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The Adobe Developer Community Needs to Reach Out

Posted on Apr 20, 2010

This is a topic I have been giving a lot of thought to lately, even before and unrelated to the continuing Apple versus Adobe saga. Its been my sense, especially lately, that the Adobe Developer Community is a very introverted community and this trait continues to hurt how we are viewed within the developer community as a whole (for what its worth, I am speaking about ColdFusion, Flex and Flash developers since these are the areas with which I have experience though admittedly less within Flash specifically). This post is my attempt to open a discussion on that topic and suggest some ideas on how to change it.

Come In - We're Open!
This is not to say its an unfriendly community - quite the opposite, I think its smaller size and the nature of its makeup is unique and welcoming. I am speaking specifically to a sense that we tend to speak inwards and not outwards - we attend events focused almost exclusively on Adobe products, we read Adobe-specific publications, we host projects on Adobe-specific sites, etc. I'd like to hypothesize that perhaps some of the negative press and negative interactions we've seen in lately within the development community as a whole towards the "Adobe stack" is due in part to our lack of direct interaction within the larger community. In fact, I'd dare say that on too many occasions our community reacts knee-jerk defensive, only deepening the negative opinion, rather than making a concerted effort to reach outside our box and change that opinion through positive interaction.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Now before anyone takes this as a criticism and gets upset, please know that this is a mistake I myself tend to make very often, even as I am actively trying to change that behavior. This year I made a conscious effort to start going to events where I might feel uncomfortable because I don't know everyone and aren't as well-versed in the topics. Nonetheless, I still am finding it hard to break out and definitely haven't attended as many outside events as I'd like.

Adobe Developer Community != Adobe
It's important to be clear that I am not saying Adobe should be doing more. I think Adobe, for the most part, does what it needs to do. It is represented at major events and its publications and sites are high quality. I am speaking specifically towards the developers who make up the Adobe Developer Community at large. If Joe Java Developer or Peter PHP Programmer meets an Adobe Evangelist at SXSW, I am sure he listens but its not, in my opinion, as likely to sway any deeply held misconceptions about Adobe products or the developers who use them than meeting with a smart developer who works with the products every day and isn't paid to promote them.

Perhaps I am being naive, but I meet way too many impressive developers within the Adobe community to believe that others outside our community won't also be impressed by them. Its my belief that they just don't know.

Recognizing the Problem is Easy - Changing is Tough
Assuming you agree with the underlying premise of this post, you may be waiting for me to offer some amazing solution. I'll admit I don't have all the answers or even many. Still, here are some items I have set as goals for me personally this year (even if I haven't yet done enough of them):

• Attend at least one major non-Adobe-centric event
  This one I did do when I attended FOWA Miami but I hope to add to this list. For the record, there were very only a few Flex, Flash or ColdFusion developers at FOWA.
• Attend some non-Adobe-product-specific local events
  For example, I'm hoping to make it to Refresh Boston and our local Web Innovators group.
• Speak at one the above events
  This is admittedly tough since you are already outside your comfort zone...I hope to do this later this year or early next.
• Write for a non-Adobe published (or specific) journal
  I did get to write for DevShed on behalf of Adobe recently but that didn't go as well as I'd hoped. This isn't easy either since many of the non-Adobe publications share the same biases we're fighting against but I suppose that isn't going to change by our not attempting to publish in them.
• Broaden existing events
  For me this is more specific to my RIA Unleashed event but could also apply to my ColdFusion User Group. My hope is to bring in some speakers who are not talking specifically about an Adobe product but perhaps a related technology or language. My thinking is that they get to meet some smart members of the Adobe Developer Community and we get to  break out of our box a bit (a win-win).

Please share any thoughts you have as I'd love to hear any additional ideas, assuming you agree, and even if you disagree with my premise, feel free to tell me why.

Comments

Great article Brian. I wonder what the best way would be to find out about non-Adobe conferences?

Posted By Raymond Camden / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 1:36 PM

I've heard the criticism about this before, and it's refreshing to read a post with a solution and a personal resolution to do something about it, Brian. I hope that others follow your lead as well.

I still think that the CF community http://www.clearcrystalmedia.com/pm/rally-cry-coldfusion needs to spend some time building great apps</a>. But we should start socializing now and learn from others while we're doing that!

