Site redesigns always take longer than expected. But in the case of manufacturing marketplace MFG.com, a major overhaul of its site ended up taking three years. “The whole team has felt as though we were hand-cuffed for the past three years and couldn’t execute on all the great ideas,” MFG.com founder and CEO Mitch Free tells me.
But now those cuffs are off. Last night, MFG.com opened up its brand new site, redesigned from the ground up. MFG.com is a surprisingly successful B2B marketplace for sourcing manufactured parts, with more than $600 million in outstanding requests for quotes on the site (which is up from $50 million less than two years ago). Jeff Bezos and the German Samwer brothers are investors, as is Fidelity Ventures.
When Free launched the site way back in 2000, he built it on an older version of ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap. It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology, given its growth. Only now does it finally have a modern architecture, built on Java and designed to scale. The new architecture will now also be able to support third-party developers via APIs, which companies can also use to integarte MFG.com into their existing business and ERP systems.
Most of the changes to the site are on the backend. MFG.com finally integrates its 2006 acquisition of Sourcingparts.com, which will allow Free to to pursue a Salesforce.com-like strategy in the supplier relationship marketing (SRM) industry, and tie that to his marketplace. Instead of selling SRM software to manufacturers for $100,000 a pop, he is offering the same software over the Web on a much cheaper subscription basis.
The new site also now supports multiple languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese) and 50 different currencies. The big growth market for MFG.com over the past few years has been China, connecting global product companies with Chinese manufacturers. Now with local languages and currencies, Free wants to go after the internal Chinese-to-Chinese market as well. “Previously,” says Free, “the MFG.com platform was only in English and we were only attractive to Chinese companies who were fluent in English and export oriented. We anticipate a significant amount of China to China business to begin happening on the platform that is virtually non-existent today.” Watch out, Alibaba.
They really need a new logo. Whenever I see it, it looks like OMFG.com
The redesign looks really well done compared to what it used to look like, but I definitely agree, there needs to be a new logo. Seriously, how’d they miss that?
Agreed, that logo is actually pretty funny.
I would love to hear if other readers of this post agree with Erick’s opinion about ColdFusion. It is up to version 9 and claims to be stronger than ever.
Good screening of suppliers will be clutch with MFG.
Would be interesting to hear from someone at MFG.com how they compare to global marketplaces like Alibaba.
Alibaba.com has been dissapointing to figure out who’s a native manufacturer of a product…or just a supplier.
Alibaba has gotten out of hand as a good marketplace for products or parts…
Understood that MFG.com would be more than just the purchase…given a salesforce-like control panel of sorts.
MG55,
Most other online directories or marketplaces for manufacturing are dedicated to the discovery phases of the sourcing process – finding someone to build, make or develop their products. MFG.com certainly serves those needs; but MFG.com goes deeper in providing features and tools that serve buyers and suppliers deeper into those processes. Collaboration, development, IP protection, and relationship management are also strongly supported in the MFG.com marketplace.
Also, what this restructuring represents is combining 2 businesses – sourcingparts.com (EMEA) and MFG.com (Americas & APAC) – into a single, global platform that serves the complexities and unique requirements that manufacturers require to manage or participate in extended supply chains.
Since when is ColdFusion outmoded technology? One of the largest sites on the web, MySpace, is still running primarily on ColdFusion.
Over 70% of the Fortune 500 use ColdFusion as does a large share of the US government.
According to Adobe the number of CF developers continues to grow. There are two open source version of CFML, name another web language that can make that claim?
Eric are you link baiting with that comment?
“One of the largest sites on the web, MySpace, is still running primarily on ColdFusion.” ‘Nuff said.
MySpace is not running on ColdFusion – it actually runs on ASP .NET and uses BlueDragon (http://en.wikip...wiki/BlueDragon). From my understanding, MySpace hasn’t been using ColdFusion for at least 3-4 years now. They still maintain some of their old URL scheme for a variety of reasons though – which could lead one to believe that they are still using CF.
Did you READ that link? Bluedragon is Coldfusion running under .NET.
Seriously, cut and paste ruins the internet dude.
MySpace certainly isn’t still using ColdFusion. They just keep the file names the same. In fact the myspace debacle of uptime was largely tied to many other issues.
Erick, your not alone in misconceptions of CF. You should really check out version 9.
“outmoded technology, given its growth. Only now does it finally have a modern architecture, built on Java”
erm.. Coldfusion is built on Java, and is far more capable than this article suggests. It drives me crazy how quickly it’s always discounted as a low end app platform.
MFG outgrew ColdFusion’s capabilities. Here’s a direct quote from CEO Mitch Free:
“MFG.com was built on ColdFusion and a victim of it’s own success. In 2000, I decided to build the platform on CF because it was fast to develop in and cheap to license, I was bootstrapping, had very little cash and thought to myself “let’s see if the concept catches on and if so, I’ll go back and rebuild it in a more scalable technology”. Well, I Iet six years pass before deciding to bite the bullet and rebuild, which took three years. For the past three years we have been pushing CF and our data model to the limits and constantly “fire fighting” to keep it up and running.
The new platform is coded in java and built upon a data model that we obsessed over for scalability and extensibility. We have architected in such a way that can begin to expose an API and allow third parties to develop niche applications to enhance the value marketplace.”
