My point was that the people running CF on their servers never update (I work for a company that has a few sites on CF _4_, I think), and a certain percentage of those running PHP don’t either (think of all those hosting companies who are Just Now(tm) upgrading to PHP5).

Of course, the same can be said for PHP as well, up to a point.

Having learned PHP first, I might be a tad biased, but having gone ahead and bothered to read at least some of the CF docs and use it a bit, it’s a pretty poor competitor to PHP, in my *very* humble opinion.

And I’ve *never* written a Photoshop tute.

Mind you, I have about 8 years C experience prior to my web dev career.

There is no reason not to change languages to something more suitable for your sanity for all new development.

I’ve switched to PHP for all side-work I do. Compared to CF, PHP is a language and CF is a mess.

Accept that you cannot “fix” ColdFusion and you will be relieved.

1) Refactoring. In a large complex system, if I don’t enforce very specific naming conventions across my entire organization, I get naming duplication between column names, table names, variable names, etc.. I use Aptana and I don’t have “find me all the usages of this reference” when I change something. So, I have to rely on text searches whenever I refactor my code. This can be hard when I have a variable name that is the same as a column name from my database and there are 600 hits for that text search in my system. Compare this to using VisualStudio for ASP MVC and doing a rename or Find Usages (finds every and just renames it or finds me all the places it is used – smartly).

2) Scoping. Since you don’t “pass” variables between templates, you have no easy way of knowing if a variable has been defined. If a variable is named the same in an included template, it will just over-write it. I prefer languages where variables are a bit more explicit in their scoping (i.e. a stack). CFC function calls are little better since they allow me to pass variables that are not in the parameter list for that function and will never warn me of my error.

3) Object-Oriented Programming. CF is very good at taking data from a table and plopping it straight into a web page. However, if I have a system with some complex logic that is best modeled by a good set of robust objects, I find CF to be very lacking. It is hard to define CFCs to give me the same functionality as C# classes without 5x-10x the amount of code. CF doesn’t seem to be well suited at building complex object models that differ from your relational data model.

4) The “unknown”. CF allows you to not worry about many things as a developer (such as how it manages connections to a database). However, by gaining that ease of use, you often lose the ability to control it when you really want to.

5) Debugging. I want breakpoints and step through debugging. I spend way too much time looking at dumps and running the same code over and over to find errors.

These are some of the frustrations I have with CF when I compare it to other technologies (specifically ASP.NET). I’d love to hear if people can give me pointers on improving the items I listed in my CF code. I have a huge CF codebase that I maintain and it isn’t going away any time soon (as much as I would sometimes like it to).

Thanks.

Varplyer, visual studio express is free.

CF : RoR :: dead ant : USS Enterprise 1701-D

These are the idiots who are probably stuck in a dead-end job wishing for retirement or a layoff with buyouts.

Hey a**holes, here’s a clue: If you’re so passionate about your point of view, try saying it.

Here’s a tip. You were doing it wrong.

If you are accustomed to markup languages (tags) and have absolutely no OO programming experience, then CF may be the right choice for you. I could understand how one could be more at home in this circumstance. But coming from someone who has a professional background programming in C, Pascal, VB/.Net, and C# (and now some CF), ASP.Net is by far the more productive language for ME.

Why?
1. The IDE is hands down superior to Eclipse. Intellisense is incredibly useful and spans from the Application scope clear down to every single accessible variable.

2. Projects can be compiled locally and ran from the IDE. Most of the time, the code breaks at the exact line of the problem – and when it doesn’t you can step through your code until you pinpoint the issue. If that’s not good enough, the built in trace functionality lets you easily log what your classes/code is doing. In my opinion this is much more effective than relying on a server and its often vague messaging / page dumps.

3. .Net has a whole arsenal of complex objects(CF term) – GenericLists(my favorite), Arrays, Structures, Hashtables, Enums, Dictionaries, StringBuilders, etc etc… CF has Array and Struct.

