Coldfusion's strenght and weaknesses

Hi,

I am busy with a reseach which contains a chapter of Coldfusion.
There I want to identify the strenghts and weaknesses of Coldfusion.

On the internet there are enough pages/articles about how good coldfusion is, for example
·The shortest learning curve of any language in this space.
·Rapid development (you need less code and less time need to write it).
·Support for all design patterns, n-tier development, and any other development methodologies.
·High performance and scalability.
·Platform supported by servers from Microsoft, IBM, BEA, Sun, and more.

But nobody says something about the limits of coldfusion.
Any of you know what the weaknesses of coldfusion are.

Bye the way, If somebody knows something about the weaknesses of ArcIMS (from Esri).

Eitherway an answer about both subjects is most welcome.

Thanks in advance

Kind regards

Bart

One of the weaknesses is that is has a short learning curve - i.e. it can lead to bad/lazy developers who don't understand the methods/reasons scripting languages as well as would be desired for any other language. That conversly moves across to DB design, as its so easy to get things to and from a DB with coldfusion sometimes the basic principles and good working practices aren't learnt.

You may not believe me but I've had expierence of both of those been a factor.

Another weakness (may just be me) is the code (the actual cfml) is ugly to look at with all those tags, I'm from a different language background and wherever I can I try and use <cfscript> as it's more concise and easier to read when developing.

One final thing is the amount of whitespace coldfusion chucks out in returned code (html) and the complex methods of removing it as best as you can. I.e. in something like PHP a loop and a comment would only output things not inside the <?php ?> tags or anything that php specifically prints... now I understand coldfusions reasoning for the way it works and that you can get around it (with cfoutputonly) but that returns me to the ugly development code issue.

Those are just my opinions though from using it and other scripting languages. I don't find these issues enough for me to argue against using coldfusion at all... but they do niggle me when I'm using coldfusion.

-D

Thanks DEfusion for your quick reply!!

Your opinion is very helpful!!

Are there also more people with an opinion about the weaknesses of Coldfusion or ArcIMS???

Please let me know.

Kind regards,

Bart

The only real disadvantage is, as stated earlier, that CF is SO easy to learn that novice developers can write horiffic code.

Regarding the "ugly" tags...this is simply a matter of preference. Coming from an HTML background, I think that CFML is MUCH easier to read and much more self-documenting than other types of code.

And regarding the whitespace issue that was brought up, yes if left on its own CF can generate lots of white space. But intermediate and advanced CF developers can easily manage this. CFOUTPUTONLY is a decent way, but the best way to deal with this is to separate the data manipulation from the display completely. Actually this should be done in any language as a best-practice. Then you simply encase your Controller and Model code within CFSILENT, which supresses ALL output. The result is very limited whitespace.

Hope that helps.