Don't be so quick to blame ColdFusion

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Not long ago my new boss and I were having a conversation and it came up that we might not be using ColdFusion much longer, but he’d get me trained on whatever I needed when they changed technologies.

Back story: The ColdFusion app that I’m maintaining now is an add-on to an asp.net application. It turns out the reason this add-on isn’t in .net is because the person they had available didn’t know or want to learn .net (I don’t blame him personally). On the home page of the .net app lives an iframe with a news scroller. The news is stored in a table and presented in a .cfm page. I’m sorry but I don’t see any reason why a single query and a few records can’t be displayed in .net, in a .net application. His aversion of .net was that strong.

When I asked why we were moving away from CF he said “Well, when we started this CF was the hottest thing, then not so much, now it is again, so who knows. CF also can’t handle the requirements. The system runs like shit!”

When I asked who said CF wasn’t the greatest thing anymore he said “the same guy that said it was great, the first developer.” I was pretty shocked. The same guy that didn’t want to learn enough .net to make a single page is now blaming CF for his lack of ability! Thanks to him, CF has a bad rap with my management and our customers!

The system did run like shit, fortunately for me one of my side projects is very similar to my day time job, making “charts and graphs 'n shit” as my boss puts it. I showed what I had done and how fast it works. I suggested it might not be CF, but the previous two developers. I asked him to give me the opportunity to fix the system before passing judgment on CF.

This week I put some proper error trapping in the system which logs the errors and a few other modifications. I saw a couple pages people were hitting often but were timing out. I made a couple changes to the query in question, removed the two queries nested inside the cfloop, removed # signs where they weren’t needed, removed some conditionals, replaced the several font tags with CSS, et cetera. The page loads in 1.3 seconds now. Using CSS also reduced the size of the .xls and html files by almost half (the xls files are html output with cfheader, I need to fix that too) so the page also downloads faster when 12,000 rows are returned (no, there’s no paging, customer requirement) from about 12 megs to 7.

Employers/managers: If your ColdFusion apps aren't running well, don't be so quick to pass judgement on ColdFusion. Look at your hardware, SQL, bandwidth and even your developers. If you're not a technical person, ask someone OUTSIDE of your team or higher a consultant to look at your situation.

I think I’ve saved ColdFusion’s reputation within my organization with these simple changes. My next hurdle is to save CF from our customers. Hopefully the proper error trapping and gradual fixing of the system will do this. Wish me luck!

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