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107 Comments
- anitab83, on 10/12/2007, -9/+25For a moment I thought I was reading a cached copy of digg. I didn't even realize that CF was still around ...
- TiKoZ, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Myspace IS a "visible bug"!
- ElWhapo, on 10/12/2007, -8/+19As a CF developer and a strong CF/Flex/Flash/Adobe community activist this is not news. The new features will just expand upon an already great product. Mind you I am not a CF bible waving PHP hating fanboy. I love php as well, jsp you my best friend, asp... well you can go to hell. This is the greatness of CF, you can mix all these technologies seamlessly.
@superpixel
Once Macromedia took over CF changed forever. The crappy little bugs Allaire couldn't fix were gone. New features were added, and CF exploded.
@eupemizeme
75 of the top 100 fortune 500 companies use CF
- Scyth3, on 10/12/2007, -14/+24That's cause CF is like Visual Basic for the web. I developed in CF for an old company for awhile before I forced them to switch to PHP. CF is a terrible language when used outside fusebox, and I'm glad I'll never be coding with it ever again.
- mrurc, on 11/05/2007, -1/+11Wow. I'd say that there were a lot of retards talking in this thread but that would be an insult to retards. Retards don't pretend they know what they are talking about as an expert when they have only heard of something in passing. You can write horrible code in any language and mySpace? Horrible code. People who don't know anything about the mySpace code or architecture are blaming its performance on CF? It's not even on CF anymore. Frankly, when you connect 350 servers to a single database server, it doesn't even matter how good your code is or what language your site is written in-- your site will suck!
As for CF being slow because it is J2EE and as it is built on top of J2EE requires an extra layer of compilation? It compiles into Java bytecode when the files have changed and that Java bytecode is run for every subsequent request until the files are changed again. You are complaining that it is run-time compiled even though you don't know the term for it and it's NOT run-time compiled. Seriously. Cluestick, please.
You can't find a site in ColdFusion that doesn't have visible errors? Try the one I work on. You might have heard of it? Logitech.com. You know why it doesn't have visible errors? It's a funny thing in ColdFusion-- it has a GLOBAL ERROR HANDLER! Actually, we have two. We could have three but two works for us. You find a site that is broken and you look at the file extension. If you go to a site and you don't find any errors, do you look at the file extension to see what language it is in? I seriously doubt it. Plus you can point any file extension to CF that you want. One of the favorites is .html. Besides, I don't think you mean that you see an error. I think you mean that you see an exception. If you don't even know the difference between an error and an exception I don't trust your opinion on my programming language.
Before you go bashing a system with which you are not familiar, do some basic research. I've done that about PHP and you couldn't get me to run a heavy-traffic site on single-threaded server software like PHP (the free version, Zend would be fine). I would need 5 clustered servers for every CPU on my CF server. I would at the very least need a server dedicated to searches, which are notoriously time-consuming. What happens if you have a single threaded server and three people try to do a search all at once? The fourth person in line gets an timeout or waits ten minutes.
Or in other words, try bashing software ON THE FACTS. Of course, I wouldn't expect mere facts to get in the way of people who call people retards but don't know what retards are. - lichme5000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10As a CF developer, I can say that there are things about it that are awesome, and things about it that suck. But I'm pretty sure that's the case with all of the server-side scripting languages out there. In my opinion, you can write a great site in any language: CF, ASP, PHP, JSP, etc; the quality of the coder is *way* more important than the quality of the language.
- euphemizeme, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13I've never used CF, but I've never run into a site that I knew was using it, which didn't have visible bugs. Not sure if it's the developers or the software, but I've not been impressed. This sounds pretty sweet though.
- jeremiahx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9yeah I hate it when you get a comprehensive debug report that lets you figure out exactly what is going on.
- brd6644, on 09/01/2009, -0/+9I love reading comments on digg about programming. Yes, this site is filled with all kinds of "expert developers" who digg up an article on DB optimization that says "you can use indexes to speed up your queries!" Amateur hour in full effect.
To all you PHP / RoR fanboys out there, here's some info for ya: when you get a real job programming for someone who isn't a friend of the family, you will find that these organizations have something called an "IT Budget." It's spent to buy servers and software and such, so that you don't have to go to Dreamhost and get a $49/month VPS that bombs out every other night. Investing ~$5000 on a CF license is NOTHING when you have a budget to support an IT infrastructure and a talented development team to pay.
CF has features that are valuable and people will pay for them. Is the syntax odd? Yep, but you can use CFSCRIPT to write most of your code in script syntax if you desire. Is it slow? Not really. Nowhere near as bad as PHP (pretty horrible performance) considering it's built on Java and can execute damn freakin' fast if you've correctly configured your JVM. Of course, that requires expertise to do so...
