Coldfusion is easy to learn and allows you develop powerful applications very quickly. Some people get the falseimpression that since it is easy to learn it must not be as robust a language as asp.net but that is not true. I develop in both coldfusion and .net
coldfusion will always be my true love.
I used to be a CF advocate (for about 4 years) mainly because of it's ease of use, and it's encapsulation via custom tags. After working with ASP.NET for over 1.5 years I can tell you that although it has a bit more of a learning curve, it is a far superior
choice for all but the simplest of web applications. Instead of rehashing all of the features of each platform, your choice should be based on studying existing whitepapers, and inhouse testing of each platform to see what best fits your needs. For 4 years
I recommended CF for about 80% of the projects, PHP and Perl for others, and ASP only when absolutely required! Within the last 1.5 years I have yet to recommend anything but ASP.NET/C#, although I have remained open to CFMX, J2EE, and PHP.
I too have been doing a lot of coldfusion (4 years) but am moving in the asp.net arena. People say that coldfusion is easier overall and that is mostly true. Coldfusion is especially good at display logic that you need to get up and running quickly. However.
asp.net and the .NET framework seems a GREAT deal easier on the programmtic level. That is, while the server controls and other UI elements are not quite as easy as coldfusion custom tags, other things like setting up timers in the global.asax (vs coldfusion
scheduled tasks), and manipulating images dynamically, are vastly easier in the .NET framework. Even things like data access, while requiring a lot more code to be written in .NET, are psychologically not that different than the simple CFSTOREDPROC and CFQUERY
tags once you get it down, and are also more powerful. Performance is also much better on asp.net. Pages that took 300 to 1500 ms on coldfusion take 20 to 100ms (at most) in asp.net. Rarely do I see many asp.net pages that take over 20ms to process. Fregas
How about moderately complex business logic or building pages that deal with complex realtionships? What about separating business logic from the presentation layer? Is CF, by itself, useful for building an n-tier app?
Well, with MX yes, since it really is a J2EE applicaiton that gets spit out, you can have true n-tier applications with no problems. But here's the catch, CF abstracts all of the data access layer for the most part, since it is all part of the cf engine, which
in my opinion is more of a good thing. So in a way it makes it easier, but does not allow for connection pooling or something similar if you want that kind of total control. With regular CF 5 or below, it's possible to stay strict and build a business layer
& presentation layer, and again abstracting the data access layer, however, it's only simulated, and not a true n-tier solution.
well actually CF is managing the connection pooling, connection strings and so forth, which IMO is the best place for the IT staff to manage these types of issues when in the production environment, versus ASP.NET currently forcing the developers to develope
a way to manage this, via web.config settings / retrieval and application code. however, I feel that ASP.NET apps have better chance of surviving application life cycles because of better encouraging of separation between presentation and business logic, whereas
most of the CF apps I've seen mix it inline on the page, producing spaghetti code... easy to create, hard to maintain... In my earlier years, I had created a checkout page that was, I kid you not, 55KB, and 14000 lines of CF code... it had Cart Contents, CC
validation, CC submission, and on success of latter, Order submission to the DB. It worked, but I definitely saw the maintainance problem that it created down the road...
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E.Newton
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Whats better? Coldfusion or Visual Studio.Net & ASP.NET ??
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