Finally, Adobe have released Coldfusion 8. Before I begin, we need to take a look at the price tags.

US Price
Enterprise edition - $7,499

UK Price
Enterprise Edition - £5,500

Can someone explain how a product that retails for $7,499 in the US can be £5,500 here? Don’t exchange rates mean anything anymore? That is around a £300 rise in price since Coldfusion 7 hit the shelves.

It’s about time Adobe asked themselves why they seem to making a conscious effort to drive more and more people away from CF and towards competitors such as PHP, .Net etc. I was asked what CF has over other platforms to warrant the price tag. I couldn’t think of a single thing. True, it has support for RSS, image manipulation, zip file management to name a few (for a full feature list, visit www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/features/ ) but the likes of PHP have had such support for years. So where are the incentives? I have been coding in CF since CF4 came out, and even I cant see any.

CF developers often talk about the way you can knock a site together in no time. I find that developing in any language which makes use of a framework is just as quick, if not quicker. E.g. CodeIgniter/PHP.

The truth of it is, CF is simply not worth it. I would love to hear how Adobe justify the prices. I cannot remember the last time I was asked to develop a CF application from scratch AND purchase either CF hosting or a CF license. Most clients approach me with either an existing site written in CF or a server with CF installed which they want to make use of.

Oh, and if I had a penny for everytime someone mentioned Myspace as a shining example of a great CF site, I would have enough to purchase CF8 license myself. :)