@bdw429s (or anyone else here, for that matter) do you see a lot of client code, or are you mostly working on Ortus projects? I am just wondering what %age of CFML out there is five-tags,

myAccountsPage.cfm

(etc) which has a query at the top and some mark-up & a

<cfoutput>

and maybe a

<cfif>

at the bottom, and it works fine? And they have no aspiration to do their work any differently.

I split my time between Ortus open source products and Ortus client projects, but Ortus's client base isn't a good measure of your question IMO since we primarily work with • people already using our frameworks, etc • people converting to our frameworks, etc

Why? Wondering about what features CFML would actually benefit from having added. I mean I love safe-nav, spread / rest operators, static classes etc, higher-order functions. And I imagine a bunch of other ppl here do too. But I suspect 95% of ppl would like a

<cfloop>

that counts backwards automatically

The code base where I work is 60% five-tags 😲 anytime I have to add a feature or fix something in that old legacy code I refactor.

FWIW, I rarely see cilent's using "new" features like higher order functions, largely due to lack of knowledge about them and understanding of what they do. Or maybe because their projects are largely older code, even if they used MVC, etc to organize it.

OFC. And I also expect the "older style" bods perhaps don't want/need new features anyhow.

Are older style bods the majority?

Is there a difference between the CF users and Lucee users?

Not necessarily, but it feels like we have more Lucee people. Possibly because a good number of our clients are wanting us to help them convert from ACF to Lucee.

Are older style bods the majority?

Yeah, probably, but it's hard to put a pin on it.

Interesting.

Back when I used to do consulting, nearly every codebase I got to see was 5-tags, except where I'd been brought in specifically to guide them in architecting a new codebase and I always advocated a framework and "better" (CFC-based) code. But, yeah, huge amount of CFML-in-the-wild was that 5-tag kinda stuff... That said, I haven't done CFML consulting for a decade now (but I would bet many of those companies are still doing the ol' 5-tag style).

So, I will tell you, the vast majority of the code I get to see from our clients is tag based, and uses stuff that's been around since CF9. It is a joy to encounter a modern, well written codeset (and they exist). I always try to advocate for folks to do new work in a modern way, but honestly a whole lot of them are 9-5 folks that have little interest in learning an entirely new methodology. It is a tough fight, but one I think we have to win in the long term if CF is to stick around past my old butt retiring 🙂

Adobe does not have a very good track record so far of encouraging better practices with CFML... the code snippets in the docs were absolutely atrocious for years in that respect! Have the docs improved?

old style bods probably don't need the docs anymore, which is why I think if adobe.com/coldfusion site could be revamped to only encourage modern best practices/tooling and specifically target the new bods CF will have a better chance of sticking around past your old butt Mark.

Have the docs improved?

No. The examples are appalling.

get rid of it and link to cfdocs.org 😂

In my personal experience... For any new development, I almost exclusively use cfscript. However, having worked on many larger sized applications that have been around for 15+ years, I see the biggest challenge to modernizing an older code base is that the time that would be required to convert everything from old school tag based code to cfscript is not usually in (or the best use of) the clients budget. The second challenge I have seen a lot of is that a client may have several different developers over the years, each with their own opinions of how the code should be organized, then they start re-factoring, but never finish which leads to a very confusing hybrid of old/modernish cfml. Unless I can get a client to commit to a full modernization project, I just keep whatever changes I make in line with the current architecture to avoid creating a bigger mess.

cfscript.me and the CFFormat tool can get you a lot of mileage, but only if you can get the team to agree on a style guide and use it. Devs who really don't care won't put in the effort.

I would like to see, and I say this as I know MANY CF Devs in the same situation as I am in, A book written in the last decade about CF Development. Things have changed since the last WAK. Half the concepts are lost as A) We are not allowed to use something not published by the vendor, or B) we are not given time to even try new concepts if the old concept works. I know that sounds dumb, but that is the industry I am in. Additionally, Dreamweaver needs to bring back CF Support. Seriously, running Dreamweaver 8, which is old enough to drive if it was human. Lastly, Adam, long ago there was a script to migrate cf to php, would love to see the reverse. The author was brilliant in their work.

@Evil Ware "We are not allowed to use something not published by the vendor" -- Adobe aren't capable of writing decent documentation about modern CFML, let alone a book, so that's a non-starter I think 😞

He probably can't use that vs code extension as it's not published by Adobe

I know, I have spoken to Adobe Coldfusion support in the last decade. 😕 I can dream of a world where Adobe channels the modern way of FREEMIUM, and gives away standard edition for free and then adds some weight and support behind their product. I know Adobe could if they wanted to, but imagine if Adobe decided to take on Wordpress and Drupal with CF, throw in their AEM product for small businesses with JAMSTACK slide in as a drop in. Oh well, I can dream. :)

Evil, did you listen to the round table talk with Ben, Charlie, Gert and Mark? Dreaming like you do is not uncommon.

