Which is best PHP or Coldfusion

Hi All
I need some suggestions; I am going to develop an E-Commerce base website for a furniture and electronic company. I am bit stuck in choosing a Language between PHP and Coldfusion.

So could you help me in the selection of the Language? i will use MySQL database.

any suggestion and feedback will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Whats this got to do with Suggestions and Feedback ?

Then where should i post that sort of questions.....?

I've requested that this be moved to the Lounge. Better place for such a discussion.

Thanks for your guidance.

PHP is supported by more hosting companies and
there are more ready made carts / cms / e-commerce packages freely available for PHP.

I have never even touched on CF before -
though I knew many sites that used to use it.
However, I cannot comment on its versatility etc really.

Well this sort of question usually gets asked by people who don't know either language, and if that's true, then you shouldn't undertake such a project.

My vote is with PHP anyway, hosting is cheaper because there's no licence to pay to adobe and the language is more pleasant and more full-featured.

There are also a ton of ready-made shopping carts for php, though avoid oscommerce like the plague.

To be fair, there are a lot of CF based shopping cart and store options as well. The whole point of CF is to make the common tasks as easy as possible, which is why doing things like database queries, sending email, creating a web service, etc. are all available with just one (or a couple) of lines of code. When what CF gives you isn't enough, you can always drop into Java. Since CF runs on top of J2EE, the entire Java API is available to you at any time from within your CF code.

Cost is an issue to some people on certain types of projects. PHP hosting is cheaper, and PHP is also free. This isn't an issue for me, since the applications I build are typically on large projects where the cost of the CF license isn't even a blip on the total cost of the project. And then there is the argument that the ROI is higher, so that even though you pay for the license, the time you save and the amount of stuff you get with CF (like DataDirect JDBC drivers, Verity Ultraseek, Flex integration, FIPS-140 encryption, clustering, and a bunch more) far offsets the cost of the license.

But this could quickly degenerate into a typical Language Holy War so I'll stop. I'd recommend checking them both out. Set up PHP and download the free developer version of CF (which has everything) and try them out yourself.

Edit: Some starting points:
http://us.php.net/tut.php
http://examples.adobe.com/cf8gettin...dex_content.cfm