Top Companies Using ColdFusion MX

At various conferences I've heard from customers that are trying to make the case for using or continuing to use ColdFusion when pitching ideas to their decision makers or executives. One the most frequent requests has been for Adobe (or Macromedia at the time) to publish a customer list which customers can take to the table.

Such an article was recently published, detailing a partial list of the world’s top companies using ColdFusion MX application server. Of note is a list of ColdFusion quick facts at the end that might be useful as an elevator pitch should you ever find yourself squeezed in with your VP for a few floors.

I would add that countless ColdFusion applications run on private intranets of companies like these which are therefore unavailable to search engines that tally application server popularity based on frequency of file extension.

World's Top Companies Use ColdFusion MX
In use at 75 of the Fortune 100 companies and at more than 10,000 other companies worldwide, ColdFusion MX is one of the most widely adopted web technologies in the industry. Here's a partial list of customers (with links to case studies) who rely on ColdFusion for its signature server-scripting environment.

For years Ben Forta has maintained a similar list, Who's Using ColdFusion?.

This blog entry was picked up on Ray Camden's blog and drew a long series of comments worth checking out.

  Tales told by Simon Brooks

Simon Brooks, a former coworker of mine at Allaire and Macromedia, has become an innovative storyteller and launched the business DiamondScree. Simon's a very nice guy with a great imagination. Check out his website:

Simon began spinning yarns and telling tales in 1991 when he would perform for school groups and families at Youth Hostels in the United Kingdom before moving to the States. In 2003 Simon became a Children's Librarian and freelance storyteller. He has performed for libraries, schools, and private functions and festivals telling to young children and adults. Combining his passion for children's literature and folklore, Simon creates a fun program for all ages. His repertoire comes mainly from European folk and faery tales, but Simon also includes stories from South America, Africa, China and Japan amongst other countries and cultures. All these stories are given life and animation by unique voices, as they are acted out in front of a captivated audience.

Simon Brooks performs tales with energy and wit. Telling folktales, myths and legends from all over the world, he brings characters like Ananzi the Spider, the trickster Raven, Wayland Smith, Merlin and Dionysus vividly to life. From the world of stories Simon captivates his audience with unique voices to animate characters and with expressive body language, he truly brings the stories to life.

Simon made his first CD over the winter of 2005/6 which was released to great applause in June 2006. "Second-hand Tales" To find a copy of his CD, please visit cdbaby.com Here you will be able to hear his storytelling at his finest.

Visit DiamondScree today!

  Cringley Speculates About Apple's Plans to Win the OS and Application Markets

In this week's edition of I, Cringely, Bob Cringely reflects on Microsoft's struggle to maintain dominance in the OS and applications market while the project schedule for Vista withers on the vine. Furthermore, Bob speculates that for Apple to remain competitive, eliminate its vulnerabilities, and even beat Microsoft on technical merits, Apple will have to entice independent software vendors to continue developing applications for OS X. Just how will Apple do that? Bob thinks Apple will buy Adobe.

Killer Apps: For Apple's Windows Strategy to Work, It Must Replace Microsoft Office and Buy Adobe Systems
by Robert X. Cringely, April 27, 2006

  Discovering the Adobe Bloggers

My view of the web technology world has been almost exclusively through the lens of two blog aggregators, MXNA and Full As A Goog. To my surprise, several new faces have turned up on MXNA today... native bloggers from Adobe itself. I didn't even know Adobe did blogging, so I'm pretty happy to know about this now.

The MXNA category Macromedia has been renamed to Adobe (formerly Macromedia), and now includes notable Adobe gurus such as:

• Bill McCoy
• John Nack
• Mike Potter
• Tobias Hoellrich
• Ben Watson

This blog, TalkingTree.com, now shows up on the MXNA Adobe category. I choose to run my own domain and site independently, and I've never experienced any pressure to move my blog to the macromedia.com domain, especially since I blog a lot of personal material here as well, although my posts are largely about ColdFusion.

So check out blogs.adobe.com!!,... now if we can only convince the Adobe bloggers to start using the Jedi-grade BlogCFC.

  Hello Adobe!

Since the announcement Thursday evening, the blogosphere has been saturated with speculations, musings, tributes, and congratulations about the Adobe merger with Macromedia. As a former Macromedia (and Allaire) employee, I'm personally excited that today is Day One for me at Adobe, and I can finally say so!