All due respect, but sorry Mitch I can’t see how you think JSP is more “scalable” then ColdFusion. What was your data model built with in 2000? There were no CFCs and the only framework around might have been Fusebox. A lot has changes since then – there are many options when it comes to full MVC, IoC/DI frameworks as well as ORM support in the form of open source and commercial (Adobe). You outgrew CF of 2000, you didn’t outgrow CF.
C’mon Todd… the CEO said it, so it must be true.
I’ll echo most of the sentiments in the comments. The CEO made a remark about CF. Do we know the CEO’s qualifications to make such a judgement? Is he a techie? What version of CF were they on? What database were they running? What was their infrastructure like?
Facts would have been nice to back up statements like “outmoded technology”. I suppose if I wrap my 1990 Honda around a tree because I was driving like a moron, that means nobody should buy a new Honda, huh?
If I “update” my 1990 Honda (assuming it wasn’t wrapped around a tree) with a 2009 Toyota, does that mean Hondas are “outmoded”?
If I don’t change the oil on my 1990 Honda and perform proper maintenance, is it permissible for me to publish an article denouncing Honda and declaring it inferior?
The logic (or lack thereof) is faulty and the article is, at best, irresponsible and sloppy “journalism”.
Perhaps the CF community is known for having somewhat of a pit-bull mentality when it comes to things like this. I have to imagine that there’s a good chance the wording was intention in order to elicit a response and generate some traffic. Either that, or the author is just ignorant. Cheap ploy or ignorance. Pick one and be proud.
Charlie, I have posted earlier. I use to work for MFG.com.
There were running ColdFusion 8 with MS SQL 2000 backend. The database initially was created by a developer with little knowledge of database design. The structure was not sound. They made many attempts to bring in DBAs to fix the issue, but when you have years and years worth of technology built on twigs, it’s very scary to think about touching anything.
The real reason for going to JSP was when we acquired Sourcing Parts. They lacked the great pictures and beautiful interface, but was far superior in their backend development. The technologies weren’t compared. They figured they would combine the best of both worlds, Sourcing Parts developers with MFG.com designers. It wasn’t about ColdFusion being “outdated.”
Outmoded my arse. The news site runs on a scalable Java platform – well so does ColdFusion. I guess Java is outmoded then?
I’m trying to understand the logic behind CF being outmoded. The site was redesigned in using Java. CF runs on Java. CF is an updated, maintained language. Java is an updated, maintained language. Am I missing the outmoded part?
Following that kind of logic, maybe the next step for the site is to develop it in C since Java is programmed in C. Or maybe we can skip a step and program it in Assembly?
If the original site was built in 2000, it was probably using ColdFusion 4.5 or earlier. I would agree that version (and the design patterns probably in use back then) are a little outmoded.
ColdFusion as a current technology now owned by Adobe, running on top of Java, and in version 9 is by no means outmoded. It’s a shame they didn’t just upgrade and do their rewrite in CFML.
I think they would have found the current versions of ColdFusion to support “modern architecture” and be quite scalable.
That’s kind of like saying, “My Ford Model T can’t compete in Nascar any longer– i guess I’ll just have to switch to Chevy.”
Damn Fords…
Yes, it was an older version. I’ve clarified in the post. I’m not trying to pick a fight with all the Cold Fusion fans out there, just reporting what was told to me by the CEO. Cold Fusion didn’t work for them anymore for a variety of reasons. See my comment above with his quote.
Did you bother to ask if they even considered upgrading to the latest version of ColdFusion? And yes, you’ve “clarified” that in the post – 1 additional word.
Good job!
If you actually bothered to clarify the truth – that 10 year old technology was abandoned without considering upgrading to a modern version (I’m assuming, but I can’t know one way or the other because of your crappy reporting), you might not be attracting so much negative attention. The Model-T argument made by Brad Wood is actually pretty spot-on.
“When Free launched the site way back in 2000, he built it on ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap. It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology, given its growth. Only now does it finally have a modern architecture, built on Java and designed to scale.”
ColdFusion has a modern architecture, built on Java and designed to scale. It has had this since 2002, with the release of ColdFusion MX. There are plenty of large-scale, high-volume ColdFusion sites today, such as Voice of America’s voanews.com – one of the top thirteen news sites as measured by traffic, and within the top five of those as measured by uptime, according to Royal Pingdom, an uptime-monitoring company.
So, Mr. Free could have saved a lot of time and money by simply upgrading to a newer version of ColdFusion. Of course, that doesn’t make for as compelling a story, I suppose.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
Dave,
These are some good stats. I would almost include Politico in that list, but they use a different approach by having the site primarily run off static HTML files. That’s a really clever workaround as it hits the application server a lot less. Noentheless, their internal CMS and business logic is still managed by CF.
I just don’t understand this comment:
“It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology, given its growth. Only now does it finally have a modern architecture, built on Java and designed to scale.”
ColdFusion has been based on Java and VERY scalable for YEARS….since MX (version 6)…now on version 9.
Fact check please!
Cheers
I do love how it took 3 YEARS to redo in Java…. maybe if they re-did the ColdFusion code correctly they could have done it in 6 months tops and still leveraged Java that ColdFusion is built on top of… Hmmmm!
Pablo
“integarte” ? Never knew this word existed.
