Thread

My boss is convinced that Coldfusion is the way to go moving forward and he is not sold on PHP.

He says Coldfusion has so many functions built in, and large sites like MySpace and Bank of America use it.

How can I convince him that he is crazy?

He isn’t crazy. He’s actually quite correct. I might suggest he has been shown too many “glossy brochures” though.  What he may fail to understand is that CF requires the right talent pool and the right investment in tools, technology, and training to create the magic he seems to use as reference.

I might also suggest that to parallel a “Bank of America” expectation with your development environment requires the same level of commitment of resources (time, money, education, training, tools, technology) that a “BOA” has committed.  The same would be true for a “MySpace” equivalent expectation.

If the expectation is different, as in “oh no, we can’t spend any money for training, or spend money for development tools or technology platforms, or anything different than ‘free’”, then the expectations should match ‘free’ or whatever the level of support and commitment to excellence your boss is willing to support.

Look at this as career development.

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Other than that, I personally don’t like CF either 😉

Randy

Back in the `90s, I worked with Coldfusion. It was a mix of custom tags and html that cluttered the view. Everything was done in the template (including queries). Is that still the case?

There are plenty of high-profile sites using PHP (Digg, Facebook, Youtube in the old days), many of which have started recently, meaning their technology choice was based on what’s relevant today. I might be mistaken, but BOA’s site is probably older, and do you know if their developers are happy with CF? As for myspace, ask your boss to rethink whether that really should be an example for the business.

What kind of functions is your boss talking about? Having a ton of features is not by itself a feature.

Back in the `90s, I worked with Coldfusion. It was a mix of custom tags and html that cluttered the view. Everything was done in the template (including queries). Is that still the case?

The source I’ve seen in the last two months is not a lot different than this.  The DB stuff is abstracted now, but the developers are allowed to put everything directly into the visual develop space, mixed up in-line styles + in doc CSS + external CSS, et. al.  Pretty much the same old stuff.  Dreamweaver has not been made any better in that regard.  The properties pages are duplicated so you can put CSS in three different places.  An inexperience developer will end up with CSS everywhere.  You get it.

Randy

Sites like Facebook and Wikipedia use PHP, so the argument that the “big guys” use Cold Fusion doesn’t really hold water.

Yahoo uses php doesn’t it? (at least for the yahoo mail) That’s gotta count for something….

Based on this:

My boss is convinced that Coldfusion is the way to go moving forward

it may not matter who uses what.  If you start selling what the “big boys” are using in the “Fortune 500” (especially outside the web centric arena like government/finance/major retail) you’ll end up developing with Visual Studio (VB, C#) and .NET OR Java with Swing and one of the Beans implementations.

Be careful what you ask for.

Randy

He isn’t crazy. He’s actually quite correct. I might suggest he has been shown too many “glossy brochures” though.  What he may fail to understand is that CF requires the right talent pool and the right investment in tools, technology, and training to create the magic he seems to use as reference.

I totally agree. My old college primarily taught ColdFusion for server-side scripting classes. When I finished that program, I couldn’t afford hosting to use it for my own projects. It’s expensive and I would agree that it would be much more difficult to find developers who are able in CF. I also wonder if it is sort of dying out? I don’t hear much about it since then…

Well, I have been using Coldfusion since I started here (4 and half years) and we have a ton of awful code that we reuse.

I just wanted a good argument for PHP since that is the language I prefer 😊

Yeah… could be worse. Could be ASP. :D

I actually prefer coding cold fusion over PHP. If I have don’t a framework with PHP, it takes far more time to develop in PHP then in Cold Fusion.

However, CI has brought some inspiration back to me for PHP.

My way of going is pretty much this:

Freelance / personal projects - PHP
Corporate projects - Cold Fusion

Coldfusion is a nice language but it’s proprietary and it cost a lot more

For instance look at the cfquery element tag you can control the out put of that tag by modifying the attributes which is a lot like html and that means that if you are fluent with html there will be a smaller learning curve when you need learn CF. However all that comes at a price in order to use CF you need a host that supports it, and from what I’ve seen a site host that supports Colfusion cost a lot more per month then a host that just supports php.

coldfusion bench marks any one i wonder if it’s all that better and faster then php and if it’s even worth it for the average website?

I use coldfusion on a daily basis at work. At home I code PHP due to the cost of CF servers.

If you have to use Coldfusion and you like using CodeIgniter, you should check out the ColdBox Framework. http://www.coldboxframework.com

ColdBox is very robust MVC framework for ColdFusion with a strong community and support. Any CI user would get the hang of ColdBox in no time. Coldbox has changed thw way I write CF applications, much like CI changes the way i wrote PHP applications.

Very Cool Josh.  Thanks for that insight. ColdBox looks compelling.  (well, I mean if you ‘stuck’ with you know what…)

@jnorris441 - if you have no choice you at least have ColdBox! 😉

Thanks! I will try that out. Although my boss will say that we should use Fusebox since more people use it…we tried Mach II for a while but that was a mess 😊

http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=codeigniter&word2=coldbox