Although, it turns out that in the office Day One is not much different than any other day for me from a practical point of view. Its business as usual here in Newton. My same customers calling for support, the same ColdFusion community members IM-ing me, and the voices of my same colleagues echoing in the hallway.

So what am I excited about? Well, I get to work for the 13th best company in the US, according to Fortune Magazine, where if you consider only software companies, Adobe comes out as #1. For another, for 7 years I've been a big fan of Adobe Photoshop. I know it better than Jasc PaintShop Pro or The Gimp, or even Fireworks. Now I can approach Photoshop as a professional rather than just a hobbyist, and I look forward to more opportunities to learn the many features in Photoshop CS and CS2. I also get to watch ColdFusion evolve closer integration with Adobe products including not just PDF generation but their server technology as well. When Macromedia acquired Allaire who would have imagined Flex or Flash Forms or Flash Remoting, so imagine what the future holds for ColdFusion under the auspice of Adobe. Yet ColdFusion is still guided by and supported by many of the same passionate folks that have been doing so since the days of Allaire.

Like Jared said,... Yes, I'm psyched. Here's to another 10 years, folks!

• Press release announcing product bundles
• FAQ on the close of the acquisition
• New company profile
• Fact sheet

  Got Work? Solve ColdFusion Problems for Fun and Money

For those seeking employment in the Eastern Massachusetts area, there is a job opening for an Escalation Coldfusion Product Support Engineer, described as:

We are looking for a member of the ColdFusion Technical Support team to function as a Tier 3 (escalation) engineer. This is a senior-level technical position and the support delivered in this role is in English only. The product set being supported is associated with internet web applications. Client Server offerings include ColdFusion and JRun. ColdFusion is a HTML Tag based, proprietary server that works with databases and delivers dynamic contact to browser based users. JRun is a J2EE application server that runs applications based on industry standard JSP pages and/or Servlets. Other related technical skills include: Web Services, Java Literacy, dbms and SQL knowledge, LDAP, and general web application development and deployment.

The job posting is on Dice.com through a third party recruiter, although I'm not sure why its not listed on the Macromedia.com website. I was once in this escalation role for a year before I moved to "Gold" Support, and its definitely challenging. Are you up to it?

Please defer salary inquiries for the recruiter.

  Around My Cube

Office snapshots on Flickr: My Geekdom Overfloweth

www.flickr.com

  [steven@macromedia /work]$ shutdown -h +360 'Going on sabbatical. Please log off'

Like many others at Macromedia, its my turn for a long sabbatical, although I've been eligible for over a year. For the next six weeks, until September 12th, I'll be out of the office. I suspect that this is the first and the last time I'll be able to take such an extended leave.

I plan to spend the first 3 weeks at home, biking, swimming, reading, and blogging. Some of my objectives include reading parts of several technical books including one on Eclipse which has a chapter on building plugins, one on building Dashboard Widgets on Mac OSX, and one on Photoshop CS. I may take some time to read up SELinux, too.

During this last month I've been reading Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, which I highly recommend, so I hope to finish that up. I think that Friedman's book is complemented by Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and by Spencer Well's The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, but best if read (or viewed) starting with Wells and finishing with Friedman. If I find a day to spare, I think I'll finally sit myself down to watch the whole 8 hour series Cosmos, by Carl Sagan.

During the second half of my sabbatical, I'll be in Barcelona, Spain and then in the high Pyrenees. My wife and I were married in a civil ceremony two years ago and now we will be having a formal ceremony in a 12th century church in a small mountain village near the border with France, close to Pico Aneto, the highest mountain in Spain. I used Ray's BlogCFC to create a dual English/Spanish informational website to assist the guests.

If you're not familiar with the region, check this out. Its a small Javascript app that zooms in on Barcelona and the Pyrennes, which I made for those who will be travelling from the US. It's a little slow in MSIE, but great in Firefox. This was before Google Earth came out, so I was trying to provide a way for non-technical people to get their bearings.

  Video Archive of ColdFusion Birthday Party with Founders Panel Discussion

Watch the video of Macromedia's ColdFusion birthday party event held in the Newton, MA office yesterday, July 13 2005. The founders of ColdFusion, which was almost known as Prometheus or Horizon, recant the early days of Allaire Corporation.

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  I, CRINGELY: What does Adobe's purchase of Macromedia mean? Bob explains

The title and topic of this week's I CRINGELY column are as follows:

"A Flash in the Pan"

This message is being sent to inform you that Robert X. Cringely's latest column is now available online

What does Adobe's purchase of Macromedia mean? Bob explains, and talks about NeuStar, the VoiP company worth banking on.

