pbell.com — With contenders like JRuby, Jython and Groovy for scripting on the JVM, has ColdFusion lost it's Mojo? In a word, no. For many use cases the value of some of the advanced tags are more than worth the price of admission - even for experienced developers.
Jun 3, 2007 View in Crawl 4
barrybJun 3, 2007
perhaps other ways of putting the "80%" idea is "tending to be happy [with CF] more often than not"or"more things to more people"or"you can't please all the people all of the time ... but you can make them 80% happy"(remind me to never go into advertising)
bigmadkevJun 3, 2007
I would have to admit I love ColdFusion for the simplicity of it and the fact it has given me a job that I love. The ability to do things quickly and easily but at the same time look impressive is the key to it for me.The reason it gets a bad name in the press is that its too easy to create badly designed apps that function.
thecrumbJun 3, 2007
But badly designed apps that function can be created in ANY language. I have some PHP code that is proof of that :)My favorite thing about ColdFusion is how well it grows with you as a developer - you can create very simple applications using a few tags and as your skills as a developer grows - CF grows with you allowing you to get into more 'advanced' programming like scripting, OO, frameworks, etc. It's like learning to swim - you start in the shallow end, with the water wings and then slowly move to deeper water. You don't just dive off the high dive the first time in...
peterbellJun 4, 2007Submitter
@knicks49, I think it still has the best tag library out there. For newbie developers it is still easier to build a site using ColdFusion than PHP. For advanced developers, for me the toss up (in scripting languages - obviously you can use a statically typed language like C# or Java, but that's gonna take a whole lot longer than any scripting language) is between a short list of scripting language. I don't like the PHP OO facilities even in 5, so for me it is between CF, Ruby and Python. I love Ruby and think it is a better language (at least for me) than Python. I don't like Rails (I prefer Django), but all that said, after a thorough internal review I decided to stick with CF because the time savings in the big tags (full text search, RSS, image manipulation, PDF manipulation and the like) was greater than the benefits of a framework like Django or the metaprogramming and "everything is an object" features in the Ruby language. It isn't the right language for all web apps, but what is worth considering is the number of CF developers who know PHP, Ruby and Java or C# and still choose to use CF despite the server licensing costs. We're not doing it just to waste money on a whim, we're doing it because for the right projects it is really worth the extra money in terms of time savings.It is good now that CF also has a solid IDE - CFEclipse so more experienced developers can switch easily between languages, easily tie into a svn repo and the like.
dochtuirJun 4, 2007
Dug cos I didn't know about Jython!