Posted By Chris Peters / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 1:39 PM

Aww, link fail. :(

@ Ray, I listen to the Boagworld podcast to learn what's going on outside of our community (and to learn about some awesome stuff too). They mention conferences like SXSW, Future of Web Apps, and such on there.

Posted By Chris Peters / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 1:41 PM

I'm not a big podcast person as I don't travel, but Boagworld looks cool. URL in case folks are curious:

http://boagworld.com/

It reminds me - I wish there was a good web development magazine out there. Language agnostic. I'd happily read about how problems are solved no matter what the language. (Sorry if thats a bit OT Brian.)

Posted By Raymond Camden / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 1:50 PM

Nice post Brian. IMO it's easier to do it by talking about Flash, Flex or mobile (Wow effect and trendy) but a bit harder with ColdFusion. Anyway we love new challenges :-)

Posted By Cyril Hanquez / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 1:52 PM

Great post,

One of the best publications I get (probably most of you would qualify for free subscription) is SD Times (http://www.sdtimes.com/). There's an upcoming events/conferences tab towards the end, lots of .NET, JAVA content/relevance. They have covered CF Releases in the past and I'm sure would welcome article submissions too.

Posted By phill.nacelli / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 1:57 PM

One of the bigger issues, I believe, holding back CFML from being more widely accepted (and subsequently adopted) is simply that almost nobody uses it for interesting little public-facing web applications.

With the API gold-rush that's going on, CFML has the opportunity to be the quickest, easiest way to whip up interesting little applications.

The reason is pretty obvious - the cost of the serving platform has been prohibitive.

That's changed with OpenBD and Railo, but for the most part, decent hosting for Java stacks is still several times more then php hosting.

But, something amazing has happened that can change that:

OpenBD on Google App Engine.

Now, its completely free to develop CFML-based web apps that can scale to "moderately successful" levels, and by enabling billing, to "really successful" levels.

Its not (yet) the most full featured CFML stack available, but the GAE-specific elements of it make really pleasurable.

The CF community now has the means to develop and deploy every funky, stupid, silly, ingenious, amazing, funny, kick-ass idea they can think of, completely and utterly free.

As Aaron Lynch, "There is just no reason that we as cfml developers shouldn't be churning out app after app on this platform."

Posted By Edward Smith / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 2:14 PM

I think a big detriment with all developers -- and conversations with friends who use other languages seems to back this up -- is that we focus too much on the tool and not enough on the craft.

Brian's suggestion to speak at non-Adobe conferences is a good one. One area to talk about is the craft, check out books like The Passionate Programmer or Peopleware and then give a presentation on it. If we show we are experts on our craft then we will gain respect very quickly on the tool we use.

Ok, I've just re-read this and I need to take my own advice and find a non-CF conference to give a presentation at!

Posted By Sam Farmer / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 2:33 PM

Here's one good online magazine . . .

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

You may also want to check out Web Designer Magazine (UK). They have great tutorials and cover html, ajax, css, php, mysql, silverlight and wordpress. The tutorials include Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop.

Posted By Lola LB / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 2:34 PM

Brian, this is a really good article and we just chatted about it in our office. I do think that one of the challenges the community faces is they are mostly contained in Adobe related conferences and/or online communities. Attending conferences that are more industry focused, like FOWA for example, would not only expose you to technology and industry trends, but it would also get you in front of developers on other platforms. This has given us a lot to talk about. Interestingly, I suspect a lot of people likely jumped from technologies like PHP to Ruby on Rails after casual confrontations on conferences and conventions. We'll be talking about this a lot I'm sure.

Posted By Mike Chandler / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 2:36 PM

Good post Brian. I attend a number of meetups in the RTP area of NC including an active Javascript meetup. I also try to make the IEEE chapter meetings and several others occasionally. There is a general web dev meetup and several others that meet at lunch or after 5. Meetup.com is a good place to find local groups in a lot of areas. I'm not sure it gets the word out on ColdFusion, but it rounds out my views on technology.
The biggest barrier is time. There is only so much time to attend meetings and groups. In the RTP area, I could go to one every night of the week.

Posted By Roger Austin / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 2:37 PM

I'm reaching out to Smashing Magazine.

