Background

As a technology manager, one of my teams consists of a web development group building  both internal and external business applications. The core platform is built on ColdFusion, a JVM based technology, mixed in with various other frameworks and technologies (jQuey, Flex, ColdBox, SQL Server, etc…).

A couple of years ago we had a project that involved integrating JBoss Drools (a business rules workflow engine), and we needed a way to easily bridge ColdFusion and Drools together, and came across the works of Barney Boisvert and his CFGroovy project. using CFGroovy, we were able to successfully complete the project, while being able to assess the Groovy language itself.

Meanwhile as the years went by, whenever we had to recruit additional talent we found it increasingly difficult (you can find an article I wrote on the topic at RIARockStars). We don’t even bother looking for ColdFusion developers any more, we look for any talented individual with a web engineering background willing to learn.

With the success that we had on that one project, and the seemingly shrinking ecosystem we decided on a strategy of switching over to another JVM language. The reasoning and hypothesis include:

• Ability to progressively evolve our existing platform (we can do it feature by feature, vs. total rewrite)
• Opens up access to the larger Java talent pool
• Keeps the product on a more relevant platform
• Keeps the staff’s skills relevant

Why not Java itself?

The big assumption

Assessing the risk/potential

Disclaimer

This article is from the eyes of management, and not that of a developer. The findings are equally useful, but the conclusions a developer would make would be different than that of management. Most importantly as a developer, you should make it your mission to learn as many technologies as possible, it opens your eyes to new techniques and trends, and makes you an adaptive individual – and this is something a business values (Seven Languages in Seven Weeks is a particularly good book in this context).

Another thing to note is that I’m not evaluating the technologies themselves – there’s no shortage discussions and articles out there that cover this, so you can read up on those as part of evaluating technological fit (you’ll find some good ones on StackOverflow and Quora).

I’m by no means an expert on any of these platforms, and this was the result of a series of Googling for a week to gather various angles. If my perception is off on anything, I welcome the feedback. Thanks!

Observations

I just didn’t have the time to fully evaluate all of the JVM languages and their ecosystems, so I had to focus on (from my analysis) the biggest three: Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. Given more time, what I would need to do is focus the research on specifically web development as all these languages (including Java) encompass more than just web applications.

But I needed to start somewhere, and you can see where I try to rope in some web perspective.

Groovy

Groovy at this point in time would be the conservative/safest bet, business wise. It’s like the Ryan Seacrest of non-Java JVM languages; its conservative, clean, polished, and very active. Groovy is like the athletic younger brother of the lethargic and obese Java.

It appears to have the overall largest ecosystem of the three, and is backed by a huge well known entity (VMWare/EMC). Grails being the web framework of interest, they’re also about to release a big 2.0 update.

I am very disappointed that although SpringSource mentions they have a Groovy and Grails courses, they actually don’t conduct any. This could be used as clue that there’s not enough interest to warrant hosting such classes (well more than a clue, that is the case), but you figure just for strategic reasons they’d take a loss on the training (the classic Gillette move, sell the razor at a loss and make it up on blades).

However, I found the Scala and Clojure training availability just as disappointing.

Scala

Scala would be the other strong contender. Although its ecosystem is smaller than Groovy’s, it has a noticeably more passionate community. As well, having Twitter as the big success story is a massive notch on its belt.

The funding of Scala would be on my things to keep an eye on. Part of Scala is backed by a Swiss university (EPFL), and educational institutions tend to be extremely bureaucratic and their funding dependent on government entities. And then you have a business also involved (TypeSafe.com) who has only been able to generate $3M in venture capital, based on the size of their corporate team, that money won’t last long if they’re not generating revenue (since they are private there’s no way to know).

Trending wise it appears to be accelerating in popularity – it’ll be interesting to resample six months from now and evaluate the landscape. Although not as many books as Groovy, its books are more current.

Clojure

From a business perspective, I wouldn’t even put Clojure on the radar for now, I’d need to see if it gains more traction in order to justify investing in it, as well as a much more solid foundation behind it.

ColdFusion

Although I don’t fully analyse it, the ColdFusion ecosystem is much larger than any of these languages. Extremely passionate community, backed by Adobe who invests millions per year in it, vast array of physical and online user groups, etc… As of right now, going by numbers, ColdFusion wins.

But, we wouldn’t be looking to hire a Groovy/Scala developer, just a developer willing to learn. I know that Java/.NET/PHP folks have no interest in ColdFusion (beleive me, we tried on many occasion). So the question is, is that the same situation with Groovy/Scala/etc…, and trend wise is it a matter of time and we’re just at the infancy stages?

