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125 Comments
- balthork, on 10/24/2007, -2/+19Cost has probably been one of the major prohibitors in ColdFusion adoption for individuals and small shops....now this shouldn't be an issue. ColdFusion is a great way to build large, scalable web applications; plus it's an easy way to leverage the underlying Java platform to do even more heavy lifting.
- dmurray14, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16$1300 is not a lot in the business world.
- jsd8cc, on 10/24/2007, -3/+17Cheap? Standard CF is $1300, Enterprise CF is $6k.
- leeesher, on 10/24/2007, -0/+14@rspeed
Since the MX versions have come out ColdFusion has become a lot easier to scale - using CFCs you can create OOP-like applications which will allow you to separate CF from HTML. - cmallinson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13You speak of ColdFusion as if it hasn't been upgraded in years. I assure you it is alive, well, and thriving.
- drsnooks, on 10/24/2007, -1/+13@Calande:
Since CF went totally Java in v6.0 (MX), the speed of execution improved dramatically - CF templates are compiled on first-hit into Java bytecode, which is then cached in RAM for subsequent executions. The end result is, for the most part, pretty much as fast as your average JSP-based code. - ferric84, on 10/24/2007, -0/+11Good to see this thread hasn't turned into a CF-hating fest (knock on wood), which is what I expected upon clicking in. Considering the amount of time CF cuts off development time, the price tag is worth it; development time can easily surpass that.
- creole, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12This is excellent news. Especially now that Smith supports CFCs (Coldfusion components) it makes it a viable alternative to the Adobe Coldfusion product. This makes CF completely free to develop AND deploy.
- perezd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Good to see an open source alternative.
- noseeme, on 10/24/2007, -2/+12Don't use "OS" as an abbreviation for Open Source.
- bkorte, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I suggest you look into ColdFusion a little more as you seem very misinformed.
- Vouksh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11I've used PHP for web development (I'm working on learning C#/ASP), and i know for a fact that it's nowhere NEAR powerful as ColdFusion. I've installed a demo on my computer to test it out, and I was amazed at how powerful it is.
The only thing that held back wide adoption is the price. It's only viable for businesses to use. Now with Open Source (or at least free) renditions of it, perhaps more web hosts will install it and allow customers to use it for free. - michaelmuller, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Very exciting news. Hopefully cfexecute will be supported soon. Until then we can't use it.
- pixel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Couldn't agree more. I've been doing CF for 7 years and you can bet I can whip out apps in no time.
Maybe it's time to bash ASP.NET along with VS2005? - mackstann, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10@jsd8cc:
I never thought I would be defending ColdFusion, but.. How much does it cost to pay a developer for just a month? $6k isn't necessarily that much money. - Dyogenez, on 10/24/2007, -0/+7There's also an abbreviated list on Adobe's site. "In use at 75 of the Fortune 100 companies and at more than 10,000 other companies worldwide, ColdFusion MX is one of the most widely adopted web technologies in the industry."
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/proven/ - creole, on 10/24/2007, -0/+7For those of you who want to know...here's a lengthy list of companies using Coldfusion:
http://www.forta.com/cf/using/ - jabberwonk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6A perfect example of why I don't mind paying $5995 for my own CF servers.... the pimply faced 13 yo can't afford that.
Someone else mentioned scalability - I believe bankofamerica.com uses a mix of CFML and JSP for their web app. - spectrm, on 10/24/2007, -1/+7@adrocknaphobia
are you goofy? you really don't understand computing in the business world.
1.) 1300USD per license - a license is for a single installment running on a single processor. Considering that a myspace (which runs CF) or Microsoft (which runs ASP.NET) would runs hundreds of DMZ servers for a particular service per region, each of them with at least 2 CPUs, and, now with virtualization, there may be multiple installations ber box. Now consider that production isn't the only use for the CF licenses - testing, production, internal services, etc. Now we're talking:
4CPUs * 1300USD * 500 installations = 2.6USD - and that's before deployment costs.
