does anyone actually prefer coldfusion ?

I coded in coldfusion for work purely for the money

I'm just wondering if anyone actually prefers coldfusion coding over other html-embedded, server-side sich as php and asp, or do people just do it for money ?

Cheers

I think most people that visit devshed on a regular basis probably prefer using php over cold fusion - but as I mentioned in an earlier thread, the more languages you are familiar with the better.

Yea true.

But was just wondering how many ppl (if any) would choose coldfusion if they had a choice.

I'm sure there are. I personally know of at least one programmer who prefers CFML to PHP. FWIW, there are people out there that prefer C# to Java, prefer ASP to PHP, prefer Perl to PHP, prefer C to C++ ... the list goes on and on. Now, you and I might think they're all nuts, but those people are out there.

I personally code CFML for work related reasons, but its an interesting language. I'm not quite sure if it is everything Macromedia would like you to believe it is, however, but I don't think it hurts to broaden your experiences.

I prefer coldfusion. Saying that around here feels like coming out of the closet or something

Why? I could give a list of reasons - there is a few, it's really not as bad as gets made out - but honestly, it's mostly familarity. I can get what i need to do done very fast. I'm sure I'll have to move to something else one day (i have little faith in proprietry software), but while it's practical i'll stick with it.

I code mostly in C++, PHP, and Perl. I had a job where I had to code in Cold Fusion for about a year. Now I have to code in it once in a while due to the requirements at the time. Maybe it's my lack of understanding, but I can't stand it! I know that just recently(v 5.0?) they added the ability to use functions! I know you could accomplish the same thing with custom tags, but I did NOT want to go there.

We had a contractor build our e-commerce site at work. It's written in Cold Fusion. It is a MESS! It seems that Cold Fusion is best for smaller, simpler sites. But, I hear people say the same thing about PHP! Of course it's all just a matter of opinion. So, I would never by choice use Cold Fusion.

I'd have to disagree. CF is "web application architecture" and as such is oriented towards, well, web applications. This saves me from putting together my own little framework for every project, so it's something i like.

Also, you can create bad code in any language/technology. I think you should be blaming whoever wrote the code, not coldfusion. Messy code is not a requirement of CFML

I've been reading the various threads on CF. The great thing about CF (which is also one of the complaints) is how easy it is to put a site together for an absolute beginner. That's great ... but then when someone else looks at it it's a mess and they blame the language.

If you know what you're doing and you take your time, you can buld some pretty amazing things. I've coded in CF for awhile (although still a beginner) and am now trying to learn PHP. I'm lost because it's not a tag based system. If I'm putting a site together now, and I don't have time to waste, it's CF all the way.

But you can never know enough languages ... hence the learning of PHP and eventually VB and Java.

I programmed in ColdFusion for 2 years and then started moving everything over to PHP after I got my feet wet with it. ColdFusion is a great web app language if you're new to programming, but if you have experience with other languages, you'll find it very awkward.

After you're comfortable programming, I think the advantages of CF start to become less important and rather, you find yourself limited. PHP has so many great modules you can plug into it - GD is one of them - that it definitely challenges the functionality that CF touts.

Another thing I've noticed is a difference in performance. When I'm using PHP in Apache as an .so object they are blazing fast and leave my CF sites well behind. My next compile will have PHP statically linked and I anticipate it'll run even faster.

People make the argument that PHP is hard to use, but apparently they don't know about PEAR.

ok, let's be honest with ourselves here.

I'm a CF programmer. I've been doing it for about 4 years. I've used .ASP, PHP and Zope (Python) a little.

I like PHP. It's great. It's powerful, flexible, and has a huge support base. It's free. It's harder to use than coldfusion, although the learning curve is not too steep.

I like Zope. It's amazing. It's super-powerful and more advanced in many ways than anything else out there. It's free. The learning curve for Zope is steep, and documentation is still fairly scarce on some of the best features.

Why would anyone choose coldfusion over these other great technologies?? Simple: it's the easiest, fastest web-app language to use in existence. If you use any version of CF Studio (souped-up version of HomeSite), it's one of the best development environments in existence. I'm sorry, that's the long and short of it (imhop). A simple, intuitive tag-based language is just easier (and therefore faster) than anything else out there.

So why use PHP? the only real advantage PHP has over CF is that it's open-source (free). If CF was open-source, I don't believe it would be a contest.

As it is, CF is very inexpensive, and it has a very active and loyal community behind it -- not unlike PHP.

If you doubt my words, you probably don't use CF very regularly. In most cases it takes about 1/2 as much code to do common tasks in coldfusion as it takes in nearly any other popular web-app language.

And I'm not even going to go into fusebox, which is probably the most elegant, robust, and well-supported web-coding methodology out there. Happily, it's become so popular that it's now being adopted for PHP and JSP as well.

For more info on fusebox, go here: URL

All you need now is a rainbow-colored CFML logo as your avatar.

This comment is actually the biggest misconception about CFML - that it takes less code than other languages.

I don't think you could name more than handful of examples of where CFML can accomplish something similar to PHP in less code.

For example:





Now, I realize that this is a small, extremely oversimplified example, but it epitomizes the problem with having a tag-based programming language - start and end tags add bloat to your code. Imagine this example played out in a web app over and over, exponentially - CFML will almost always use more code to do the same thing as PHP.

Actually, you can even further reduce the PHP code to this:

or even :


With this last example, you're talking a difference of 24 characters in the PHP echo script, to 36 in the CFML <cfoutput> script - PHP is using roughly 34% less code to accomplish the same task as CFML.

Like I said, this is a really small, almost trival example, but imagine this across an entire application... 34% less code can add up to be a whole lot of code!

How can you write a complex application without OOP? I think that "web application architecture" is Macromedia marketing-speak for "web scripting language".

What don't you like about CFCs?