“Only now does it finally have a modern architecture, built on Java and designed to scale”
ColdFusion is a Java based web architecture and is also designed to scale if you use solid design patterns and an object based architecture. The entire language is built on Java Classes.
“The new architecture will now also be able to support third-party developers via APIs…”
This could have been implemented at any time during any of their development lifecycles. The limitation again has noting to do with the programming language of choice.
Check your facts. Also, spellchecker is built in to the web browser.
-Tony
“he built it on ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap. It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology”
Really? Source?
ColdFusion is used by:
- 12,000+ companies (20% increase since 2007)
- 778,000 developers
- 1,089,000 applications
ColdFusion has:
- 350+ user groups
- 10,000 downloads per month
Adobe has just released ColdFusion 9, will soon release ColdFusion Builder, and has road-mapped ColdFusion 10 and 11.
Outmoded?
http://www.adob...ngkit091509.pdf
Yeah ColdFusion is about as outmoded as .NET. Where else are you going to find such a rapid development environment with such strong community support? Odds are very good mfg.com spent a fortune on their site design, and could have spent a lot less if they had stayed with CF and simply rearchitected it using a good framework.
I see mfg.com is running JSP now. I haven’t seen JSP used in YEARS. You wanna talk outmoded, holy cow.
…which CF can do as well…
A little known fact for you….
The guys who originally built the BlueDragon CFML server and still build the OpenBlueDragon version, built it because, as Java developers, they really hated JSP. They liked the CFML tags, functions and the way it worked, but didn’t like that it was, originally, essentially a Windows only platform written in C++.
It says something when hardcore Java developers dislike their own scripting language so much that they write a new scripting engine based on someone else’s technology.
Obviously, Adobe’s ColdFusion is now also a Java application, as are all the CFML engines.
I suspect, just like CFML, PHP and asp, JSP has also moved on since then, so no reason its not a valid solution to their problem.
You have no idea about where ColdFusion is. You seriously sound like a dude that is out of touch, and no disrespect: like a fool.
ColdFusion 9, the best version yet has: drop dead simple Hibernate integration, is the single best abstraction layer for JAVA development ever, jam up easy RAD UI ‘widgets’, a great IDE, totally seamless .NET integration, native support for Adobe LSDS and Adobe AIR, and when you want to get you groovy on, hop into a Groovy class or heck get wild and compile some JAVA if you feel the need, all under one platform.
It is truly the coolest, most RAD, easily testable, totally greatest platform to build software on.
Go download a copy ColdFusion 9 and the ColdFUsion Builder IDE, then get ready to ROCK. Also did I mention that the community is developing some CREAM of the CROP frameworks and OS projects, plus they are a great fun group. There are several great MVC frameworks and a Spring clone (and again, if you want to integrate a ColdFusion project into and existing Spring project, go ahead, its easy as pie).
If you want to make web sites/http service software that is testable, maintainable, and thus cost effective check out Adobes ColdFusion 9.
I’m NOT an Adobe rep or affiliated with Adobe in any way. I’m just a TDD addicted script kiddy that has tried them all and this ColdFusion 9 is to cool for school, it kills PHP, .NET, Rubs, all of them, hands down.
You should apply to be…you just did a better marketing job than Allaire, Maromedia, and Adobe combines has done hehehehe…
Thanks Eric.
I am tired of the lies and misconceptions about ColdFusion.
ColdFusion is the best web development platform period.
All coders reading this… go try it out. It will blow your mind, make you laugh cause its so good and make you cry cause you just realized that you have been missing this fabulous technology for years.
ColdFusion 9 is really powerful and really cool.
I would hardly describe ColdFusion as outmoded. I would probably better describe the code base for this specific site being un-manageable.
So hang on – a site built in ColdFusion because it was ‘fast and cheap’ does great for 6 years, building this business from nothing. And then it takes 3 (!) years to redevelop the site with a ‘better’ technology? 3 years?! Rapid Application Development it’s not.
I definitely would not call a redesign project that takes 3 years a success.
I guess it depends on your definition of success; one is “an event that accomplishes it’s intended purpose”, which to me, sounds like this was a success. Success in anything, is hard to measure in a certain time frame, there’s always the big picture. I know there’s some sort of saying like ” Rome wasn’t build in a day” or something. I just don’t think it’s up to others to judge what success is to each individual. Just my non tech opinion. No offense intended.
RickM,
Any technology improperly used, can be seen as ‘decaying’ in the eyes of the customer. ColdFusion is now based in Java, and has been for 6 years.
As you point out, a tremendous amount of successful business are run on ColdFusion, but they also leverage the language in a professional manner that is in line with the modern needs of an internet business.
I would venture a guess that the original site wasn’t built to last decades. As with any business, sometimes there becomes a need to overhaul the ‘outmoded’ processes that were built for the company (but in no way ‘define’ the language, just that need and that programmer), and recreate a system that works and flows better for the client’s current needs.
It appears that either the company that did the redesign or the client itself did not fully comprehend the scalability and the massive amounts of data flow capabilities that ColdFusion has to offer. On top of this, there is usually a significant savings when using ColdFusion when working with true professional CF programmers. The time it takes to get code up to market can be minimal, so the cost of the development is smaller, even when factoring in the cost of the base server.