2.) they're not "missing" support - they're still working on it. "Gee...it's really noble what Dr-DOS is doing, but it's too bad they left out the GUI" It's alpha software (as of yet) numb-nut. Now shut up unless you actually know what you're talking about. I swear...this place is turning into slashdot. - Charlotte_Web, on 10/24/2007, -0/+6MySpace added well over 100 million users in the last year, I'm not sure that that's the best example of scalability issues that the average business will run into.
Besides, MySpace is now running ASP.NET, and still having major issues. I would say the problem goes well beyond just the language. - yoinky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I thought BlueDragon and Railo also offered free coldfusion servers?
- roadie, on 10/24/2007, -0/+6Myspace is no longer running CF. They migrated to .NET
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2082921,00.asp
Cold Fusion isn't in need of a renaissance; it's doing well all on its own. I read a recent article which put CF running about 10% of web sites, with a small increase over the last year. CF 7, with CFCc and event gateways, is a fantastic leap in technology for the product line. I'm looking forward to CF8 (Scorpio?) this summer! - theinternot, on 10/24/2007, -0/+6I'll reiterate what another poster said. I, too, am glad this has not turned into a CF bash fest. I earn my bread and butter as a cf developer. It has served me well and has helped keep myself and my family in a comfortable lifestyle. I hope it just gets bigger and better. It might not have as much market saturation for public sites as asp or php, but nearly 95% of the cf work I have done has been for corporate intranet portals... it kicks ass for this. And, yes, it is very fast to develop in. In addition, there are many great frameworks emerging that utilize as much of an OO approach as is possible with cf. Model-Glue:Unity anyone? cf_rocks!
- bleg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Its nice to see another alternative, although the smith project is not open source just yet.... Railo is the next best thing, its not open source, but they do have an unrestricted free version.
- jeffgtr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6BlueDragon is free, at least I thought so. I've been thinking Adobe might drop the cost of CF since they are spending so much time on Flex. Yes CF is expensive until you look at how much time you save in development. It takes far less lines of code to do a CF app than it does in php. In php's defense though there are so many excellent open source projects out there to build upon that I find myself using php more and more. Hosting for PHP is much less expensive as well. In addition you can throw together a lamp server in no time at all. I just finished a help desk project using an open source php app and Ubuntu. We installed it on an older G4 power mac that was sitting around unused. The cost was next to nothing, setting up Ubuntu with Apache, MySQL & PHP took little time at all. I was shocked at how far Linux has come with Ubuntu. Setting the same thing up in Windows using IIS would have taken longer and would have been more expensive. Next thing we're going to do is install Blue Dragon on the box, just to see how some of my existing CF apps will run. Anyway, I digress, it would be very cool if there was a less expensive avenue for using CF, it really does have it's place.
- jmfamp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6It is open source, so I suppose you could add support for what ever tag/function you want.
- coldskool, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Dont forget CFSchedule
- pruckelshaus, on 10/24/2007, -0/+5CF does scale, and it scales well. However, just like pretty much any other web programming language, it depends upon a number of things, such as code quality and server environment. Even the potentially best-performing language will be inefficient if coding best practices aren't followed, or the server is badly configured. I worked for a company that did online event ticketing, and we regularly hit thousands of distinct users per minute. However, we were load balanced across 8 app servers and 2 DB servers on a high performance SAN. Even still, there were some pages with real crap code, and they were performance killers until they were rewritten. And there's the problem with CF -- it is actually a really easy language for a relative NewB to pick up and do some cool things, even with very ugly code. It takes experience and discipline with CF (just as with any other language) to write clean, efficient, optimized code. Don't get me wrong, I realize that CF isn't the be-all, end-all web application server, it probably wouldn't be my first choice for a true, hard-core enterprise-level high volume web site, but for small, medium, and even some large businesses, and especially for many intranet projects, it deserves a look. Other reasons to consider CF is its platform-independence (will run on pretty much anything with a JVM), interoperability with other technologies such as SOAP, XML, Flash, etc., built-in functionality allowing for PDF generation, email, charting, and more, and finally, the ability to connect to any database that has a JDBC or ODBC driver.
