There’s been a long thread on the CFAussie mail­ing list this week: recruters say “CF on the way out”? … FFS! not FUD from them too?

The dis­cus­sion has been at var­i­ous times hilar­i­ous, inspir­ing, bor­ing and tire­some (often all at once) and has moved from how recruiters are out of touch, to how the whole world is mov­ing to .NET, to how Adobe is not doing enough to pro­mote CF, to how we should be con­vert­ing PHP devel­op­ers to CF en masse, to how Scott Barnes is the devil.

Talk moved at one point to things that we as devel­op­ers should be doing to ensure the longevity of our plat­form of choice. Gary Bar­ber posted some thoughts and then fol­lowed up with a blog post on the state of Cold­Fu­sion with some ideas and a bit of a dig at the Cold­Fu­sion com­mu­nity for being too closed. Gary’s post spurred some strong reac­tions — Mike Henke posted Cold­Fu­sion is dead (yet again) and claims it was a car­bon copy of other “CF is dead” arti­cles. Really though, Gary was try­ing to spur peo­ple into action, which Jim Priest recog­nised in his post The Closed State of the Cold­Fu­sion Com­mu­nity.

For the record: I agree with Gary. He’s based in Perth too, and this topic is one we’ve spo­ken about at length, over beers at Port80 meet­ings. Port80 meet­ings where there are PHP, .NET and Ruby devel­op­ers, graphic design­ers and front end devel­op­ers, search engine opti­mi­sa­tion experts, recruiters, busi­ness own­ers and stu­dents of web devel­op­ment all net­work­ing and shar­ing knowl­edge (and free pizza). But there’s never any Cold­Fu­sion devel­op­ers other than the two of us, and Gary doesn’t really count him­self as a CF devel­oper, for the most part.

This may not be the case in other parts of the world, but it’s def­i­nitely the case in Australia.

I responded in the thread, but what I said was things that I’ve said before, many times. Because I’m sick of typ­ing it out again and again, here’s my take.

Cold­Fu­sion devel­op­ers, in my per­sonal expe­ri­ence which now spans nine years, do not par­tic­i­pate in the web com­mu­nity out­side of their own cir­cle. Many do not par­tic­i­pate in the com­mu­nity at all, but that’s an entirely dif­fer­ent prob­lem which we’ll leave for another day. In Perth, a city of merely 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple, we have Port80, the web indus­try net­work­ing evening run by AWIA, which has been held every  month since 2002. In the past year have had our first Bar­Camp, Australia’s first Pod­Camp, a Web­Jam, install­ment 4 of the Ideas sem­i­nar series, and the third annual WA Web Awards. Although not of inter­est to every­one, there’s also monthly blogger’s mee­tups, which have been run­ning since 2004, and last night was the third PTUB (Perth Twit­ter Under­ground Brigade). When I first started going to Port80 back in 2002, many of the peo­ple I spoke to had never met a Cold­Fu­sion devel­oper or didn’t know of any­one using CF. Some had never heard of the lan­guage at all (I always explain with “it’s like ASP or PHP, but better”).

So here’s my call to CF devel­op­ers who want to con­vince the world that CF is alive and well: get involved in your local web indus­try com­mu­nity. If there’s a healthy con­tin­gent of CF devel­op­ers at these events then CF must be thriv­ing, right? But don’t go because you want to con­vert every­one you meet to a Cold­Fu­sion pro­gram­mer… go because it’s fun. You’ll meet peo­ple out­side of your cir­cle (and if your city is any­thing like Perth, you’ll drink beer with them), and if you get an oppor­tu­nity to present, your love of and enthu­si­asm for CF will shine through and peo­ple won’t be able to help but take notice. It will make you a bet­ter devel­oper, a bet­ter net­worker, a bet­ter busi­ness per­son. There’s absolutely no downside.

Go for it!