4. Both VB.Net and C# are Strong type languages – meaning you have to declare the variable type when creating a variable (by the way VB and C# are the primary ASP.Net languages). Because of this, any changes to your code will immediately cause the compiler to complain if there are ill-referenced or unsatisfied conditions. And because of this, a good majority of typed functions are directly accessible through dot notation. You won’t spend a lot of time combing news groups for functions.
For example:
Dim str as String = “this is a string. And so am I”

str = str.ToUpper
str = str.ToLower
dim hmm as Boolean = str.Contains(“is”)
dim strs() as String = str.Split(“.”)

and as soon as you place the dot after the variable, a good chunk of the available function are listed.

5. Code behind. – look this up if you don’t know what it is. To me, this bridges the gap between winforms and webforms programming. It truly is OOP. No messy inline intermingling of html and code.

For me, ASP.Net is much faster to develop applications with. The code is cleaner, debugging is better, the GUI is great…

I could go on and on, but it’s late, I’m tired, I’m grumpy, and I have to get up and deal with CF.

I’m a software engineer with 10 years under my belt, and my specialty is web-based applications. I have used a number of platforms to author applications of all sizes. PHP is very near-and-dear to my heart (Stop laughing. I’ll save my defense of PHP…

BTW David, Gartner disagrees with you on CF, but wtf do they know?

How is the view from inside your hind quarters?

But I hate ColdFusion. It sucked 5 years ago. It sucks today. I’m not all that hot on PHP either, but it does the trick and at least it has a C-like syntax, mixed in with some Perl-ish influence.

I can’t f***ing stand ColdFusion, with everything having a CF this and CF that prefixed to it. It’s getting compiled into a servlet anyways, for the love of all that is holy, I would rather bleed out of my a**s than program in ColdFusion.

F***!

Aside from the actual syntax which can be debated on who’s better or worse… they all have pros and cons. Debated weather English is better than French makes about the same sense. HOWEVER, more people speak English…. just as more people speak PHP. {www.langpop.com}

You can get started on any other platform for FREE. The developer edition of CF …. haha… hardly…. ONLY 2 IPs can access your server. So imagine how long that would last if you were on DHCP. By day two you’re stuck or have to change to a static.

At the end of the day you can get either language to perform the desired end result….. speed and performance can be easily debated, because it really depends on how you wrote the code in the first place…. easy fix to that is to throw more hardware at it… Hardware today is so damn fast is sick.

CF does save a few lines of code here and there…. but honestly… I find a lot of rather annoying …. CFSCRIPT is a big improvement… but I think the race is just about lost.

My advice to ADOBE…. give Standard away for free….. Charge more for Enterprise. You’ll dramatically increase the demand by allowing developers to create apps at no cost.

- identifiers are not case sensitive
- Arrays are 1-based (gasp)
- It relies on Java internally (who needs a language layer over Java ?)
- Comparison operators are syntactically alien (>= is “gte”. Welcome back to assembly days)
- Flash applets it relies on (cfcalendar, cfchart) are clumsy, hardly customisable, sometimes even buggy. Much better free versions exist
- construct is both retarded and XML-breaking
- Let’s not talk about OOP implementation. I’d rather use PHP4…
- Did I mention arrays are 1-based ? Can you imagine that ? Who the hell made such a choice ??
- It’s closed and expensive.

I am glad that I made a switch at that time, really.

CF, only good for small projects, if you want to grow up, go learn something else.

You can call me ignorance if you want and stick with your Coldfusion.

Actually when I wrote ‘awesome’, I actually meant ‘retarded’ and ‘worthless’.

What, are we in 5th grade again? And this guy gets PAID by ADOBE to be an “evangelist?”

Oh brother. Glad I never messed with Cold Fusion, it sounds like the “community” [sic] around it is full of shrill, insecure children.

I think CFM is dying largely because it’s not commonly used, costs $$ and isn’t dazzling, like Roooby on Ruhaillzzz….

Adrock – oh how clever you are. Thank you for gracing us with your brilliance. It appears from your remark that you might disagree with David on how worthless CF is in modern webdev. Surely you make your comments as an independent, unbiased individual without any intentions besides promoting what you believe to be true.

or, wait a sec…

it says on your blog you work for adobe! hmmm, perhaps you do have some interest in covering up how absurd CF has become.

love the disclaimers on adrocksomemadeupthing.net – “all rights reserved” for instance. So does that include the co-opted tri-force, copyright Nintendo? Or how about the Adobe logo, copyright Adobe?