Ouch, it’s sad when an author undermines his own authority by displaying his ignorance. Let’s see …
“he built it on ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap … Only now does it finally have a modern architecture, built on Java and designed to scale”
Apparently Mr. Schonfeld is unaware that ColdFusion 9 is the 4th major version of the product built on [drumroll please] Java! So, now it’s built on Java as opposed to before when it was built on, um, Java.
Oh well, credibility is over rated anyway.
ROFLMAO. I think this may be the most hilarious blog comment I’ve read all year. ColdFusion RULES. ‘Nuff said.
Ouch, it’s sad when a paid ColdFusion “evangelist” from the Adobe marketing machine undermines his own authority by recommending a dying technology for his own benefit. Let’s see …
- very little international interest in Coldfusion (have 10 % of the worlds developers even heard of it…unlikely). Go outside the English speaking world and it is near nil.
- very small (but noisy community) that is just now starting to look _seriously_ at MVC and OO methods. Sure they have been around awhile, but let’s face it most of the CF implementations from 2006 back are big, ugly plates of spaghetti that need to be re-written. When proper processes and frameworks are applied there is no advantage to ColdFusion.
- Going to university? Good luck finding a CF course, but you can study Java and .net at any serious school to tie your over until you dive into your dying CF career.
- Any experienced Java developer with a foundation in one of the many frameworks and API’s can be just as productive. However, I agree that any entry level CF developer can deliver more than an entry level Java developer. However, it will be that same, but seasoned java developer that will re-write that pile of spaghetti in Java a year later.
- As mentioned in other comments check the Job postings!!! It is hard to get around that sorry little fact. Have a look at indeeddotcom trends and langpopdotcom (language popularity) and compare CF with Java or Microsoft languages. CF will always be that line at the bottom that looks like the x axis.
Apparently Mr. Forta is unaware that ColdFusion should be called [drumroll please] CULTfusion! So, now it’s dying a fast death as opposed to before when it was dying a, um, slow death. For me it will be good riddence just knowing other seroius developers will not have to suffer with it for years at various software houses like I did.
Oh well Ben, credibility is over rated anyway.
It’s interesting to see the viewpoints of the two extremes, the very pro and the very against. I too have experienced the pains of having to work with and rewrite bad ColdFusion code that was written between 1999-2001. At that time, the most popular open source framework would probably have been Fusebox (potentially very spaghetti-ish and definitely not OO at the time). The best you could do for reusing code without a community framework would have been to master custom tags, which was fine. Post CF5, you could also write functions using the cfscript syntax if you preferred the ECMA-style syntax. Custom tags and cfscript still rock to this day, but they are no subsitute for object-oriented programming. Luckily, the engineers and designers behind ColdFusion fixed this a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) with the implementation of CFCs, and the ColdFusion development methodology has continued to grow since then. OK, enough of the history lesson…
I often see ColdFusion get a lot of the bad rap for spaghetti code and poor scalability. How come the developers that WROTE the code rarely ever get the blame? When I had to refactor a ColdFusion site back in 2007, the original student programmer really set things up nicely by copying and pasting SQL queries throughout over 800 ColdFusion templates. As you can imagine, this became a pretty huge nightmare when it came time to re-normalize the database. ColdFusion should not get the blame because he never bothered to come up with a set of data access objects or even some sort of framework that would’ve kept all the business logic in one place and separate from the HTML. I definitely blame the developer for not studying the language better, doing some research, and putting its best features to use. If you think having developers who do not understand MVC is a problem particularly exclusive to the ColdFusion community, allow me to show you our graphic designer’s PHP code.
As far as this atttitude that ColdFusion apps are written poorly, many students taking Java classes today will either drop out of computer science or write bad code despite what may be taught in class. That doesn’t make Java a bad language but rather one you have to learn to master like any other craft.
As far as jobs go, you are probably right. I also get the impression that ColdFusion jobs are mainly concentrated in certain pockets of the world as opposed to some of the more prolifous languages like .NET. However, this whole notion of “I have more friends than you therefore I’m better” is pretty childish. A recent IT supervisor at my organization bought into the ColdFusion FUD a while ago when he decided to discontinue writing new projects in ColdFusion. He figured it would be cheaper to pay for undergraduate interns and dinky web hosting if he stuck with PHP and MySQL. This has been the strategy for a while now, and to this date we have yet to hire a quality Web developers who are fluent in both PHP and MySQL. Why? Because quality talent comes at a price. Just because you jump on a bandwagon doesn’t mean all your problems go away.
With ANY language you choose it’s always a gamble. Success is the most important metric, not the technology it is based on. How you get to that point is completely up to you. This message was not paid for by Adobe (or anyone else for that matter).
I take it that your throw away comment about ColdFusion was exactly that – meant to be thrown away. If a few minutes were devoted to researching that comment then you would have thrown it away yourself.
ColdFusion is still fast and cheap. It also covers your criteria of being on Java and scaling. In actuality, if ColdFusion was used for the rewrite, it would have been done in less than a year, not three.
But why listen to what I’m saying about it. Look it up yourself. Take those few minutes and see what the latest version brings to the table.
@RickM…
While it’s true that Myspace does expose some of it’s public facing files as ColdFusion, from what I understand it’s running something else under the hood. They probably just didn’t want to invalidate loads upon loads of inbound links in Google and other search engines.