Posted By Raymond Camden / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 2:44 PM

** applause ** very well said Brian. How can we help?

Posted By Rachel Luxemburg / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 3:57 PM

One thing that Adobe can do is support more events like NCDevCon this May in Raleigh. NCDevCon was designed to try to bring together different populations of developers and web designers. The idea is to have general web development tracks along with CF, Flex, etc. That brings in speakers and attendees on Javascript, CSS, HTML5, and other topics who will get exposure to Adobe technologies. It also naturally mixes different technologies together. There probably won't be a lot of conversions during the event, but ColdFusion and Flex will get exposure where there was little.

Posted By Roger Austin / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 5:46 PM

That post was really noble, Brian. You pretty much hit the nail on the head. These communities can certainly begin to feel overly insular when we as developers don't branch out from within the Walled Garden, so to speak. I've pretty much been on the same wavelength of all your bullet points for quite some time. I just haven't been vocal about it because I don't really think voicing my opinion will change much.

Yes, I'm a pessimist. I realize Adobe's other products have pretty good standing in the marketplace, but I don't think the CF community will ever truly "dominate" in terms of market share. I'm of the opinion that most Web developers like the "free as in beer" above anything else, and developers flock to where the money is. Yes, there's good money in ColdFusion, but it definitely doesn't have any of the hype surrounding all the other languages. Does any of that matter though? As long as ColdFusion developers are making money and Adobe is making a profit, who cares about market share? Do what you love to do, and fuhgeddabout everyone else.

A little bit of non-Adobe sponsored PR would do good to enhance the overall image of Adobe's developer community. I'm surprised no one in this thread has mentioned helping out in jQuery land. That's the first one I would go for. As Chris Peters points out, pushing out some neat open source apps is also important, but these should be apps that are heavily in demand. Otherwise, I don't think you'll even get as much as a flinch from the outside developer world. For instance, I'm really hopeful that the Mura CMS guys gain some good traction with their product as the CF community needs a champion CMS product just like PHP has Drupal.

One thing's for certain. It certainly doesn't help when you have flame wars where Joe Tech Journalist claims ColdFusion is dead, community members get all riled up, bomb a comment thread, and then you get the Adobe employees jumping into the riot with broken bottles in hand. I'm all for freedom of speech, and Adobe employees certainly have the right to speak, but some people just need to STFU. Did someone say MFG.com?

http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/mfg-com-takes-off-the-cuffs-with-manufacturing-marketplace-redesign/

Let's not go there.

On Sam's note, I would recommend these two books for managerial type books:
"Rework" from 37signals
"Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming" by Peter Seibel

Posted By Jose Galdamez / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 6:16 PM

As someone who has come to the "Adobe Stack" from outside - as a "former" C++ / Java developer, I can see how easy it is to turn inward: Adobe provides a complete developer ecosystem of tools, languages, conferences, user groups and so on. In many ways, you could live your life as an "Adobe Developer", interact with lots of fellow developers, build all sorts of software and media - and pretty much never need to look over the fence. It's a little ironic that as Adobe developers, we've criticized Microsoft for enabling and encouraging the same thing.

Despite the complaints I hear from time to time that Adobe "doesn't do enough for us", the reality is that Adobe does so much that it can actually encourage the insular nature that Brian is cautioning about. No criticism of Adobe intended here - we should be glad that they provide so much support - but it means that we need to make even more effort to expand our boundaries...

We all have a finite amount of time so if we make a living from Adobe technologies, it can be hard to justify time and money spent on other technologies. I'm glad Brian has started this discussion and that folks are being so positive about the challenge!

In the past I've attended several Java conferences (Sun's JavaOne and O'Reilly's Enterprise Java) although those are very expensive (over $2k registration) and SD West (also well over $2k registration). As I do more Groovy and Scala work, it becomes easier again for me to justify Java conferences but that may work for everyone - especially since our goal is to get CFML in front of more people (or Flex or whatever).

I've found meetup.com very helpful - I told it I was interested in a lot of different technologies and it has suggested a number of user groups, some of which I've joined: HTML5, Clojure, PHP (all local to me).

Just experimenting with other languages helps - by joining the mailing lists, you'll hear of events and you'll also have the chance to have conversations about different technologies (but be wary of "pushing" your tech on those other folks!).

Posted By Sean Corfield / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 6:24 PM

As I do more Groovy and Scala work, it becomes easier again for me to justify Java conferences but that may ^ NOT ^ work for everyone - especially since our goal is to get CFML in front of more people (or Flex or whatever).

