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Comment by rebeccapowell | Hacker News Reader

I’m kind of blown away that there are still people out there using ColdFusion. Blast from the past.

The entire stack described in the post is the stuff of nightmares. ColdFusion, IIS on Windows Server, PHP. Things that make you wake up in a cold sweat.

They're well-documented, well-supported products.

What gives me cold sweats are custom application servers that no one knows how they work.

Next someone is gonna pipe up and say they used AI to enable them to continue using FrontPage extensions to keep their php+cf sites working

Frontpage on Linux. That was fun to support :).

Frontpage on Linux, backed by file storage on Netware. That was hell to support (student home pages).

When I was in undergrad we used CF quite a bit for the custom university applications. I cut a lot of my wed development teeth on it. But everyone hated it. So we were actually quite excited to get a PHP server. It could run open source alternatives to Blackboard after all!

I played around with PHP quite a bit in my senior year and got a job as a developer working for a PHP shop when I graduated. Boy was I absolutely disillusioned within 12 months. PHP nearly ruined my love of computers. It was an abusive relationship: I would spend my working hours writing horrible little patches to ancient systems that were made of spaghetti 10 miles long, then go home and night and weekend try to write beautiful code in PHP. The more little patches I wrote the more I felt the need to somehow make them right.

I escaped to Python and JS and have done a lot of therapy since. Doing much better these days, thankfully. My addiction to C seems like such a minor vice in comparison.

I have ported programs from PERL and PHP. I think it is a personal preference but I didn't care for them. I did like Ruby on Rails immensely and did a couple of projects in it prior to it reaching version 1.0. But the jobs at that time were with CFML so I migrated back.

My user group recently had a presentation on Wheels, which is a CF version of Ruby on Rails. Its been around for a few years but never quite delivered what it promised. But it has a new project leader and has been totally rewritten. There will also be a book coming out. It uses another open-source project RustCFML which is an interpreter that converts the code to Rust. CF is pretty fast all by itself but this is lightning fast. You can also now run CF programs on Cloudflare. So the community does keep moving along. Lots of AI work being done as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIwXMlinJw&t=1487s

Years ago I worked for a company that had an application, written in Delphi, running as a DLL in IIS (on Windows obviously). To more easily deliver certain features fast, open source PHP code was run in parallel, e.g. some customer wants a visitor counter, so that just got bolted on using PHP.

There are some absolutely insane systems out there.

ColdFusion has been maintained by Adobe since 2005. Apparently, they think there is future for it:

    ColdFusion Next is evolving into an AI-powered, cloud-native platform designed for modern business automation.

See “Roadmap for Adobe ColdFusion 2026” for more details: https://www.adobe.com/cc-shared/assets/pdf/products/coldfusi...

Everything says that - look at Filemaker: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/agentic-development/

Lawdy. Now we just need FoxPro Copilot to round it out.

Edit: No we don't oh please god no.

TIL Claris still exists.

> evolving into an AI-powered, cloud-native platform

Everything is doing that.

“Is evolving into” is code for “marketing made all this up.”

ColdFusion has a very lively community and there are two open-source versions: Lucee and BoxLang. The language has also stayed very modern and something like two thirds of the Fortune 500 are using it. Also there are a few well-known startups like DistroKid using it.

Same! I have a huge soft spot for CF. It put a lot of food on my table in the early 2000’s. Then I switched to Java :-)

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