I also agree with most of the people here regarding ColdFusion. It’s superbly suited for rapid development. I suspect that if the new team would have continued using ColdFusion in it’s current form (ColdFusion 9), they probably would have been able to complete the redesign in less than 3 years.
MySpace is using Blue Dragon’s .NET implementation of ColdFusion. Blue Dragon also has an Open Source version out. Blue Drangon is put out by New Atlanta.
Mr. Schonfeld, I invite you and any others who doubt the speed and robustness of ColdFusion to come out to CFdevCamp this weekend in San Francisco.
For “such outmoded technology” we have an amazing amount of sponsors and people signed up for this saturday to learn it. Come join us http://www.cfdevcamp.org/
Come watch somone who has never coded before build a database connected contacts system in an afternoon, or more advanced programmers build very cool applications in a third of the time it would take in other languages.
Come see ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder. Speak with the Product Manager of ColdFusion, Talk and Learn from some of the best CF people in the world.
And here is one of the best parts! Its Free!
Please join us if you have any interest in learning something new or want to see “such outmoded technology” build amazing things faster.
Luke Kilpatrick
Co-Organizer, CFdevCamp
Saturday, November 07, 2009 from 9:30 AM – 7:30 PM
Adobe San Francisco Office
601 Townsend St
San Francisco, CA
Cost: FREE
Umm…Erick…CF is built on Java… Outmoded technologies generally don;t have new releases either. Why do they allow people like you who don’t have a clue about technology comment on technology? I will never get that…
@Andy Mathews
Maybe someone from MySpace can comment. My understanding is that after originally thinking they would rewrite the entire site in asp.Net they decided on a hybrid approach and are still writing new CFML.
It’s a perfect example of tech team trashing a technology for what they are comfortable with. It’s common. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it especially when they have to maintain it. I am sure a lot of people here have done it including me. What I don’t like is that instead of just flat out saying it, they tried to play Coldfusion down to justify building the site in 3 years in JSP. Whenever I see this approach, I just shake my head and move on. This time I couldn’t shake it off because it was on Techcrunch (one of my favorites). Come on guys, do some research before posting this kind of claims. It just makes you look outmoded which you guys are definitely not.
“Watch out, Alibaba.”
Do you know many industries Alibaba promote?
This looks really interesting. I’ll keep an eye out on this
I won’t bother reiterating my friends comments above, but I will state that ColdFusion is far from ‘outmoded’ or ‘dead’. SlideSix.com is built on ColdFusion and the simple fact of the matter is that there is absolutely no way I could have built and maintain the entire application on my own without the rapid, flexible and scalable environment that ColdFusion provides me. I get so many features ‘out-of-the-box’ that I simply can’t get from other languages without relying on paid extensions/plugins or sketchy open source (if at all). And when it comes to integration (Flex, Java) what I can do is limited only by imagination.
On top of that the community is one of the strongest on the web. There is a strong (and growing) core of community leaders like myself who give countless hours of our own time to write blog posts, tutorials, offer support on forums and speak at conferences because we truly believe in the product. Adobe believes in it too — if they didn’t they wouldn’t be roadmapping multiple versions, releasing a full featured commercial IDE built specifically for CF development (which is also extensible via CFML) and further integrating CF with other RIA tools like Flex and AIR. CF is more alive then ever – version 9 added more Office integration, SharePoint integration, Ajax enhancements, full ORM support (using Hibernate), full cfscript support, significant caching enhancements, native integration with Lucene & SOLR for searching/indexing content, direct access of CFML features (image manipulation, pdf generation, mail sending & retrieval, etc) as a service for consumption via SOAP or AMF — the list goes on and on. Adobe will also be bringing CF to the cloud where it will run on Amazon EC2 and S3 as a hosted service.
The bottom line is ColdFusion can handle whatever you throw at it. If the developers/owners of MFG disagree then I’d say they didn’t do their homework. It’s scalable, flexible, rapid and powerful — on top of all that it’s damn easy to learn and use.
RE MySpace: My understanding is that MySpace still uses a lot of CFML (and a lot of .NET backend), but it is run mostly on New Atlanta’s .NET Blue Dragon app server. That being said, I have had an Adobe employee tell me that MySpace still owns a number of Adobe ColdFusion licenses; so even if it is only used internally, they are using it somewhere.
When MySpace left Adobe ColdFusion, there were running version 5 (pre Java) and MX7 was the current Macromedia version.
Mitch Free looks like a man trying to sell his company.
I think the initial fast and cheap comment might have applied to their coding techniques more then anything else.
You have to love tech blogs like this. The readers know more about technology than the writers.
You guys just don’t get it. The CEO of MFG.com got together with his marketing team and their PR group and tried to come up with a story that could create some buzz. There’s no new news here other than they redid their website and offer translation into a few languages. My favorite line is that their new technology will allow them to support APIs.
Actually its a complete platform rewrite, but you are spot on that the language wasn’t the issue, the design of the application was the issue. CF is a great platform, and can be done right and wrong just like any other development environment.
Um, CF folks need to chill. Where does Free say anything about CF being outdated. He’s talking about their architecture being updated, not Java being more modern or better than CF. Choice of programming language has nothing to do with his statements, just that they’ve re-written from the ground up. Re-read it and relax.