Not a good typo!

Posted By Sean Corfield / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 6:26 PM

@Brian
No worries. I knew you were talking to the Adobe developer community in general. I'm just not a part of any other Adobe circles, so CF is all I can comment on :)

Posted By Jose Galdamez / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 6:59 PM

I love this post; it's a fresh perspective. We're always talking about growing the community, promoting the community, etc. and yet because we are so self-sufficient we generally don't have the impulse to wander around. Perhaps part of it *is* that we're insulated/isolated as a by-product of the language that doesn't have us constantly looking for external libraries or documentation to solve our problems.

I've already hit up my neighbor ("a.ka. Rails boy") and told him to drag me along to his next user group/conference/gathering/whatever.

Good stuff, Brian. Really good stuff!

Posted By Grant Shepert / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 7:53 PM

Excellent article Brian. Many good thought there.
I was always interested and following more then just CF-related events and news. Mostly Java and .NET. For instance, tomorrow I'll attend .NET UG meeting to hear Silverlight 4 preso (and meet some old colleagues and friends + beer :)).
As addition to that, I'm working in environment of mixed technologies and have opportunity to see what is happening inside other communities.
From that point, and regarding isolation level of our ecosystem, I may say that we are opened as ocean compared to .net developers and closed as good bottle of wine compared to java ecosystem. But way less arrogant then any of them.
Specifically for my country (and region in general) is that Adobe's activity is close to zero. Though, some progress regarding Flex activities is notable. Reason for this, most probably, is that Adobe doesn't find financial interest.
Bottom line, if I find space & time to talk, that certainly will be as part of some non-CF event. Attending CF events is matter of (thousands) dollars.

We need an innovation. Something that would attract attention of masses. I wont elaborate much on this, because if I could know what it is, I would do it and become famous :)

Imho, the way we should open/go is toward some kind of Java-synergy or, at least, to put bolder accent on it (in case you think that kind of synergy already exist). We should find the way, or show the way, how all those Java and .NET developers could employ knowledge they already have, in context of developing CF application. We all know how easy is to learn CF ml/script. At the same time, as learning curve is bigger that harder to drop gained knowledge it is. This is a moment where we should say: "You already work with Java. Great! That will only help you to be better CF developer", and, on top of it, "With CF, you'll be able to make Java-based apps faster".

Posted By Marko Simic / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 8:14 PM

The Boagworld podcast has already been mentioned here. I've been listening to that one as well as the Sitepoint Podcast (http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/category/podcast/) regularly for a while now. I really encourage people to check those out as I've found them really good at helping me to keep track of what's happening in the "web world" from a very broad perspective. The last Sitepoint podcast talked about the Adobe/Apple issue and it was interesting to hear a perhaps more objective take on the situation than what we've usually seen within the Adobe user community.
Also, I couldn't agree with you more, Brian. There's a "Web Geeks" meetup group close to where I live and I'm going to start attending their meetings and hopefully give a talk or two in the near future. Great post!

Posted By Tony Garcia / Posted on 04/20/2010 at 11:07 PM

+ If you are interested about software architecture, design and development processes, I would recommend
http://www.se-radio.net + interview with many (mega) smart people

PS
German accent gives special flavor to podcasts :)

Posted By Marko Simic / Posted on 04/21/2010 at 12:35 AM

This may be a bit of a stretch here, but also, if you have are posting a CF job opportunity for your business or team, and you tend to post on CF specific job boards, if your budget allows, try you also post on more general job boards like Dice, Monster or CareerBuilder.

CF job openings are out there, however we don't see as many postings in those boards as we used to. Unfortunately some folks tend to assume negatively based on these job searches and begin making false assumptions about CF.

Posted By phill.nacelli / Posted on 04/21/2010 at 7:10 AM

@Brian

You should add one more thing to your list - Work through a project using another vendor's tools/tech stack (even if it is out of a beginner book). Long before I knew what ColdFusion was I did client/server ERP Systems development for many years. I really cut my teeth as an RDBMS Architect/Developer after that (ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2 and MySQL) and then once I was unplugged from The Matrix I moved into using CF to build portals and RIA's on top of the aforementioned ERP Systems.

How many of you have ever coded a database driven C#, PHP or Ruby application? When was the last time you did it?

