If you’ve ever touched a computer at all, chances are you know what HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is. It’s how a website is built, right? But unless you are in the website development field or are responsible for a website built in it, you likely have not heard of CFML, or ColdFusion Markup Language. ColdFusion is an application development tool used for writing web pages that interact with databases, and contrary to what the uninformed may think, it is NOT a dead language.

Take the WRIS Legacy ColdFusion Division for example. Once the word got out that we could provide solid support for older ColdFusion sites, the phone started ringing and it hasn’t slowed down. Some of our clients only need minor support, so it’s cost-effective for them to seek our help rather than redesign their whole site in another language.

But other clients require substantial support, sometimes challenging the notion of a complete redesign. So why stick with their site? Because it works. ColdFusion is a reliable platform for a website that is also conducive to a user-friendly interface. And once you experience that, more often than not you stick with it.

In fact, ColdFusion is still so active that there also are open-source initiatives like Lucee that strive to “provide the functionality of CFML using less resources and giving better performance” than other CFML engines. In other words, a continuous effort to expand and improve it.

You can check out our site to find examples of organizations with ColdFusion websites and applications, but in addition to WRIS Clients, there are other high-profile sites that use CFML for all or part of their website and/or internal applications. These include PBS.org, the National Park Service, CarFax, and Etsy.com, and that’s just a sampling.

Need more proof? This is 2018. The current version of ColdFusion from Adobe is ColdFusion 2016, which was released in February 2016. There is another version in development and scheduled for release this year. Pretty much every couple of years there is a new version coming out, and older versions continue to get a generous support period. You can check out Adobe’s ColdFusion Roadmap to get a visual representation of just how alive ColdFusion is.

If you want to learn more about the benefits of ColdFusion, let us know.