Fanatic Coldfusion fan on every aspect. Bottom line CF fellows (you too CF father Ben Forta) is that this just shows how much more can be done in promoting ColdFusion. And I’m so glad I have made the correct choice in investing in it my last 7 years. Every time I thought of changing to a different web technology Coldfusion without much buzz just slapped me with EXACTLY what I needed to move on without changing. And you know what? I’m sure it will keep on doing it (although i don’t think there is anything missing – no joke). BUT I’ve always thought of Techcrunch being the Coldfusion of the tech news industry, so I’ll have to apologize to Erick Schonfeld for the attack from my fellow Coldfusion developers. But I’ll also request a formal interview/post with our father Ben Forta since Techcrunch always recognizes its mistakes and never tries to hide it (touche Michael Arrington for that).
I know a fair amount about one part of this thread, the MySpace bit. MySpace got to be the 5th or 6th busiest site on the Internet using ColdFusion 5 with Fuesbox 2, let us just mull on that for a moment; the 5th or 6th busiest site on the Internet using ColdFusion 5 with Fuesbox 2. What hit MySpace hard were the JDBC drivers shipped with CFMX 6, CFMX 6 was not a good version, it was the first built on Java. The BlueDragon.net engine for ColdFusion used ADO.NET drivers which worked much better for MySpace. It was not ColdFusion that failed or caused issues but the underlying change in the core language of the engine from C++ to Java.
Mr. Schonfeld,
I’ll leave others to point out your factual inaccuracies when it comes to ColdFusion and instead make this point.
Perhaps the reason that ColdFusion had it’s issues was that Mr. Free didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when he was writing code. Or since it had to be cheap, he hired programmers that couldn’t program their way out of a paper bag and spent most of their time masterbating to internet porn.
Either way, it doesn’t matter what language you are using, if you program the way Teddy Kennedy drove and write shit code you can bring anything to its knees, ColdFusion included.
Seriously though the original article was about a redesign, and on that front it’s not good at all. It took three years tells a story if the people who worked on it spent that long then I wouldn’t hire them!
It’s looks as if the developers designed it, which is why it needs another overhaul, if you ask me!
I can’t really add anything more than what my fellow ColdFusion developers have said; other than to reiterate that ColdFusion is awesome and that it’s the language that I have built my career on top of. It’s been extremely good to me.
I think what this thread clearly illustrates is that ColdFusion is not only a technically viable option for large scale development, but there is also a very passionate and involved community.
A modern technology company would be wise to invest heavily in ColdFusion. Not only would they benefit from a productive and scalable development platform, but also from the support of a vocal and active developer community.
The ColdFusion community is on track to hit 1M developers worldwide and they are actively looking for companies/services they can stand behind and promote to dispel these myths. It’s unfortunate that MFG.com got on the wrong side of this movement.
From a technical perspective, MFG.com is incredibly slow. I’ve typed this entire comment while waiting for an RFQ to load (waiting for app.mfg.com…).
Where this CEO made a mistake was by trying to build the same application/site with a different technology, rather than building something _better_.
For example:
To print an RFQ, they rely solely on the browser to print the existing HTML (menus and all)… as if a user selected File –> Print from the browser. A ColdFusion application would have simply generated a dynamic PDF for print in just a few lines of code.
You can also tell they started this project 3 years ago, because it lacks any sense of modern client side development. No AJAX or Flash… just old fashioned templates being completely generated on the server. Again… very easy to drop in AJAX functionality w/ ColdFusion’s native support for REST/JSON/ExtJS/etc.
The fact is, they could have built something _better_ with ColdFusion, instead of building the same old crap in Java.
-Adam
CF Product Manager at Adobe
I have to agree with @bennadel on this one. CF has been great to me as well, and continues to be a bright part of my future. I choose it over any other development language.
While I don’t think the author was intentionally trying to “bash” CF in this article, I think it is fair to say that CF gets a very bad rap in the dev community, and articles stating that it’s “outmoded” doesn’t help. Authors need to do some research for themselves and will see there really is a lot of power to be had.
For those interested in CF modern sites, scaling, etc. Interesting video/story of politico.com http://tv.adobe...ing-politicocom
I think this quote is very telling on a number of levels:
“The whole team has felt as though we were hand-cuffed for the past three years and couldn’t execute on all the great ideas.”
To me, that says the site redesign is a massive failure. Tying up your whole team for three years is a very expensive way to launch a new web site – and it sounds like the business pretty much had to stand still for much of that time (”couldn’t execute on all the great ideas”).
Three years ago, their choices for technology would have been much more limited than today, of course, but even then ColdFusion had been completely rebuilt on top of Java and had plenty of stable options for a well-architected site, in terms of frameworks (as well as the core functionality in, then, CFMX 7).
What would have made this a more interesting article would have been a deeper dig into how the team selected Java, who they worked with (in terms of consultancy to jump start their development) and why it took such a long time.
In today’s market, companies can’t afford to handcuff their development team for years like this which is why RAD technologies like Rails, Grails, CFML and so on keep increasing in popularity.