So please, before you open your mouth next time, realize that coding your uncle's Civil War Reenactment Club web site does not make you an expert developer, and also realize that you should probably read up on a technology that you haven't even looked at in 5 years before bashing it. - TroubleInMind, on 11/05/2007, -9/+18Oh phleeeese. Isn't ten years of begging people to adopt this crap long enough?
Hello, Adobe? The patient's family just called, remove the feeding tube today. - bkmaxey, on 10/12/2007, -6/+14Two reasons it won't: it's freaking expensive, and it's closed source.
- jeremiahx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8it's about $1k for a server license...
I can trim way more the 15 hours off my bill in rapid development to make it worth their while. - Elfman, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11In the early days, when it was C++ based (server-side), it was bloated and couldn't scale very well. But when they moved the the J2EE platform with CFMX, it has steadily become one of my favorite development tools by far. I can do more with CF in an hour then I ever could with .NET.
- stopple, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10ColdFusion as a programming language is very robust. I have used it to scrape, serve media, content manage, XML/RSS, and recently to fool around with AJAX.
I have 10 years writing CF for various companies and the amount of times I have run into an actual ColdFusion bug can be counted on one hand. 99.9% of bugs are simply the result of poor coding / error handling. - jeremiahx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Hmmm that could be why I have about 12 hours of billable work as a CF consultant on a daily basis... yep it's a dead language alright!
- mos6507, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Speaking as a 7+ year CF veteran. CF is designed for ultra-rapid development. It's designed for web development. It is not a general purpose language. That's why it's tag-based, so you can just visualize the code as an extension to HTML, since that's what you are usually generating as output. To me that is more logical than the cryptic code bocks in ASP/.NET/PHP. It is great for developers who want instant gratification. The problem is, once you build it, you have something that takes a lot more server resources than it should so you might as well plan ahead and not worry about future performance problems by using a different language. A huge chunk of Myspace overhead was spent towards buying servers they wouldn't have ever needed had they built the site in .NET or had they bitten the bullet and ported to it earlier. Even worse, they clung to CF5 for the longest time which just gives up and crashes under load. MX (and BlueDragon) is more graceful about being overloaded. MX and Bluedragon are not really that much faster than CF5, though. There are still enough sites out there that are not going to see infinite growth that are not really hindered in any way by using CF.
- jeremiahx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7yeah I have always hated having to tell the code that it is getting ready to process something... <?php ?>
yeah... - rip747, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6It's funny that people will say that ColdFusion can't handle load. The site that I work on on a daily basis http://www.sheriff.org gets close to 4.5 million page views a month and it's built entirely on ColdFusion. I can check the server at anytime (like now) and it's just sitting that at 1% utilization. Why is this? Because I've been writing web applications and ColdFusion code for about 8 years now and I know what I'm doing.
Plain fact is that any programming language can suck if you don't know what your doing in it and write crappy code.
Oh and by the way, this server doesn't even have the template and compile classes caching turned on, which would speed up the site even more, but it's a pain in the ass to clear the cache when we update code so I leave it off. - rip747, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7@bkmaxey
Yes CF is expensive but the trade off is developing application a lot faster. Also there is an open source CFML engine coming soon: http://www.smithproject.org - LeftE, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I should probably alert Bank of America that my online banking is using CF too. They might want to get on recoding it in .NET or Ruby or something just for fun, because, you know, it's cheaper.
- Dyogenez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@opes
Not exactly hard information to verify.
"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. Here's a partial list of customers (with links to case studies) who rely on ColdFusion for its signature server-scripting environment."
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/proven/ - jeremiahx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@ericanderton
"Pretty" url support is only the fault of the developer... even all your beloved RoR's depends on mod_Rewrite for that... It is standard for all my fusebox sites now to use mod_rewrite to have "pretty URLs" - superpixel, on 10/12/2007, -7/+12I used to slam CF pretty hard because of some early quirks... But these new features are incredibly strong. CF has always been pretty easy to use.
- brd6644, on 09/01/2009, -0/+4They've added interfaces in CF8 (finally). They are still missing abstract, final and a few other common features... but most of the big ones are in place.
- LeftE, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I should probably alert Bank of America that my online banking is using ColdFusion too. They might want to get on recoding it in .NET or Ruby or something just for fun, because, you know, it's cheaper.