"Of course, Adobe gets a lot more than Flash from its $3.4 billion (all stock, no cash) purchase. It gets Codeweaver and ColdFusion,"...

"Macromedia, in contrast, has great customer support and very good developer relations. Let's hope some of that stays." ...

"So it is a good deal all around, especially if Adobe can learn from Macromedia how to have fun."

See also:

Informit.com: What Drove the Adobe Systems-Macromedia Merger?

"Assuming that happens, the new Adobe Systems will emerge as a powerful software company with an array of products including applications such Photoshop and Illustrator - which are commonly used in publishing content in the print and web worlds - as well as Macromedia's Dreamweaver and ColdFusion products, which are essential elements to building web sites."

  ColdFusion highlighted in Macromedia Fourth Quarter Results

Betsey Nelson, CFO of Macromedia, noted in the Breezo of today's Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2005:

Server products posted nice strong results this quarter with major strategic wins in both Flex and ColdFusion...

I'm still listening, so there might be more on CF. There's definitely a few slides just on Flex in there.

Here's a text version of the quarter's results.

  Macromedia: Java, ColdFusion Developers Safe

On April 21, Ben Forta blogged about an article in SD Times where Kevin Lynch was quoted about ColdFusion. I couldn't find that article online then, but today I noticed it's a headline in the May 1st online edition of SD Times:

Macromedia: Java, ColdFusion Developers Safe

Here's Brian Rinaldi's link from the comments below.

  ColdFusion Live! A CFUNITED show with Jeff Peters and Simon Horwith

This is the first in a weekly series of lunchtime events where presenters at the upcoming CFUNITED ColdFusion conference will preview their talks here at the Online Coldfusion Meetup Group in cooperation with the Maryland ColdFusion User Group.

This event will begin 12:30 PM EDT on Thursday April 21st, that's tomorrow! There will be 2 short presentations, about 15 minutes each.

Part 1) Jeff Peters, book author and creator of www.grokfusebox. com will be discussing the Fusebox Lifecycle Process.

Part 2) Simon Horwith, Editor CFDJ and CTO AboutWeb will be discussing the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia

Please come join us to participate in the online discussion. Watch for the archived meeting online if you can't make it.

When: Thursday, April 21, 12:30 PM EDT ... Tomorrow!

Where: Click the link below to watch and listen to the archived meeting:
http://mmsupport.breezecentral.com/p35447946/

  Podcatch.com - A directory of cool stuff for the podcasting community

Blogging's Founding Father, Dave Winer, who first envisioned podcasting, has launched a new site tonight, Podcatch to act as a respository of knowledge for the podcasting community.

I commented on his initial post about my intentions to start podcasting Macromedia technical content, move on into interviews and such, and then reach out into creative podcasting when my experience matures.

Dave picked up on my comments and blogged it on Scripting News, where he relates to my experience as one of those moments where the lights suddenly go on.

Check out this one hour interview with Dave on IT Conversations. He discusses his first course in computing after following his father's advice, to starting his first business, running Userland Software, developing XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS, and podcasting. If you're not listening to IT Conversations regularly, you should be!

  Macromedia Flex for Web Application Developers - A New Course

This week I've completed a new Macromedia course, Flex for Web Application Developers, recently renamed to indicate the course's appropriateness for programmers from all web application backgrounds, rather than just ColdFusion. The course is designed to be a day longer than the existing Fast Track to Flex course and has a target audience of web application developers that may not yet be proficient with ActionScript 2.0 or Object Oriented concepts and programming.

The Macromedia Training web page has not yet been updated to include this course, but that is expected soon. I was forturnate enough to participate in the course in its final testing stage where the instructor sought feedback from technology professionals, to be used in carefully tuning the class towards the general skill set of contemporary ColdFusion MX Developers. In addition, this week's course in particular was also used to train Macromedia Training Partners who will later be teaching this course as well.

The Flex for Web Application Developers course demonstrates how to easily build robust Flex applications that provide a sharp looking user interface while integrating with ColdFusion components as the primary data provider. Knowledge of Actionscript 2.0 is not assumed, and the progressive use of Actionscript from day one builds fluency in the language through osmosis, so to speak. The course emphasises programming best practices for Flex's markup language MXML, as well as Actionscript and ColdFusion's CFML language.

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