has a community that is positive and >  aggressive and go-getting - despite many flaws in their technology. Yet >  here we see "Macromedia needs to create jobs for us" posts. No company >  marketed PHP - the community made it successful, the community >  evangelized and battled to get PHP into companies. Any company >  listening to you go on about "CF is dying" is hardly going to want to >  invest in it, are they? No its not negativety is called passion, it is called being able to survive in a market that is not being supported. The bottom line Sean is that if I was to remain a CF developer I would not be working full time, if I have ASP skills which I do as well as .Net then I have more chances of moving straight into another job. But god forbid that this job ended tomorrow, and I want to remain a CF developer where do I go, the jobs are not there compared to ASP .Net, perl and PHP. That is the point we are trying to point out to you, it is no good saying you are a die hard CF developer. Because the reality is that we have to live and survive in a market that is now being taken over by M$ and other free langauges. From a carrer perspective, I would look at the papers and see where the market is. That would be like me learning russian and using russian as my native language and goiong to an english speaking country, I would not last without knowing the langauge. The point of this is that if there are now Jobs, and no new jobs comming into the market place then the langauge will die. If you're smart look at the company Commodore Business Machines, and the Amiga computer. I was die hard programmer on that platform till almost then end when I switched to the PC as others did and this was doomed becuase they figured we are still growing a little but not enough to pay the bills. In your case Macromedia has more money thta sense on this issue, they can afford to just drop CF and rest on the rest of their products. But how can you not see that if a company is not deciding to use CF anymore, that CF is still growing. If CF is still growing, why is is that .Net jobs are increasing by 800% compared to maybe 1% for CF?