- kenwestin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I used to use CF, until version 6 and it crashed our servers where we had deployed it. Then was told I had to pay to get support, I was pissed. Those were good times. It was more the customer service and support issues that turned me off and made me finally switch to other platforms. They finally fixed most of the bugs in 6.5, but still, I can do everything I need in Python or PHP for small stuff and Java for the big apps, why would I want to pay $6,000 for ColdFusion? If I could "trust" it and Adobe and it was a lot cheaper I might give it a whirl again. But Adobe has let me down with a lof of their server products, more recently Breeze, they come out with great products, but then bugs appear and their support and customer service is just not there for people and it seems to be getting worse as they get bigger.
- ryanstewart, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10This is great news for ColdFusion. It's really grown as a language in the direction of making it easy to build rich features and this could give it a big boost in the Ajax world.
- rmaxim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4That's just plain wrong. There is nothing about CF that limits or requires you to use MS Access. The VAST majority of the CF community uses MSSQL, although plenty use MySQL and Oracle. The fact is that CF makes it really easy, and seamless, to use a wide variety of RDBMS'.
- Scyth3, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8MySpace is mixed 50/50 ASP and ColdFusion. They started with CF before realizing their mistake, and started to move it over to ASP via BlueDragon.
- cartanga, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Most people critical of CF are small web site, brochure ware, download Xoops or Joomla, $0.95 a month hosting shoppers.
We have 1 PHP enterprise level application running report distribution system, we project to save $125,000 next year when the new CF replacement is finished. The savings will come from the labor hours saved in development and maintenance. We were paying a PHP consultant group to add features and maintain the code, we are replacing them with two guys on staff who have developed the whole application in 9 months in CF. It took 5 guys 2 years to develop the original PHP. In CF they have been able to add requested features in between 1 and 5 days, before that it took about 3 weeks in PHP.
We will still use PHP mind you. If a small dept wanted a small web site to share information, we will install Joomla or Drupal or whatever for them, but anything that requires customization or code rework will go to CF. It is a lot cheaper for us.
It seems that anyone who downloads a free PHP application and installs it calls himself a programmer. These people can't write code in any scripting language. A capable programmer respects other languages because he/she knows that a capable programmer can create wonderful products in any of them. For us CF proved more economical and faster to develop in. For others it might be .net or PHP. Will CF always be the one for us? If PHP or .net can save me money on the next application I will go with it in a heart beat. It will be a business and not an emotional decision.
We have downloaded CF8 and are playing with it. The new features will probably reduce our cost even further by making the development cycle shorter. Thank you Adobe. - iKnowKungFoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3'When Coldfusion stops restarting the servers 30 times a day then I will take a look at its "new" attributes'
@jinx: I and two other CF developers started at my current employer a year ago and they had similar problems. Fortunately, a new server admin started at the same time. Between the group of us, we diagnosed memory & code issues, put in some simple fixes and made the servers behave. The servers haven't had any CF related restarts in nearly 6 months.
Two weeks ago we released a new version of our website using OOP, optimized queries, AJAX and better session management. http://www.unitrinspecialty.com
The code is clean, commented and modular for easy reuse. While we use the Mach-II MVC framework on 6 of the larger applications, the other dozen procedural applications still have a separation of UI, logic and data access. Programming time-lines for a few upcoming projects that were originally spec'd under the old code base have been severely truncated due to the improvements we made.
We completely rewrote what had originally taken 6 years to develop in about 8 months including QA and Beta testing, Compared to the old code base, the CPUs on the production servers are down 10-15% and the memory usage has dropped by over 100Mb. There have been no major bugs filed so far (knock on wood) and our customers are extremely happy with the improvements we've made. Everything we've done so far is just a starting point for the next few years' worth of projects we have scheduled.
@rip747: We average 10 million page views a month. Template and class caching is on (it's worth the hassle).
There are nearly 20 CF developers in our group and we're very much looking forward to Coldfusion 8. - kookiekrook, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You seriously need to learn a lot more about Enterprise Web Development. Then come back and write like a grown up.
Being the Webmaster for your World of Warcraft guild doesn't qualify you for much. Other than a good laugh. - cartanga, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You say "Adobe as a company doesn't seem to get much of the web development world" I say loooooooooooooooooooooooooool. Have you heard of Dreamweaver and Flash.
- fkr3, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5MySpace achieved something like an 85% increase in performance when they moved to .NET. They also (belatedly) introduced a layer of caching servers during that migration which accounts for a signifficant amount of that performance increase.
There's a great writeup of it here:
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2082921,00.asp - WarLooch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3ColdFusion has a "free" development version. Plus it runs on mulitple platforms and connects to multiple databases. So, in your example you can setup your LAMP and replace PHP with ColdFusion (or be a more versatile developer and support both languages as well as others instead of bashing a product without proper research).
