We need ColdFusion and it is alive and kicking! To be a software engineer, well a good software engineer is absolutely still where it is at and I am talking about here in the USA, just read this. My opinion is that this will remain the case.  If we think about where software is used, there are many obvious places but truly we are no more than at the tip of the iceberg. Our world is changing fast, we are in control of some of that change but not all of it. Resources that we need are running out and we cannot recreate them, it is impossible; fossil fuels, oil, coal, gas will expire, probably within the next 300 years.  Nothing we have discovered or created so far can fill that void, for instance nuclear energy, if used widely in its current form would create so much long-term pollution as to make our planet uninhabitable. But my points are not ones of ecology here, well not directly.  We use resources to make and power things and we really need to do two things in order to maintain a good life for all here, we need to improve our abilities to use renewable energy, the sun, wind, water for instance and we need to reduce that part of our consumption which is damaging and overtly depleting, for instance get more efficiency out of combustion engines, change their fuel source entirely, software figures in both of these needs.  Our homes are filled with highly inefficient devices which use far more energy than is truly needed and at the root of all of the solution these needs, which are inevitable, is intelligence and the enabler of more rapid use of such intelligence is software.  As I say, I believe we have only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as the deployment and use of software goes.

So, where does ColdFusion come in?  From my standpoint, having worked with hundreds of companies all around the globe, during these past 11 years and having seen every paradigm you can think of in use, ASP, JSP, PHP. Ruby, Groovy, Perl, Python, Flash, Flex, Curl,et al; ColdFusion is still the easiest to get into and the most powerful at integrating with all other software and hardware paradigms.  It also scales like the clappers, done well (48,000 plus concurrent users!)  So ColdFusion will be a key enablement method in bringing on more software engineers and we do and we do and will need them.  We should never be elitists wanting to make things more difficult, that will not help any of us, the visionaries who created ColdFusion, Jeremy and JJ Allaire did not set out to make things more difficult and one of the most oft criticisms of ColdFusion is that it is too easy to get started in; well that is arrant nonsense.

Adobe, as current owners of ColdFusion, please do all that you can to encourage the use and teachings of ColdFusion use in our schools, colleges and universities, this will bring more people into software more quickly and we will sorely need that, in my opinion.