My concern with projects such as Smith and Railo is that if they are not well implemented, and thus have stability or performance problems, it might give the whole CF platform a bad rep. I have used BlueDragon without any problems, but not Smith or Railo, but I plan on giving them a whirl as soon as my workload decreases some. - digiteyes, on 10/24/2007, -0/+5interesting to see all these open source cf project cropping up. I don't see why people always complain about cost. You cant really compare CF to PHP ( and i say this carefully). CF and PHP are positioned very differently CF started out as a commercial product while PHP started off as an Open source project, hence the reason its free, even though with the Zend Optimization etc you have to pay some money.In an enterprise setting $13k for a server software is nothing, try purchasing a Weblogic license. In terms of whether it can scale or not all depends on the developer, you can write bad code in any language (granted some languages make it easier) but if as a developer you are prudent and build loosely coupled, maintainable code then whatever u write in can scale gracefully
- mike42780, on 10/24/2007, -0/+5Hopefully this catches on. I use Coldfusion everyday at work. It really is great to make web applications fast.
- mike42780, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Rails is a framework. It would be better to compare Coldfusion to Ruby. Or maybe something like CFWheels to Rails.
http://www.cfwheels.com/ - westfork, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5PHP would be a lot faster to work with if PHP server had a similar great debug that CF server provides.
No need to google vague one line error messages, like PHP forces you to. - joerinehart, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yeah, ColdFusion has some fair-sized language issues. Most are to do with its roots as a datacentric scripting language that was a bit ad-hoc when it started. For example, you pass the loop tag the value of a collection:
cfloop collection="#map#"
But the variable name of a recordset:
cfloop query="someRecords"
I don't think that's any different from some of the what_will_weCallFunction_names_Today in PHP, or some of the ins and outs of learning Ruby (my favorite, as always, is the addition of "months" to the Date object that assume every month is thirty days).
I've done ColdFusion, Java, C#, PHP, and took myself through the Rails book then rewrote an app in Rails...I keep coming back to CF. It's the least wonky. Yeah, it tires my poor fingers out, because it's not as terse at the others.
That being said, it's just as agile and just as powerful as anything else: how you use it is going to impact agility and flexibility above all other factors.
Where I think Rails is superior is that it very quickly shows developers the payoffs of good MVC design. Where I think Rails falls apart is that it's purely datacentric. Any ORM that relies on database metadata to reflect an object model is flawed by its very nature; an ORM should serve to map an existing model to a persistence layer, not turn a persistence layer into an object model. In Rails, this really pervades, as raw SQL often "leaks up" into the object model instead of being hidden inside of data-access functions (since Rails pretty much abandons DAO).
Anyhow, someone did mention the Model-Glue (MVC) / ColdSpring (IoC) / ORM (Transfer or Reactor frameworks) stack. Put together, they can do some of the same stuff as Rails, but with the addition of implicit invocation (not that too many RoR fanboys are familiar with it or see the value), Aspect Oriented Programming, and a Model tier that's not at all bound to the MVC framework that's running it (which is where I think Rails is doubly borked).
Model-Glue, ColdSpring, and Reactor doing an MVC+II blog in under 10 minutes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHmp6E-icQo - Jammer, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Ah, another 13-yo pimply-faced wannabe web designer weighs in. Nice work.