The Data

JavaRanch Posts

• Groovy: 2398
• Scala: 625
• Clojure: 532

Books on Amazon:

• Groovy: 12
• Grails; 7
• Scala: 7
• Lift: 2
• Clojure: 6
• Conjure: 0
• Noir: 0

Note: The current offerings of the Groovy & Grails books are relatively old (most recent Groovy one being from 2008, and the most recent Grails ones from 2009).

User Groups:

• Scala: 53
• Lift: 4?
• Clojure: 33
• Noir: 0?
• Conjure: 0?
• Groovy: 23
• Grails: 63

Email List Activity:

• Groovy: 50/day
• Grails: 83/day
• Scala: 38/day
• Lift: 46/day
• Clojure: 33/day
• Noir: 2/day (Google Groups)
• Conjure: 1/day (Google Groups)

Tiobe Index:

• Scala: 50
• ColdFusion: 59
• Groovy: 69
• Clojure: not on the list

eWeek Article 09/12/11 (http://bit.ly/nbbtbx):

• “Groovy, JavaScript, Ruby among the fastest growing programming languages”
• Note: the early relative percentages are interesting, but as impressive as a 100% increase is, going from 1 job to 2 jobs isn’t.
• The more relevant thing here is the industry perception an article like this generates.

StackOverFlow Search on terms:

• “groovy” : 4390
• “grails” : 3391
• “scala” : 3222
• “lift” : 1608
• “clojure” : 3059
• “conjure” : 89
• “noir” : 34

Source of funding/corporate support:

• Groovy
• SpringSource a VMWare company, subsidiary of EMC Corporation
• VMWare: Publicly traded on the NYSE (VMW)
• Employees: 9000 employees
• Market Cap: $42B
• Revenue: $3.54B
• Gross Profit: $2.36B
• EMC Corporation: Publicly traded on the NYSE (EMC)
• Employees: 48,500
• Market Cap: $51B
• Revenue: $19B
• Gross Profit: $10B
• Team Size: 68? (http://bit.ly/ryL8fb)
• Scala:
• Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL), a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology organization.
• Scala Solutions, acquired by TypeSafe.
• Privately held
• Founded in 2011 by the creators of Scala.
• Received $3M (euro) in Series A funding on 5/12/2011 by Greylock Partners.
• Team size: 12? (http://bit.ly/u3uPmI)
• Clojure
• Primarily via the personal “commercial endeavors” of the creator of Clojure (Rich Hickey) and private donations.
• Team size: 8? (http://bit.ly/tIEaQ6)

Who’s using it:

• Scala
• Twitter, LinkedIn, EDFT, Novell, The Guardian, Xebia, FourSquare, Sony, Siemens, Thatcham, OPower, GridGain, AppJet, Reaktor
• Groovy
• Wired.com, LinkedIn.com, Sky.com, Aegeon, eHarmony, EverBank, ExpertPlan, NetJay, NimBuzz, XWiki, Vodafone Music Store,
• Clojure
• BackType, Sonian, Fightcaster, Akamai, BankSimple, Relevance, KamaGames, Stere, Infinitely Beta, Wusoup, Factual, The Deadline, holodb, Prismatic, Amazon

Job Searches on Dice.com:

• ColdFusion: 343
• Groovy: 247
• Scala: 126
• Clojure: 20

Job Searches at Monster.com:

• ColdFusion: 196
• Groovy: 120
• Scala: 64
• Clojure: 9

Indeed/SimplyHired trends

Survey Responses

I recently had the honor of being a panelist at the August 2011 Bay Area ColdFusion user group, alongside such notables as Sean Corfield and Nolan Erck regarding the topic du jour – is ColdFusion Dead?

The topic was the result of a survey sent to the user group with two choices, and this topic was the clear resounding winner with over 95% of the vote (I can’t remember what the other topic was).

It’s a topic that’s has been gaining a lot of attention over the years, and back in March of 2011 I wrote an article on RIA Rockstars regarding my perspective as a manager and the scarcity of talent.

Here’s a recap of some of my points of view, as well as other perspectives shared by the panelists and audience.

Dying but not dead

I started off by asking is Cobol dead? Last I read, there are still more active lines of Cobol in use than any other language. So technical Cobol is not dead, but it certainly has contracted to a point of a nominal maintenance existence.

Cobol will take awhile to fully go away, this is because it all boils down to a business decision. Many of these Cobol systems were developed at the cost of millions, so does it make good business sense to rewrite a Cobol app that only needs to be in maintenance mode? If it’s humming away, doing whatever it needs to do to support some operations, or maybe it has an old user base that doesn’t care about new stuff (I know of such products), then leaving it alone might be the proper business decision.

It will make sense eventually when the last of the Cobol generation (who are now in their late 50s) is about to die off, and even maintenance mode becomes at risk and the product is revenue generating where the revenue justifies the expense of a rewrite or mission critical. If it’s neither criteria is true, the product dies.