When you get married to a vendor then you can sometimes get surrounded by that vendor's family and become a bit too insulated is all that I'm trying to say.

Posted By Andy Sandefer / Posted on 04/21/2010 at 12:44 PM

Great post Brian. You've nailed it on the head.

I see this already with guys like Peter Bell, who speaks at several high level development conferences a year, and contributes regularly to GroovyMag.

Aaron Conran is the Technical Lead for ExtJs. Aaron's a longtime CF guy, who was one of the original contributors to ColdBox. When Ext introduced Ext.Direct in 3.0, Aaron's first server-side stack was a ColdFusion stack. It's small, but every little bit helps out there.

I know there are some guys here at cf.Objective() who, if they took their presos out on the road they would rock some of those other conferences. Respect is earned, and we have a lot of deserving people in our world.

Last year I gave a presentation on CF9 in the Enterprise at BarCamp Nashville. My session was one of the last of the day, but I attended a lot of other sessions, asking questions, and "hanging out" all day with other developers. There were several times someone said "ColdFusion? I didn't know it was still around?" Now they know better.

I know there are BarCamp, PodCamp, and other events all over the world. And it was free too, so it was a no brainer. Posting and answering posts on sites like StackOverflow and ServerFault are good ones too. I'll try to answer topics in the ExtJs and JavaScript areas occasionally, and my Adobe creds sit in my profile for everyone to see. Forum sites, where you define your signature block, is another way to help out and spread the word.

Posted By Steve 'Cutter' Blades / Posted on 04/22/2010 at 10:17 PM

I agree, but I don't know how to fix it, at least for me personally. I only get to go to anywhere from one to three conferences per year (2008 was a year I got to go to three). I usually only go to conferences that I can go to as a speaker. Two reasons: I can't afford it any other way, and the training budget was slashed and there just isn't the money to go to whatever I wanted. I am paid well, but we're still dealing with my wife's long period last year without a job and now the job that she has pays very little - a lot less than what she made. I can't afford to go to a lot of conferences. If there was a general conference nearby (as in I could get away with not staying in a hotel) that I could attend, I would strongly consider attending it. I don't know of any in the Cleveland area, though. I know there are a few in Columbus that I might consider.

A few people have mentioned Boagworld. It's primarily a design podcast, but I have listened to it for years. I listen to the Ruby on Rails podcast, the Stack Overflow podcast and the jQuery podcast, as well as a few others.

Posted By Brian Meloche / Posted on 04/29/2010 at 1:05 AM

Hi,
I am from India.
First please make sure all the big hosting companies give Coldfusion hosting or Railo -now GoDaddy is off it.And let Adobe sponsor something like Microsoft's Dreamspark, so that start-up developers can ..start up! And in Linux open source conferences, or CEBIT, Railo/OBD personnel etc should give talks so that crowd can be pulled in.Of course if someone is able to install CF in Android or maybe rather far fetched convert Facebook or Google to Railo/CF-- that beats everything !!!

Posted By Narayan / Posted on 01/10/2012 at 10:56 AM

Hi Narayan (I user to work with a guy called Narayan at Macromedia, BTW)...

It's been over eighteen months since the last comments here so maybe you'll reignite some discussion and we can look at what's changed in the Adobe world since then, viz-a-viz getting the community more plugged into the world outside Adobe's cozy little environment?

GoDaddy was always a terrible host for ColdFusion. They didn't upgrade in a timely manner, their support folks knew absolutely nothing about the product and they had things so restricted that it was hard to run serious programs there.

Hosting.com has also become a fairly poor ColdFusion host - a shame since HostMySite used to be so good, years ago. It went downhill rapidly after the acquisition (of HMS by Hosting) and once Lou and Neil left, ColdFusion support really fell apart there :(

I don't know if Adobe maintains an up to date list of hosting providers (Brian? Ray?) but Railo lists hosting providers here: http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/community/hosting-providers/

As for CeBIT, Railo was present at that in 2010: http://blog.getrailo.com/post.cfm/railo-at-cebit-2010 and Railo team members regularly attend and speak at non-CFML events. Adobe is also very prominently present at a lot of non-CFML events: Ben Forta gave a keynote at JAXconf in 2011 (introducing Adobe technology to enterprise Java developers) and Adobe had a big booth there. I know the OpenBD folks also attend and speak at non-CFML events too.

