What surprised me is that when I went to look at the Wikipedia page for CF, apparently its latest release was this year! I haven’t heard anybody mention it in a very long time.
I was active in the ColdFusion/CFML community for a long time, and still run some production code in it. It certainly isn't popular, but just carries on quietly, powering a lot of internal applications you'll never hear about. Many run the open source version of it (Lucee).
Indeed it does. I maintain one such application while an in-progress rewrite develops. Gotta say, it's not been that bad and the Lucee docs have served me well, but for whatever reason I tend to be pleased/impressed by all kinds of tech, even when popular opinion is negative about it.
With how deeply embedded cold fusion was in many gigantic corporations I've worked with, I would not be surprised if it stays alive for decades to come because nobody ever can port off of it.
Don't remember the full context, but I heard a few years ago from Adobe that they could never sell another license to the private sector and government licenses would be self-sustaining.
I worked at a major university that used ColdFusion. They had one guy furiously writing all these websites that were total one-offs. They didn't use source control. Every project was a copy of his original. If there was a bug, he had to update dozens of projects instead of maintaining common source across those dozens of sites. He was totally insane and making bank.
It's superficially tailwind-y, but in fact a sort of stenographic subset of SQL:
db-{table}-{column}-where-{field}-{value}-limit-{n}-orderby-{field}-{asc|desc}
db-users →
SELECT * FROM users
db-users-name →
SELECT name FROM users
db-users-where-id-1 →
SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 1
db-posts-title-limit-10 →
SELECT title FROM posts LIMIT 10
db-products-orderby-price-desc →
SELECT * FROM products ORDER BY price DESC
Certainly can result in some terribly inefficient access patterns, as there's no obvious syntax for joins. But enough for a toy project, and enough to hit the HN front page %)
There's a guy complaining that the creator is poisoning the collective code used to train LLMs. If that's all it takes we have a moral responsibility to flood GitHub with garbage.
hopefully I never have to review someone unironically using something similar in production code since I don't think I'll be able to stop myself from dropping a slur or two.
The actual disturbing thing is that given Next‘s track record of questionable security architecture, the author felt compelled to make the joke explicit.
GraphQL and SQL are not comparable or competing technologies. GraphQL is more analogous to a REST API. GraphQL can use SQL under the hood, or you can even hand serve the bytes (tongue in cheek here). It's just an over-the-network protocol to serve data.
a Node.JS server might use SQL directly or call out to a GraphQL API, but I literally don't think it's possible to let client-side JavaScript (safely) call a SQL database server directly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion
What surprised me is that when I went to look at the Wikipedia page for CF, apparently its latest release was this year! I haven’t heard anybody mention it in a very long time.
Also longtime internet celebrity and occasional HN poster Pud built the wildly successful Distrokid service with it.
Everyday we stray further from the simplicity god.
The README also says "License: MIT - Do whatever you want with it (except deploy to production )"
It's that perfect level of absurdity that captures so much of the terrible complexity that often happens.
”I’m doing my part!”
Weird stuff, seems to be vibe-coded using cursor and also the github issues are full of spam.
MIT - Do whatever you want with it (except deploy to production )
You can't make this up.
a Node.JS server might use SQL directly or call out to a GraphQL API, but I literally don't think it's possible to let client-side JavaScript (safely) call a SQL database server directly.
-Dr. Ian Malcolm