ColdFusion and the Web Application Market

>By showing that ASP (and ASP.NET) are not really "free" at all - they   >don't include much of the functionality that comes free with CF and   >they are harder to develop sites with (therefore the initial deployment   >cost is higher). There's plenty of information on Macromedia's website   >to help and Ben Forta has more stuff on his site too. Since I know CF and ASP.NET both quite well, I can say with full confidence what ASP.NET doesn't have that CF does: 1) FTP (actually, this is .NET in general - there's no FTP classes) 2) CFGRID, CFTREE, etc. (those utterly useless Java applets). I can tell you what ASP.NET has that CF doesn't: 1) Much better implementation of OOP 2) Events 3) Better session management, and different types 4) External process session management 5) Better caching mechanisms 6) Much, much better transaction management 7) Built in configuration file management 8) An IDE that actually belongs in the 21st century, like letting me create a solution that contains multiple projects and doesn't work like molasses like DW is. 9) Serializable objects (actually .NET in general) 10) The whole damn .NET library - including image creation, COM integration that works, asynchronous operation, thread management, etc. 11) Interactive debugging As for Forta's silly little propaganda piece (which actually ashames me, as a CF developer), let's see the CF example that allows me to do a <cftransaction> across two databases.  Oh wait, can't do that.  I can't even do nested transactions.  Sorry, why should I hope and wait for MM to maybe perhaps put even basic features like this in, when heck, I can use Java or .NET _now_ and have them?  It only took you guys _6 years_ to fix CFHTTP, so I'm not holding out for <cftransaction> to work any better than it does now. And by the time ASP.NET 2.0 comes along, CF is in serious trouble: 1) Layout management via Master Pages.  This one feature will make me forever forget about using CF ever again. 2) Login controls 3) Built in, extensible via OO, composite controls that allow for much easier, faster CRUD screen creation 4) An even better IDE, that belongs in the 21st century 5) FTP classes 6) yadda, yadda, yadda. Oh lets not forget the third party support.  Want an O/R Mapper for .NET?   There's lots to choose from.  Want an O/R Mapper for CF?  Zero.  I'd like one from MM, but you guys seem to be busy pushing things like Flash and Breeze. Here's the state of the union: There's no compelling reason for anybody to use CF anymore.  Especially if they want to use OO in their daily life.  Before you give me the standard line about CFCs, remember that CFCs don't have: Interfaces No way to finalize either methods or classes Static methods Overloaded methods Constructors (and really, just how silly is this?  What was going through MM's minds when they didn't bother to put this in?) Oh, and let's not forget the whole silliness with "var", "this", "variables", etc. And of course, there was not even one CFC class beyond the base CFC class offered.  This is akin to Sun offering Java with the "Object" class, and nothing else.  I would have at least liked to have some sort of collection object, so that I don't have to write my own just so that I can have an aggregate of objects (and no, a structure doesn't count). Yeah, you're seeing some growth.  The harsh reality is that competing techs are growing faster.  And therein lies the problem.  There's not enough adoption of CF.  And really, who can blame them?  I can use free stuff in the Java world like Eclipse, Tomcat, JBoss and write awesome web apps.  I can pay $1500 for MSDN, and get VS.NET and lots of server software, and even 15 licenses of Win XP, Windows 2000, etc and write awesome web apps.  I can pay MM $1500 for DevNet, and I get a version of CF that puts a warning on top of every page that breaks all the XML I write and XHTML compliance just because you guys are so paranoid about piracy.   And I can't even run it on a QA server, because your license doesn't allow for it.  Thanks for all the fish.