And it appears ColdFusion is headed down this path – the volume of jobs is decreasing, many of us have seen companies that have bit the bullet and rewrote their CF apps in other languages, and anyone who has tried to get a full time job (even in this hot tech market) has struggled to land a good growth opportunity.

Look around you – your team, your user groups, the blogosphere, birds of a feather sessions at Adobe Max, etc… It’s the same crowd – and we’re all aging together. Very few younger developers get into ColdFusion.

And much like Cobol, ColdFusion does have a big enough customer base (particularly with the government institutions) that it will be worth it to justify keeping the technology fresh.

So is ColdFusion dead? No. But at the current trajectory, it is certainly dying.

Chicken and egg

Unless there are a lot of high paying CF jobs, people won’t migrate to CF. And unless there are a lot of skilled CFers, businesses won’t risk starting new projects based on a technology with such a scarce resource pool.

Juniors, Intermediates, and Seniors

From the literally hundreds of developers I’ve interviewed, I’d roughly size the community up as 70% juniors, 25% intermediates, and 5% senior.

Of course, everyone is fighting for those seniors. The types of folks who really understand not just syntax, functions, and deeper aspects of the technology, but also a strong grasp of computer science, and the art of writing software.

Many people have Sr. level titles from purely working for a long time, but when they interview with us they realize how much they don’t know. Though we often use that as an opportunity to coach such candidates during the interview so that they know what steps to take in order to grow their skills.

The problem is ColdFusion is so easy. That’s what we love about it. That’s what I love about it! Everything that is hard in other languages is easy in CF. But there in lies the problem, you can get really far on minimal knowledge, and there’s nothing to really motivate you to progress further.

Some people mentioned they want to learn more, but attending things like conference sessions don’t go deep enough to get a true understanding. And this is where you should leverage the community; one advantageous aspect of the CF community is that everyone is very passionate about helping each other.

And there are a lot of great online resources. E.g. if you want to get into using a framework, check out the ColdBox Connection, you’ll find out everything you need to know to use ColdBox.

If you can’t find them, make them

If you have the time, find smart ambitious folks of other technology backgrounds and train them. ColdFusion is easy to learn, and their skill from other languages adds more strength to your team.

This technique doesn’t work on Sr’s however, by then they’re invested in their chosen technology and are unlikely to switch.

Learn Other Languages

Learning another technology can only strengthen your abilities as a ColdFusion developer. You’ll learn about topics, concepts, and techniques that are a natural part of that language, which you can then apply to ColdFusion.

Secondly, if ColdFusion is dying, it just makes good career sense to have a relevant skill set.

Pricing and open source

The $7K CF Enterprise price tag has been an agonizing issue. In order for enterprise customers to take CF seriously, they psychologically expect a high price tag otherwise it must not be enterprise.

Plus Adobe is a business after all – there’s no point in creating a product if they can’t profit from it.

However wouldn’t it be possible to create a CF Lite version that disables many of the extended features?

A lot of companies and public institutions are being given a mandate of open source only in order to control costs. If that’s the case, just use Railo.

The community

The audience mentioned how on the various discussion forums that the online community can be intimidating and snobbish with folks who have strong chastising opinions.

Another observation (by Sean) was as a community we tend to dig our own holes by isolating ourselves from the broader technology community. E.g. instead of participating in StackOverflow, you have well intention folks wanting to create a ColdFusion version of that site. Which then results in the outside community thinking there’s no CF activity.

Taking ownership

Per Nolan, as much as we want Adobe to do something, we have to take ownership of the problem ourselves.

Those of you who know you who want to become real Sr. level developers, you have to invest in yourself and get the training you need to grow – even if you have to pay for it yourself. The cost of $1500 is nothing compare to the return you’ll get.

If you feel the blogosphere only writes about super advanced features, yet you’re still trying to understand the deeper fundamentals – get on the forums and ask for it. Don’t be afraid to have a voice, the community wants you to succeed.

Repositioning ColdFusion

I threw out that I think there’s an opportunity to reposition CF as an integration technology.

Instead of something that competes with Java, .NET, RoR, and PHP – how about something that empowers developers of all such languages? And btw, it just happens to have it’s own language (CFML) as well.

What CF excels at is making stuff easy to do. Whether it’s reading in an excel spreadsheet, hooking into exchange, or interacting with a search engine, it’s all easy in the land of CF.

Running on the JVM, it lends itself to being able to interoperate with other such JVM platforms such as Clojure, Groovy, Java, Scala, Jython, JRuby, etc… Plus CF already supports .NET assemblies, so some early plumbing might be there.

Wrapping it up

At the very end, Sean conducted an informal poll to capture everyone’s take and the result was that people feel neither positive or negative about CF’s future. Everyone is in a wait-and-see mode…