Not at the level of politico.com, but the sites I’ve worked on over the past 10 years all use ColdFusion for major parts of the site (if not all), all have significant traffic, are successful businesses, and all have been around for at least 8 years:
(no, I’m not the designer of any of them
http://www.homeaway.com
http://www.landsofamerica.com
http://www.mapp...gyourfuture.org
http://www.newsstand.com
http://www.peoplexs.com
I hope this helps someone
Seriously the biggest thing giving any technology a bad name is the utter amount of Fan Boy crap being spewed out on this mediocre post. It seems no one can be critical or even mention ColdFusion in a negative light without being bound and gagged by a group of folks that come out of the woodwork then run back into their insular community never to talk to the world again, until the next person utter a word about ColdFusion. Maybe the original article was worse (I don’t know), the current article has good points and sounds accurate.
It sounds like many other companies that have walked away from ColdFusion. The technology, in their company, was stagnant and indeed outdated when faced with rewriting they had 2 options. They could stick with the, by then, disgusted technology or move to something different. Honestly if you are not happy with the current technology would you look at the current version or just move on to new promises? Naturally they chose to move to something different that promised more standards, more scalability and wider market share.
Yes it took multiple developers 3 years to rebuild what was built with one person in 2000 and lasted for over half a decade but it is now top notch with scalability in mind. The article never said it could not be done in ColdFusion this company simply made a conscious decision not to stick with the same technology due to their grief over the past few years.
Yeah, Adam. We know you don’t like our insular community. It is what it is, and why it is would be a whole ‘nother topic of discussion (FWIW, I’d be in your corner on that one).
And yes, we’re kind of defensive about CF. I agree that this article didn’t say, “ColdFusion is bad, Technology X is good”. Personally, I didn’t get involved until the author’s response in the comments stating, “MFG outgrew ColdFusion’s capabilities”. I disagree with that.
I’m sure it outgrew the capabilities of whatever “older version” he was on. But I’m fairly confident that a newer/current version would have handled whatever needs he had wonderfully.
“Honestly if you are not happy with the current technology would you look at the current version or just move on to new promises?”
Depends on why I’m not happy with the current technology. If the current technology was 7 or 8 years old, then I can hardly blame the technology.
I hardly think it’s “natural” to choose to move to something different. It’d be “natural” to want to make the migration as painless as possible, which would likely mean reusing/refactoring/repurposing as much of the existing codebase as possible. It’d be “natural” to stick with what you know. I’d think it would definitely be natural to want to explore newer versions of CF so that I could leverage as much of what I had as possible. I’m not saying I’d definitely go with it, but I think saying that it shouldn’t even be evaluated is somewhat off-base.
Ok guys, I think I might have a higher input in on this than any of you guys. Why might I say this, simply because from May 2006 to March 2008 I worked for MFG.com. Yup i said it. In fact, not only did i work for MFG.com, but I was one of the few ColdFusion programmers http://www.link...m/in/johnrwhill.
Now, you may wonder why i left. Without hesistation it was because of poor, severly poor management . In fact, not only did i leave, but in that time span about a fifth of the employees that were there when I reached MFG.com left also. From key management to human resource personnel; the people I am speaking about left, not fired, because of poor management. And I am saying this in defense of ColdFusion. The application was built on ColdFusion and was marvelous. Leading technology. Even relying heavily on Flex. It wasn’t that MFG.com outgrew ColdFusion. It was that 1) the management then didn’t know how to utilize ColdFusion, and 2) the most important technological decisions were not being made by the highest knowledgable person dealing with development, but rather someone who change clothes because some of his associates decided to change clothes. Real talk.
Mitch Free founded a great company. But his decision to leave ColdFusion was not sound. In either case, that site as it stands now, is very beautiful. I know many that worked many nights and days in getting this new application up. There were many revisions, many cancelled launched dates, many tears and a whole lot of joy. And I congratulate them all today.
I left MFG.com, because management lost perspectives. From conversation that I have recently heard, they have implemented new personnel to bring back that perspective and I am very sure that is why this launch was successful.
All of this was again to say, that MFG.com didn’t outgrow ColdFusion. It just had wrong people directing through a technology, that didn’t know the capabilities of the technology. Instead of trusting those with that knowledge to make such a decision, they decided change programming environments because their associates used “this” environment.
Thank you John for that insight. In general, in my opinion, moves away from ColdFusion happen more because of management perceptions than because of real technical problems that cannot be overcome.
See I think that is detrimental, honestly, I’ve seen too many “rewrites” not succeed do to trying to reuse previous art. The whole idea of a rewrite it to start from scratch, don’t save anything. Moving to a new technology only helps prevent the natural tendency to borrow from the old code base, heck I’ve still seen old code 4GL apps get reused ported into a new language like a CF or Java during a rewrite, its bad form but it happens.
Fair enough… but there’s still obviously the concept of having the CF knowledge, which I assume they have since they kept the “old version” running for so long. Even if they don’t reuse a line of code, they know the syntax.
I’m not saying they should have automatically gone to CF and not examined alternatives. I’m saying I don’t think they should have automatically gone to an alternative without examining newer versions of CF.
But now those cuffs are off … with the ColdFusion community
I just have to roll my eyes.
I don’t know everyone in the ColdFusion community, but I recognize some of the names (and pseudonyms) of the supporters above. A large proportion of them are either past/present paid adobe representatives, sockpuppets thereof, or sad victims of some weird tech cult.
The reality is that despite a few exceptions (how many times can we hear about myspace?), the mainstream IT community has passed CF by.
It was a great idea when its competitors were embryonic web-centric languages like ASP, but that era has passed.