- Dyogenez, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@bcarl314
Very true, price is a huge barrier to entry stopping a lot of solo and small firm developers. As far as costs go, there are a number of prices at present. You can get a CF standard license under 1k, CF Enterprise for 4k (i think?). There are a number of other similar cfml interpreters that run anywhere from free to 4k as well that many people stand by. Bluedragon and ColdFusion remain as the most recognizable names, and implementing the most recognizable features. Bluedragon does offer a free version for non-profit sites. Both Bluedragon and ColdFusion have been at it for 10 years (started around the same time as Ruby or PHP), so even though their reputations suffer (as seen in this post), they are both established products. Until Adobe offers a free version though, I don't see too many of the lamp crowd signing up. On the bright side there are supported linux versions of CF, so you're not locked in to Windows either. - ShooterMcGavin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I like CF, have used it a lot. But since my company decided to get away from it, I can't find anyone else hiring for it. I would love to keep using it, but I guess it's time for me to switch to PHP.
- kookiekrook, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Very well said, the ignorance from the script kiddies here is deafening.
- cartanga, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3MySpace is not converting to ASP. They are using BlueDragon to run their CFML under the .Net platform. The release says: "MySpace.com relies heavily on the ColdFusion® Markup Language (CFML) to dynamically deliver custom content to its users - allowing MySpace engineers to rapidly introduce new features to their users." BlueDragon is ColdFusion runtime and NewAtlanta, the makers of BlueDragon, are striving to become a ColdFusion clone and with every new version they are getting closer. Why does MySpace choose to run under .net, maybe because they chose MSSQL 2005 for their back end. I would not be surprised if their where major financial incentives from the makers of MSSQL 2005. What is relevant to this topic though is that even in-spite of these incentives myspace still chose to keep running their CF code.
- cjordan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@mrurc:
Right on, brotha! I don't think there's much to add to that!
CFRocks! - TroubleInMind, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3If you wanna teach a couple dozen HTML monkeys to be "developers" your time would be much better spent with RoR. Regarding bar to entry for non-technical types, RoR (especially with RadRails) is even easier due to the pure MVC model and isolation from the database.
- cjordan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@elfman:
Amen brother... Amen. I can get far more done in CF in a short period of time than in .Net. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5If there is one thing people on digg are guaranteed to hate more than PHP, it's Cold Fusion.
- zmanzorek, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0I'm not sure where you are looking for CF jobs, but I have to say I get about 10 emails a week for CF jobs. I have noticed the job requests are booming for CF programmers for full and contract work for very high rates. If anyone is looking for some CF work let me know, I have more CF work then I can believe and I’m looking for CF developers to subcontract work to.
- SiRwhilms, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Never been a big fan of CF, but that looks moderately cool. One thing that has always had me bugged is seeing pages where the navigation contains:
index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=1
index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=4
index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=8
index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=23
It's really the fault of the designer/programmer but ffs, if that's really how you want to discern between the URLs of your pages, you're in trouble.
edit: @Moosetube Yes, I'd say a poorly trained user base is exactly the cause of what I mentioned above. As for a purely OO environment... well, I've taken to Ruby for those things :) - zmanzorek, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0My experience with “developers” who say ColdFusion is dead or PHP is better, don’t know how the platform works. They are the ones stuck in CF 1999 days, and have no comprehension what has happened since then with the product.
- coolbru, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2> Once Macromedia took over CF changed forever. The crappy little bugs Allaire couldn't fix were gone. New features were added, and CF exploded.
Erm, are we talking about the same Macromedia? The one that ships new app versions then doesn't fix the showstopper bugs for a year or two, if ever? Dreamweaver, and has been buggy as hell for years (no honestly, I really want windows to come to the front when I click them, and when I paste, I'd like you to paste what I just copied, not random snippets from somewhere else). I'm not going to start on Director, which raised bug workarounds to an art form. There are very few apps that didn't get considerably worse once Macromedia got their hands on them. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if CF explodes, just not in a good way. - EricAnderton, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Yea, that's an *indirect* consequence of CF's design.
For those reading that aren't too familiar with CF: What you see (FuseAction stuff above) is the impact of using the Fusebox technique for designing sites, which allows for hierarchical composition of templates. You *could* use ColdFusion Components for that, but they're nowhere near as flexible/useful as Java classes. Littering your code with statements everywhere gets unmaintainable pretty quick, so that's a non-starter. Fusebox is pretty much the only game in town for large-ish sites when using CF.
In light of that, I'm *very* dissapointed that "pretty URL" support isn't a first-class feature in CF8. - DarkPrincess74, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5Traditional cold fusion did suck but once they added components(classes) then it changed everything. Unfortunately by this point most people were frustrated with it and didn't notice. It'll be interesting to see what happens with the new release.
- fkr3, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3There is no ajax world.
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