- Dyogenez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@spectrm
Adobe offers a free version enterprise version of their software. The only limitation is that the IPs that access it must be internal (I believe that's the only limitation). This is suitable for all the non-production mode sites you listed. Plus, if you're deploying something to 1000 servers, I don't think you'd have 1000 test servers. You'd have one test server and then deploy to your cluster. Ideally you might have a smaller cluster to test on initially to make sure the cluster is working, but it wouldn't be 1000; and you wouldn't have to pay for the licenses. - cfjedimaster, on 10/24/2007, -0/+4cmdNacho - where is your proof of that? CF can scale just as well as any other language. 9 times out of 10 the fault is in sloppy code, not the platform.
- cmallinson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"I could really build a Java solution just as fast as any CF developer (Ill put money on that)."
Get out your wallet. - rip747, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4They both offer free server but with restrictions and limitations. I know that with BD, you can't use it for commercial use. I'm not too sure about Railo.
- annonimality, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I'm getting ColdFusion with my godaddy.com account at just $2 per month. A very small portion of my overall business expenses.
- adrocknaphobia, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7It's too bad they are missing support for so many tags and functions. Without full support for the lanaguage you can't move existing applications to Smith without major rewrites. It's a nobel effort. Although I'm not sure why we need a 'free' version of CF considering how cheap it is.
- jonezylights, on 10/24/2007, -0/+3homeaway.com (the largest vacation rentals site in the world) uses CF... they do a lot of traffic too..
just my $.02 - spos5, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Coming from xBase in the early 90's, CF was a godsend especially after using CGI, ISAPI, NSAPI, WSAPI, etc. Then came ASP, Java (server side, please), Struts. Lately, PHP, ASP.net and AJAX (insert backend here). Here's my take after doing the web development thing - professionally - for 13 years (I've used all of the above languages to feed my kids):
Java/JSP/J2EE: Great scalability, solid language, platform independence, lots of bad looking apps at there (see banks)
PHP: Throw in MySQL/Linux and you have the Open Source/MS bashers dream, lots of libraries, a LOT of code that is a pain to maintain
CF: Quick learning; Kind of the outsider but still VERY powerful
ASP.net (VS 2005): LOTS of free stuff (see AJAX toolkit), C# is a better language than Java (get over it flamers) but tied to one web server
Choose your tool, be good at it. And please just listen to the users. - theinternot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I agree. A developer should not depend solely on a single language. I like PHP. I have programmed in it. OO PHP is the bees knees. RoR is fast and no doubt very slick, but is still in its infancy in regard to widespread adoption (read paying jobs). ASP.net is fast and stable. But as long as CF keeps paying the bills. I will stick with it. It's never let me down.
- Dyogenez, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It's not "Cold Fusion". It's "ColdFusion". :-p You don't know how annoying it is searching for jobs and only getting half of them because people put a space in it.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=coldfusion%2C+cold+fusion - CaptShmo, on 10/24/2007, -2/+5i use php and coldfusion mostly, and although coldfusion isn't the most programmer-friendly in terms of the syntax and the total flexibility, it is a really great tool for pumping out fast apps. I think my job spent a few grand on a coldfusion server, so hopefully this will turn out to be a great free solution.
- weirdbro, on 10/24/2007, -2/+5Inacurate. The site clearly says it is free as in beer, but isn't open source yet.
- cmallinson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3They are using both ... sort of. As of this past summer, they were running CFML on BlueDragon, but on a .NET platform. BlueDragon can run on top of .NET, but the code is technically ColdFusion.
- magic6435, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Aww Silly retard.
- rip747, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Some awesome CF stuff:
www.model-glue.com - my favorite framework
www.cfeclipse.org - open source CF development enviroment (thanks to Mark Drew!)
trac.reactorframework.com/reactor - ORM to make databases suck less
www.riaforge.com - open source CF projects
www.cflib.org - THE place for functions and CFCs
rip747.wordpress.com - my blog (go CF and jQuery!!!) - anamanaman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Heh, its amazing how people with absolutely no knowledge of a situation can speak definitively about it.
Trust me, they arent writing any new code in coldfusion. Dont believe me, take a look at their job board. -
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