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Do PHP Developers Think ColdFusion Is a Toy Language?

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Hello folks. My name is Brian Kotek and I'm the moderator of the ColdFusion forums here at Devshed.

I've noticed over the years that developers in other languages often view ColdFusion as some sort of toy language. And for some reason it seems that PHP developers have a particular dislike for CF. For example, occasionally someone on Slashdot will mention CF and it often sets off a series of negative comments from PHP developers.

I was thinking about writing an article to address this issue. I'm not trying to convert anyone from PHP to ColdFusion. But I would like to find out some specific reasons for the perception that CF is not a powerful or robust web development platform and attempt to address them (or acknowledge them if need be). It is my hypothesis that people are either unaware of the full capabilities of the latest version of CF, or they played with it back at version 3 or 4 and still see it in that light.

So please, no random negative comments like "CF sucks". And I know that the fact that CF is not open source or free is a stigma for some people, so please don't focus only on this issue. I'm looking for honest, well described thoughts. What about CF do you not think is capable or powerful enough? Are there specific things you think it should do that it doesn't do? Are there things that you feel are easy in PHP that you think would be difficult to do in CF? Or does it truly come down to the issue of cost and closed source more than anything else?

I'm truly interested and I'm not trying to start a flame war. I want to know what PHP people think about CF and if they truly dislike it (as my antecdotal evidence seems to suggest), then why don't they like it? And if there are good things about CF, or things you think it does more easily than PHP, please feel free to note these as well. Finally, if you have any thoughts on why CF is sometimes perceived as a "toy language" in general, I'd be interested to hear them. Because it's too easy? Because newbie develoeprs come in and write awful code and this colors the overall perception of CF? Let me know what you think.

Thanks for your time,

Brian

What do you guys think about that?

personally i like cold fusion. but it falls short for finding hosting for it.

I don't know... i've never used it and i doubt i will. It's not free and few hosts support it. That's enough reason to stick with php for me.

i installed it on my computer for a bit and i didnt really like it, the program had lots of bugs and the setup was odd to me, it works well with other macromedia apps, just it gets very little use because of php asp and other languages that are better (essentially this is just due to popularity, but still)

p.s. UNDEROATH OWNS ALL OTHER BANDS!!!

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Neverside Development Director
PHP Snippets
BigToach.com - IT WORKS, TOACHY!

cfm + html = hard to read

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angelessme, antagonising neverside members, staff and administration since 2001.

I've never used ColdFusion, and doubt I ever will. PHP is free, open source, works on nearly every host, and does everything I need it to do.

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// Ben

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Originally posted by angelessme
cfm + html = f_cking hard to read

You should take a look at this:

http://www.tutorialforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14352

The problem with coldfusion is that it's completely backwards from the accepted new standard for good programming practice, seperating your presentation from your logic. Hell, even ASP .net w/ VBScript is OO with codebehind modules, completely separating code from logic.

CF does exactly the opposite of that. Since it has so many automatic nifty features, what happens when it starts doing those when you don't want it to?

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Fomerly known as lasnaranjas. Holler.

Quote:

Originally posted by lasnaranjas
The problem with coldfusion is that it's completely backwards from the accepted new standard for good programming practice, seperating your presentation from your logic. Hell, even ASP .net w/ VBScript is OO with codebehind modules, completely separating code from logic.

CF does exactly the opposite of that. Since it has so many automatic nifty features, what happens when it starts doing those when you don't want it to?

Like what?

blog I'm working on In ASP .NET C#

http://csharp.jeromegagner.com/blog/admin/default.aspx

html code:
http://csharp.jeromegagner.com/blog/admin/default.txt

codebehind:
http://csharp.jeromegagner.com/blog/admin/default.aspx.txt

class to generate MD5 hash
http://csharp.jeromegagner.com/blog/admin/security.txt

and no, the blog admin does not do anything other than generate the md5 hash of the password you submitted.

Anyways, notice there's a minimal amount of actual code in the html page. It's all in the codebehind module.

-Jerome

ps. also notice 0 html in my code.

Show me something similar in Coldfusion.

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Fomerly known as lasnaranjas. Holler.

Last edited by phpmonkey, December 10th, 2004 02:48 AM (Edited 1 times)