Can someone explain ColdFusion to me? All I can gather is that it is a development tool for interfacing with databases. That's as much as the material I've looked up will tell me. From the sound of it, can't you do the same stuff with PHP? Doesn't it cost quite a lot for a license?

Basically, what's the big deal?

hahahahah... Sorry...

ColdFusion is a lot older than PHP, probably more buggy, closed source and more expensive. I do not know how it stacks up to PHP in power, versatility or functionality, though. I just have to deal with it for my customers sometimes...

I and another fellow on the board here have been programming in coldfusion for personal and commercial purposes for a couple of years now.

It is very similar to PHP, but more similar to microsofts .asp.

Its not buggy at all, its in fact very stable. The server can be run on windows or other flavors of Unix and linux.
The learning curve is very small. Its very easy to build a powerful application with limited training. But its also very powerful. We've built some pretty robust apps with it and love it. We've tried .asp and .php but we keep coming back to CF.
Sorry if I sound like an advert.
John (jwtadmin) anything to add?

Z~

CF is a tag based programming language for the web. It has been ported to Sun, RedHat and Win2k IIS

Unlike asp php etc there are a lot of applicaiton server type calls to handle sessions opening data cursors etc...

It is designed to be easy to learn and yet still be powerful. It has gotten a bad rap as many people have used it to create some very insecure apps. So in that sense it's like giving a 16 year old the keys to your sports car, sure they can drive it but chances are some one's gonna' get hurt.

Used properly you can do some pretty cool stuff very quickly and with very maintainable code.

It can be a server hog but that's true with most windows web languages.

Check out www.fusebox.org

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Its not buggy at all, its in fact very stable.

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Huh? How many million hits are you putting through your cf server? I put almost 2 million a day through each machine in my clusters and I can tell you it has some pretty nasty memory leaks. I wish our developers could track them down, but they can't. (It's out of my hands...) There are some crashes too (a few per week), but thankfully it automaticly restarts.

Granted, we're not using CF MX yet. I wish I could get these people to use some more modern tech.

Okay, I'll buy that. The guy who does the website for my dad's company swears by it, but he doesn't seem to do very fancy stuff with it. Certainly not stuff that I could do purely with the PHP that was tought to me on this board recently. So I was trying to figure out why my dad had to pay for this thing that had a free alternative that was more suited to his needs.

Then again, I've disagreed with this web guy before on some stuff, so whatever...

It is my experience that people like to have someone to blame if things go wrong, and they feel that it's hard to blame free products (you get what you pay for, etc.). I think that this is a corollary to ``No one ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft''.

Of course, open source products will usually fix whatever problem you're having faster than closed source products will, and if no one is interested in fixing the problem, it's infinitely easier to fix it yourself if it's open source.

But that doesn't matter because you can't pass the buck. Which, as we all know, is the most important part of being in the IT field.

If you think the CF server app itself is the problem and not the coding then it sounds like it might be an older version (pre 4.52) or maybe a patch level/server OS health issue.

I admit I'm not in the millions-of-hits-a-day category but Williams-Sonoma uses CF for their online store and I'm guessing they're probably up there somewhere. And they're not the only ones.

Z~

There a version 4.5.2? Latest I've seen is 4.5.1 SP 2

For the record, I have heard good things about CF MX. I looked at it a bit after reading this thread, and if it wasn't for the cost, I'd consider using it on some of my independant projects. For now PHP, Zope and Java along with a few helper frameworks here and there seem to fit my needs very well.

Sorry, my bad. You are correct, the Server app is up to 4.5.1 SP2. It's CF Studio thats up to 4.5.2.
I personally have been using CF 5.0 with no issues.

Z~