Ok to the last guy, did you happen to look at the date of the article. I mean come on the article is about "Allaire" Cold Fusion which was about to release version 5 when they were around 2001 when it was bought by Macromedia. Version 7 was released just a few months ago if that.

Anonymous User 5/10/2005 12:06:11 PM

Jesper is way off base, this artical should be removed as it simply displays a poor reviewer.

Anonymous User 3/1/2005 7:42:11 PM

I think the idea that coding in a different platform, somehow makes it better, is ludicrous.

You have to evaluate what your needs, are, and what tool can speedily and qualitatively deliver what you need....

The funny thing, is that ColdFusion can deliver in weeks what it takes the big boys to do in months or years, and do it cheaper too!

You don't have to be OO, to create complex applications..

crosenblum10/7/2004 8:45:54 AM

"If you've recently been charged with setting up a Web server to interact with SQL Server, your choice of development environments probably comes down to Active Server Pages (ASP) or Allaire ColdFusion."

PHP should be on this list as well.

Shawn Johnston 4/28/2001 4:24:02 PM

Re: Jesper's comments: I've been using CF for years and haven't found anything you said to be true. And regarding the price tag, is $5000 really that much when you're paying $100,000 for a web server and db server, and your development time and complexity are cut by about 20% (compared to using something like ASP)?

I use tons of CF's features. Consider things like doing db queries or connecting to LDAP. Something that's done in a couple of easy lines of CFML takes like half a page of (comparatively) complicated VB code.

BTW, interesting that ASP+ is going to be tag-based, and JSP is sort of like tag-based Java. It seems that more and more people are realizing that tags are an easy and efficient way to do programming.

cheers,
Simon.

Simon Wallis 12/13/2000 11:47:12 AM

ColdFusion's main problems (or rather CFML's main problems) are (IMHO):
* CFMLs' weird syntax. Sure, the "everything is a tag" is great for people who starts with CF with
their only experience beeing writing of static html-pages. But more experienced programmers probably feel like the language is cumbersome. At least in earlier versions you could use JavaScript for program-flow, but all expressions were still CFML so this was not very usable.

* It seems that CFML has been created without a proper grammar and things like which tags can nest has been thrown in afterwards. The two "modes" ("process only CFML-tags, ignore everything else" and "dump this to the browser except when CFML-tags occur") doesn't mix very well. The flexibility that you can do everything from string concatenation to retrieving values of variables in a zillion different ways leads to code that is harder to read and more difficult to maintain. You get no help with the coding-standard from the language, which leads to problems in environments were several programmers work together on the code base. Also not all ways can be combined, there are a lot of side-effects (often undocumented). A good language should keep independant things apart and be based on a few simple concepts which can be added freely together when solving complex tasks.

* The built-in parser is not very good - it's notion of where the syntactical error acutally occured is just plain wrong most of the times. It seems lika Allaire wants people to use their HomeSite-product for all development and it's on-the-fly validation instead of your own favourite editor. Probably this stems from the point above.

* It lacks some features found in virtually every other programming language. Modularisation is hard as you can't have template-local functions or "block"-local variables. All functions must be defined as user-written tags (i.e. separate files) and there is no real return values. Return values from functions must use "global" variables (i.e. defined in the calling template).

The most severe thing is that, with CFML, Allaire tried to reinvent the wheel. Possibly to flatten the learning curve. A much better solution would have been to take an existing laguage (or several) and just provide a good object-model as a framework for supporting the building of web-app.. This would be things like calling databases, managing clients without bothering about the stateless nature of http. etc etc. This is more or less what the ASP-solution from MS is about.
I think the things that happen behind the screens in CF, like ODBC-connection-pooling, client-management, COM/CORBA/EJB-connections, smooth integration with IIS (if you run CF on win32) are great. But CFML is a just plain bad. Let's face it, the user who needs the code to look like their ordinary static web-pages, just with some extra tags doesn't go out and pay $1200/$5000 for ColdFusion. Companies who do would probably want to hire competent programmers to develop their web-solution anyway.

CF is a probably a great product for creating things like the DB-driven web-site of sqlmag.com, but if you need more than business-logic than just keeping track of today's date and user-comments to articles (that would be the "extensive, complex Web applications" mentioned in the article), you need to go for a real layered system where everything but generating html-pages should be kept somewhere else than ColdFusion. And if you do that - how many of ColdFusions features do you use? Does it justify the price-tag?

I look forward to your comments on this issue.

Regards Jesper Trägårdh

PS: Why is this window not resizable? Seems lika flawed UI-design to me. :)

Jesper Trägårdh 8/16/2000 3:39:08 AM