I think there are a lot of misconceptions about just how much promotion Adobe does for its technology stack and that somehow it's "Adobe's fault" that CFML (or Flex) isn't dominating the world - that's absolutely not the case, and you only have to look at other technologies out there to see that, as Brian indicated in his original post, technologies live or die on the backs of their communities.

The sole exception might be Microsoft which has such phenomenally deep pockets that it can give away huge amounts of its software and spend vast amounts on marketing to bludgeon the world into accepting its (very proprietary) software and practices.

Posted By Sean Corfield / Posted on 01/10/2012 at 11:52 AM

As far as I know, we do not maintain such a list.

My personal recommendation is Edgeweb.

Posted By Raymond Camden / Posted on 01/10/2012 at 12:10 PM

I concur with Ray about Edgeweb.

Posted By Lola LB / Posted on 01/10/2012 at 12:14 PM

Yes, EdgeWeb is a great host. Broad range of services, very knowledgeable folks. Vlad and his team are awesome to work with! The last two places I've worked have both hosted their production infrastructure at EWH: Broadchoice and World Singles.

Posted By Sean Corfield / Posted on 01/10/2012 at 12:38 PM

@Sean
I ain't the Narayan from Macromedia.

Anyways, I have been working from CF 4.5 onwards and loved every minute of it always!

Big hosting companies should not be lost to Coldfusion. GoDaddy was restrictive, but for ordinary sites it was excellent and Godaddy has visibility.Had good call centers with prompt responses.Many smaller hosts like say Hostek, though very good have limited call center facilities as it is too costly and economically unviable. I understand that VPS and Colo etc are low cost nowadays, but most small biz people want something standard and are, naturally, averse to risk.It should be noted that the majority of php/asp.net sites use simple applications only, many the new simple HTML5 single long page sites.

Network solutions, still has I think CF hosting. When we used Network Solutions for some customers, 2-3 years back they had problems when we used application.cfc and we were forced to use application.cfm.They could not solve some JVM error for many many months.I remember explaining to the NS Arizona customer care engineer that "application.cfc is like global.asa or .asax in asp/asp.net" and that is required for the application to function and that I cannot remove it!!

Few things are needed in my humble opinion:-

1)Just like Oracle database with Enterprise Linux (actually RedHat) a consolidated stack of software that can be pushed to customers is needed. I remember telling that to the Oracle exhibitor at a exhibition, may be CEBIT, 6 years back that I was unable to understand why a Windows OS was needed for Oracle to run at that time- I was glad when they started the Enterprise Linux stack with the databases. Railo does with Jetty/Tomcat- they should also include a OpenSuse/Novell--it is simple to do that. Also if the customers start with Windows OS they start using Asp.net, despite the pitfalls.

2)Also need virtual machines like what Oracle does that can be run anywhere in Virtualbox, and can be used in Amazon.Must be able to be made to order in Suse Studio, which is a wonderful facility! Of course OpenBD has some very imaginative packages, easy setup offerings- but many people do not know about it.

Have been trying to use the OpenBD in Google App but the lack of SQL(the usual SQl db stuff) not Big Table is a inhibiting factor- and we are finding it difficult;wished for at least Apache Derby.

3)We find Sharepoint excellent mainly for document management and versioning of records, say patient records, with approval workflow etc.Wish that is possible on the fly natively in CF- it is a typical database driven app that should have originated from CF not MS.The CFSharepoint tags we used do not do much as yet I think, from what I have used.

4)And with President Obama with the Healthcare bill and stimulus, I wish Adobe/others engineer a good database driven EMR that is user friendly, standards compliant-even an opensourced one. The present ones are archaic naturally -many in PHP, VB or jsp, which the doctors hate to use!!I Something in CF, to model on say OpenEMR is wished for-- database logic and screens seem simple.Probably I would start on that when time permits!! The market is huge and only small companies at this time are offering products for it.I feel CF+Linux+EMR has got what it takes I think!.

Sorry for the ramblings.But the future should be bright as when you dabble with Asp.net/PHP you see how archaic it is most ways.Ask a 2 year experienced .Net developer to send email from a Godaddy/shared hosting website in .Net.Or ask the java guy who maintains 50 applications for a local bank, the extremes they have to go through for simple stuff.Ugh

Regards
Narayan

Posted By R Narayan / Posted on 01/13/2012 at 12:21 PM