I just saw a press release titled “About Adobe - Adobe to acquire Macromedia“.
Adobe is the company that produces Photoshop, among many other great products — primarily print-orientated applications, although Photoshop is the defacto standard application of web designers. Macromedia generally has stuck to Web apps in the last 5 years - Flash, Cold Fusion.
This bothers me from 2 perspectives. It’s the #1 and #2 companies in the field merging — and I’m not even sure who #3 would be at the moment, but they’re not not even close. So much for competition. I’m sure the deal has to go through regulators, etc., and will take months and months to complete.
From a developer’s perspective, I’m curious how this will affect development of Cold Fusion. I’ve worked under that platform for almost 7 years now, and they’re really starting to make some progress. Adobe hasn’t got a successful server product under their belt - although Macromedia did buy Allaire a few years ago - so I’m a little worried about what the future holds. I guess it’s a good thing I’ve moved more towards PHP.
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Not being a fan of ColdFusion, I kind of hope it’s killed immediately. What I thought was it’s slow and painful death over the years was fun to watch, but I deal with too many creaky old (and poorly written) ColdFusion apps, that I’d really like to say “ColdFusion is dead, we might want to rewrite these in something else…” ;)
Posted April 20, 2005 at 10:04 am by Pete Prodoehl .
I could say the same thing about ASP or PHP - it’s not the language, it’s the developer. One of the strengths of CF - and maybe weaknesses - is that as a programmer, you’re able to get an app up and running very quickly, and requires a basic understanding of the language. The more you know, the better (cleaner, more efficient) your apps become.
Posted April 20, 2005 at 10:28 am by Bryan Buchs .
Ah yes, completely agree. It’s the coder not the code. Though we kept finding and having to work around limitations and bugs in ColdFusion that was driving us nuts at the time. (For the record, I mainly did the testing and support while others struggled to write the code.)
Posted April 20, 2005 at 5:44 pm by Pete Prodoehl .