Transfer Survey, and the Results Are In!

I officially closed the Transfer survey a short time ago, as results had slowed to a crawl.  Overall we had 87 respondents, and it was really, really useful to get the feedback.

I can honestly say the feedback from this survey has changed the road-map for the next two releases of Transfer.

Transfer Experience

This was a really interesting set of questions.  41% of respondents say that they use Transfer every day, which is really exciting. Only 1 person responded with What is Transfer?, which hopefully means I'm doing a decent job of getting at least the name 'Transfer' in people's knowledge sphere.

Most people have been using Transfer for only 1-6 months (30%), while coming second place (26%), 6 months to a year, and third 18% for 1-2 years. Only 2 people have been using it for more than 2 years, but since the project has only been around for 3, and the first year, itwasn't all that stable, I'm very happy with these results.

The version of Transfer that people are using totally shocked me! 73% of people where running either 1.1 (which at the time was RC), or the BER release of Transfer. 36% of people were running 1.0. Only 3 people were running 0.6.3, which is a good thing, as it was a really buggy release.  I'm so pleased to see the adoption rate is so high!

Other ORMs people have used

This was another interesting section, in that Reactor scored the highest at 51%, and Hibernate came in second at 21%.  Interestingly enough, 31% of people had never used an ORM before Transfer.

Transfer Enhancements

Not surprisingly, 58% of people that that Performance improvements were most important.  I wasn't surprised by this, and I expect this won't change no matter how fast I make Transfer.  The annoying thing is being constrained quite severely by how fast ColdFusion can createCFCs, which isn't nearly as fast as I would like.

Several comparisons where made between Hibernate (and other Java/Groovy ORMs) and Transfer, and while it is understood that Java will always be faster, they still want comparative speed out of Transfer.  Not sure how I'm going to get that to happen, but I know I will try my best.

To quote a survey taker: '...the whole thing about not really being able to instantiate collections of associated objects with decent performance - therefore you do your head in constantly switching between object-think and query-think.  This is the #1 reason I'd choose Java over CF for a decent-sized domain layer.'

The fact of the matter is, he is right on what he's saying, and I hope its something that Adobe listens to with future versions of ColdFusion.

Interestingly enough, there were several requests specifically to be able to retrieve arrays of Transfer generated Objects.  I had purposely avoided it due to performance concerns, but I think this may be something that will end up being discussed on the Transfer mailing list further, as there were a few people who were interested in this feature.

Integrated Flex support was another hot topic.  I'm currently in the process of learning Flex at the moment, so expect to hear solutions for this common problem around the corner.

DB introspection was a huge draw card, with multiple comments like '...config file generation without using illudium...' and '...non-generative XML can be burdensome in large applications...', which is all true.  In the next few releases we'll be looking at doing property auto-generation from the database, and also providingDDL support for Transfer to generate your database for you.

Inheritance mapping was also a big feature request (far more so than I had originally ever thought it would be, and this is even before the recent spate of ORM articles), and got me thinking about it a whole lot more.  To that effect, expect to see Inheritance mapping as one of the next big features in the next release of Transfer.

Some other interesting requests that came through were:

• Annotations in Transfer XML data
• Railo support
• Generate methods for setting object properties from a struct
• Query paging / Query limits
  
• Bidirectional M2M compositions.
• TQL aggregates

Support and Documentation

Support seems to be well received, with 46% of people giving Transfer support a 4, and 30% giving it a 5, where 5 was 'Very useful' and 1 was 'Not Useful'.

That being said, ease of learning could be better, as on a scale of 1 (Easy) to 5 (Really hard), the majority, 43%, sat in the middle at, 3, although 34% gave it a 2.

From reading comments, the big element to help Transfer learning, is examples, examples, and when done, some more examples. Comments include: 'Beginner Tutorials, step-by-step type. Maybe even videos...', 'Lack of tutorial type documentation. Especially for advanced topics.', 'The examples on the site are a bit limited...', 'More examples, and more advanced examples...', so the pathways are pretty clear.  I will be contacting members of the Transfer community and contacting people who participated in the survey to help with this.

Conclusion

I'll be finalising the road-maps for the next 2 releases of Transfer based on this feedback, however, I'm looking at moving to Skweegee from Project Tracker, so once I've made a decision in that area, and how to manage previously completed tickets and milestones, I'll get stuck in.

Thanks to all who participated, it was really useful to get the feedback!