State of CF in India
A little over a year ago I blogged about the complete unavailability of ColdFusion books in bookstores in India (http://www.horwith.com/index.cfm/2009/1/16/namaste-coldfusion). I am writing again from my annual pilgrimage to 'Mama Hindustan' and thought I'd follow-up and see how the market has changed. I believe that the availablity of books about a particular programming language is a reasonably good reflection of the popularity and job market in a region, though I don't know of any real data that backs-up that claim.
One year later, the number of book stores in Delhi is about the same, but there are a greater number of much larger book stores (similar to Borders and Barnes and Noble in the U.S.) and the size of the 'computer' section in these book stores is much larger than last year. A few of them are comparable in size to the computer section in a large bookstore in the U.S. That said, I could not find a single copy of any book about ColdFusion. I found this a little surprising for three reasons:
One year later, the number of book stores in Delhi is about the same, but there are a greater number of much larger book stores (similar to Borders and Barnes and Noble in the U.S.) and the size of the 'computer' section in these book stores is much larger than last year. A few of them are comparable in size to the computer section in a large bookstore in the U.S. That said, I could not find a single copy of any book about ColdFusion. I found this a little surprising for three reasons:
- I'm under the impression that there's a decent job market for CF developers in India.
- These computer sections didn't only carry books about very common technologies - I found books about pretty much every language, theory, and computer-related topic I could think of - including very obscure and outdated technologies.
- One large bookstore even had an entire 'Adobe' subcategory (made up of 6 large shelves of books) in their computer section
- Java
- .NET
- PHP
- Flash/ActionScript
Also, at least in my area (Baltimore MD), the computer sections in general are seriously shrinking.
Mark
I personally don't think it's a good idea to put too much emphasis into the "availability of books" metric as
-a lot of good documentation (incl. blog posts) is available online
-the importance of books can be overrated
-CF books may sell well online but not in stores
-and a lot of programmers today learn languages using pure heuristics.
To add to that, CFML is a language you can do powerful things with without ever learning theory and knowing only a small subset of the code library.
I realize you weren't trying to insinuate that book sales were the pivotal benchmark, but I do think it's kind of sad that so many outdated languages are readily available on shelves in general and not CF. I run into the same deal living in the DC area where CF jobs run a plenty.
I wish I could find the link (me Google fail), but years ago I found a line graph put out by Tim O'Reilly showing the popularity of web programming languages based purely on O'Reilly book sales. CF wasn't even listed. When asked by a few community members, Tim O'Reilly simply stated that if you were to actually draw it out CF book sales would be the equivalent of the X-axis.
To be fair, this was taken from data in 2005 or 2006, and O'Reilly has not really put out any up-to-date CF books in forever. My point is that book sales don't really paint the whole picture, and we can certainly be thankful for that. Availability of books is most certainly a great thing, but there are so many other things to factor. For example, Barnes & Noble had a booth at CF United 08, but hell if I was going to buy any books they were selling at full price.
CF has been around for 14+ years, CF jobs are still available, the product development team is highly active, and new versions are continually being planned and delivered. I highly doubt Adobe would continue to invest in this product if it was truly dying. I like these kinds of metrics the most.
I am a coldfusion developer and working on Coldfusion about 5 years.
what i feel , adobe is not having strong marketing of it's product however on the counter part Microsoft is very strong in this area.
therefore here in india ColdFusion is less popular to other technologies.
thanks
Prashant Gupta
Do you think the "enterpise glue" marketing strategy is effective in getting new ColdFusion customers?
First, regarding India, since I only have some travel experience there (specifically to the Adobe office to work with ColdFusion Engineers), I can't make an assessment of year over year. However, I do follow ColdFusion user group blogs, and from that I get the feeling that the ColdFusion community that does exist is a vibrant and active one. As an aside, my experience book shopping in a Bangalore store on par with a Barnes & Nobles was that they are very security conscious with lots of guards floating around and bag check on the way out.
Here in the US, I've consistently noticed a decline in ColdFusion books over the years. About 5 or 6 years ago there might have been abou 4-6 ColdFusion titles including the WACK, the O'Reilly, Dummies, and some from Macromedia. But that dwindled to just WACK and O'Reilly, and as of last fall I wasn't able to find any ColdFusion books at all in both a Borders and a Barnes & Nobles.
On a related note I'll mention that a year ago I was out of work and it took me months to find a ColdFusion related job (a remote one at that as there were no local ones to be found). This year I once again went looking for new work (in the Boston area) and in about a week I had interviewed at three places and had 3 offers. I'm happy to say I'll be working with Brian Rinaldi, but more importantly I want to emphasize my experience with ColdFusion jobs where the hiring landscape this year is much much better than one year ago.
Steve - I have noticed more Indian CF User Group visibility online since Adobe launched their groups site - but I don't know whether or not that actually translates to a real community (or did a lot of people who meet once a year just create profiles?). This is my 9th trip to India in 9 years - several years in a row I contacted Macromedia months prior to my trip in order to line-up a speaking engagement with the local user group... every year there was no CF user group (yes, I know there's supposed to be one or two now). I did speak at the Delhi Flash User Group in 2004, and it was a great group. As for the market in the US - I'm glad to hear that the market is getting better (it's been several years since I looked for a job) but I will say that from the point of view of someone who is a hiring manager, the pickings are very slim. I rarely bother to look for CF developers anymore - in my experience it's generally easier to find and hire a PHP developer and get them up to speed.
True dat. Let me add some flamebait to that. If Adobe were to give out all the books for free (as eBooks in particular) it wouldn't help CF become more popular. Feel free to agree or disagree.
http://www.buy-2moons-dil.com http://www.2moons-dil.org 2moons dil