Adobe are working on an official extension for VS Code, apparently. So there's something you can dream about 🙂

I'll never forget when Elisha came to Austin with the Adobe roadshow in 2019 or early 2020 to talk about the next release of ACF. She had code samples, maybe from the beta, all tag-based, not scoped correctly -- I felt bad for her since obviously she didn't write it but she was pitching it to 20 of us in a hotel conference room and nobody had told her it was garbage until I opened my fat mouth

I hope you didn't do that mid-presentation 😉

I did

HA

I was as nice as I could be about it though, cause it wasn't her fault

I would have told her afterwards. No point derailing a presentation.

It was a small group and the Q&A was kinda 'during'

ah yeah, fair cop then

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Well this is a fantastic thread guys, real nice. Ending my week on a high note, cool.

We aim to please, @Mark Takata (Adobe), you know us! 🙂

Nobody takes your job without a lot of Kevlar. 🙂

I mean, luckily I have an ego the size of Jupiter & my mom says I'm handsome, so I can take a bit of flack.

I nominate that as Adobe's new corporate tagline

Adobe ColdFusion

"Our mom says we're handsome."

I'll start writing checks

This is, easily, the best idea I've heard since cfmobile.

For most of my life my mom has told everyone she could that I am a genius... purely on the basis that I got 100% on some standardized test in the first grade.... I have yet to do an actual unbiased IQ test to confirm or deny my genius... It's best to just listen to your mother.

If you live a sinful life, your penitence will involve forcibly attending the meeting where cfmobile was advanced from the larval stage to 'this is a good idea worth doing' stage, and you won't be allowed to speak

I met the engineer who was the lead on that at a lunch once at Summit. Before I could tell him my thoughts on it he said "I just want you to know, I'm so sorry. It seemed like a great idea in concept. But obviously, not how it ended up." Honestly I felt really bad for the dude, like... damn. Kind of like the guy who green-checked the design for the Pontiac Aztek. :)

I don't think the concept behind cfmobile was sound, regardless of the implementation.

Hey, that's cool. Glad he owned it

Sean, are you also not a believer in Ionic/React Mobile, etc?

I fought hard against that when it was first proposed (years ago) and it was dropped at the time. Unfortunately, it seems no one was around to fight against it again when someone decided to propose it again 😞

BUT WHAT IF YOU COULD

Over the years, there's been so much weird, misguided cr*p added to CF instead of focusing on making the language itself better and decoupling it from the HTTP server so it can be used more widely.

Don't clip my wings maaaaaan.

And the REST implementation is just horrendous -- no wonder people prefer to use Taffy instead, or ColdBox REST (or, heck, even FW/1).

<cfform format="flash"> still gives me nightmares

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There have been many other <cfhorrors> that my mind has tried to block out... I tell ya, if I knew back in 2006 what I know now, I might have actually taken the job as CF product manager 🙂

Holy shit Scott, warn a guy before you post that lol. I'm now cleaning coffee off my keyboard 😄

I think killing flash was a big mistake, they should have made it open source. YOu can barely animate a spinning circle in javascript and CSS, meenwhile in flash you can animate a complete game or movie.

I was offered both the PM role and the evangelist role, after the Adobe acquisition, along with head of QA for Flash Player, but decided to take a team lead role with hosted services... which was ultimately a mistake but, hey...

see I'd pay license money for actual

<cfhorror>

Flash was a nightmare. So full of security issues. I worked on the Flash Player team for a summer, BTW, helping with the ActionScript compiler test suite...

I paid for a couple of licenses for Adobe Flash Paper

I say if you are going to bring something back that should never come back, it should be Spectra! you could store all the data in JSON now instead of WDDX!

security? who cares. Flash and AS3 was amazing.

two, it's a salve you put on code you know is a horror and you need it to temporarily not be horrible, but it's a Faustian bargain and if you don't refactor before midnight then Adobe gets your actual soul and Mark can retire to the Caribbean

@Evil Ware Entire high-performance game engines are written in JS and run in the browser these days. That's a lot of why Flash has died out.

Marketing to the wrong people. Adobe flash had a cult-like following among low end indie game makers and comic creators.

I was lucky enough to work as a contractor for 2 Advanced and let me tell you this was amazing shit. I didn't get to work on their main website, but the kind of creative content that was being done in Flash was ahead of its time.

After Macromedia acquired Allaire, Jer was put in charge of the Macromedia web team and he was pretty obsessed with Flash and Flex and we built a prototype of the main macromedia.com site that was pretty much all Flash. It ran like a dog, so we scaled it back to "just" the auto-expanding navigation bar on the site. It still ran like a dog. But it did push the Flash Player team to make a lot of improvements 🙂 There was a version of the Macromedia Exchange (for extensions/plugins) that was all Flash (or all Flex?) for a while and a version of the Online Store too. Ultimately, those were all dropped because the performance and usability were terrible.

everything in flash had to be lazy loaded, it was a must.

My 3rd language was ActionScript. Honestly, there's only a few languages I dislike more. It always felt clunky and just a couple features away from really being to do good things.

that studio had their hands on some touch screens and they were doing interactive "customize your Nissan" kiosks at car shows. I worked on the transition animations between the main sections of the experience. I needed a full time job so I took a normal html/css web design job and did lots of flash presentations for product micro sites but eventually the shopping cart 2.0 project took all of my time, then when I wanted to do more flash talks about flash exiting the world started. wow Adobe, you messed up.