I have no doubt that there are plenty of vocal, dedicated supporters, and proud we are of them. Go ahead, thump your chests and jump up and down like angry gorillas all you want; the other 99% of the IT world will happily move into the future with modern technology.
“A large proportion of them are either past/present paid adobe representatives, sockpuppets thereof, or sad victims of some weird tech cult.”
I know a large number of people in the CF community (certainly not everyone), but I only see 2 names above that are paid Adobe representatives (one of whom identified himself as such, the other… well, it doesn’t take a lot of googling to figure out). Point being, neither are pretending that they’re not Adobe reps
As for the rest of us (the true “large proportion”), can’t we just be developers who are happy with ColdFusion and what it does?
“The reality is that despite a few exceptions (how many times can we hear about myspace?), the mainstream IT community has passed CF by.”
Not saying you’re wrong. We’re a niche technology/community. The question to ask is… why? Is it because CF isn’t up to the task or is because the mainstream IT community is misinformed?
“…the other 99% of the IT world will happily move into the future with modern technology.”
What technology specifically? And what (again, specifically) does it offer over and above ColdFusion?
You’re entitled to your opinion that CF has no place in the modern technological IT world. But I’m genuinely curious as to where that opinion comes from. Is it based on fact or incorrect notions of what CF is today?
To be honest, I don’t have a huge issue with the main article. If the site was originally built on CF 4.5 and the version of CF wasn’t updated then it is true it *would* be outmoded in that situation. There are many reasons why someone would choose a different technology path. I’m primarily a CF developer but there have been instances where I’ve chosen another platform based on the project requirements (PHP, Ruby, ASP). CF can pretty much do *ANYTHING* other languages can do natively and then some. The management made a decision to move away from CF and I respect that, the article should have made that clearer though.
My concern is with Mr. Woods’ statement which just seems like one that is designed to incite the masses. Unlike the other languages out there Adobe can say (based on number of licenses sold) how many deployments of ColdFusion are up and about and let’s face it no one is going to fork out at least $1200 to sit the box on the shelf without using it. Yes, the majority of the IT community passes CF by simply because of the fact that you have to pay for it, however, for businesses that are able to budget for it, CF is a highly attractive prospect. Most developers never hear about CF and stick with what they 1. learned at school or 2. can find tutorials for on the web.
The CF community is very vocal because of the fact that we do get a bad rap most of the time. We are always faced with the “outdated/obsolete” stigma which simply is not true as most of the comments on here have already noted. It’s good that we gorillas come out sometimes…at least we can generate pdfs, send emails, execute database queries with one line of code and no external libraries to include…oh look I just build a web app…
Wow! I think the site looks great, all the hard work & waiting obviously paid off. It’s clear he knows what he’s doing. Congrats!!
From the stories I heard about that guy coding wasn’t a priority over the coke binges and strippers. I would take his mention of CF and development strategies with a grain of salt. It wasn’t a piece of coding art to begin with more like polishing a turd I’m sure.
Shoddy articles like this one are why I stopped reading TechCrunch. I only came here to read the “article” and leave this comment. I didn’t click any ads.
There is nothing more refreshing than well balanced technical postings. Well balanced as in a chip on both shoulders. These posts are shocking, and, indeed a small amount of Google searches will reveal paid Coldfusion “evangelists”, Adobe employees, CEOs of open source ColdFusion Engines, and those whose businesses solely rely on supporting a dying technology. There are even a number of personal attacks on the CEO of MFG.com and the author. Is this really a community you would want to be a part of?
Although there is a YoY increase in CF developers it is substantially, substantially outpaced by the increase in web developers as a whole. Please don’t be swayed by these bullying tactics and do your own research, and be weary of their anecdotal examples that in no way reflect the vast development community. A good start is job postings. Projects drive jobs and technologies, and ColdFusion is not on the radar. You will rarely find it on a university syllabus while asp.Net and Java are ubiquitous, and it is dying a faster death in the international community. A majority of developers have not even heard of ColdFusion.
I even struggle to understand its purpose now? It is so much like Java why not just use Java? There are many tag libraries that solve the same problems as CF. A ColdFusion template is nearly identical to a JSP page using tag libraries… so why bother. In short, do your homework and move your project /Career onto a more sustainable technology. Don’t worry about these guys. They will be alright making mountains of money migrating or re-writing this outdated technology on to a more sustainable platform
“You will rarely find it on a university syllabus”
I find university training of commercial languages to be pretty overrated, IMO. Adjunct professors don’t always do the greatest job at coming up with a decent curriculum and teaching it the right way. I prefer DIY learning or working with a pro one-on-one when I’m starting out.
Even more overrated are the $1500+ one day courses that are provided by consultants and vendors for the all sorts of languages out there. I nearly fainted when I saw how it much it cost to pay for MySQL day training courses.
If you are looking for ColdFusion education, there’s plenty of material out there that’s free. If reading stuff online or on paper is not your thing, the free user-conferences and local user groups are a cost effective way of training yourself and learning from others.
“Google searches will reveal paid Coldfusion “evangelists”, Adobe employees, CEOs of open source ColdFusion Engines, and those whose businesses solely rely on supporting a dying technology.”
Who did you expect to react? A bunch of nuns?
If a tech blog were to badmouth PHP and it somehow got to Digg, believe me… these comments you’re seeing now would appear like breakfast at Starbucks in comparison.