I and a small team have been writing a small application in PHP using CakePHP, which we all have an ongoing love-hate relationship with.
However we have been thinking that to really get things moving forward quicker we might move to Coldfusion. We currently have a dedicated server which runs my family of sites which is a LAMP box running.
So I have an open question to any of my readers, what would you guys see as the best option moving forward:
- Coldfusion installation on our current web server – I have no experience of installing CF on Linux, I don’t know what kind of overhead it has etc.
- Coldfusion hosting, if this is an option we want it to be flexible but as inexpensive as possible – any suggested hosts.
This is just a whim at the moment and I haven’t performed any real research into the above options (yet) so I thought I’d just throw it out and see what other people think.
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Comments
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1. Jason - 2nd Mar 2007 - 3:36 pm
I have some experience with ColdFusion from my past days… If you are looking for quicker development times, ColdFusion is not where you will find it IMO.
Coldfusion on Linux… well, it eats a hell of a lot of RAM, occaisionally will crash at random intervals. When I was using it, you had to have an officially supported Linux Distribution (IIRC, Redhat or Suse?), otherwise technical support not available. Not recommended for a Linux novice.
Then there is the cost. WHY spend thousands on licences and support contracts etc when there are better open-source products on the market these days?
It is harder to write structured / modular / well maintained code in CF, I do not thing the language lends itself naturally to this. CF is primarily a tag-driven language rather than class/OO driven. Having seen quite a few CF apps, this has often seem to have resulted in a mixmash of logic & display code all in the same files, all the large apps I have seen eventually become VERY unmaintainable.
It’s been 2 or 3 years now since i’ve touched CF, so some things may have changed since my days with using it. TBH there are much better platforms on the market today. If you are looking at changing to gain faster dev times, then look at Ruby on Rails. Although documentation and examples are sometimes lacking, any competent Ruby programmer should be able to figure out most issues that can arise (rails does have some issues – no rose tinted glasses here). The MVC structure of the framework forces you to write code that is maintainable.
2. Jason - 2nd Mar 2007 - 3:41 pm
Hosting – forgot to add. If you are not hosting your own production server, then I have used AccuFind.com in the US for non-dedicated sites. They offer reasonably good support, although a bit on the expensive side, plus, I don’t think they host CF on Linux though, they host it on Windows.
Still suggest using RoR though ;)
3. Dave - 2nd Mar 2007 - 4:15 pm
Hi Jason, thanks for your thoughts. I have been using Coldfusion since CF5 and the recent updates to MX and then MX7 have made it in easier to produce more structured code (with basic OO support been a part of that) in fact there are a couple of MVC frameworks and ORM & Active record frameworks that I’ve been using heavily at work.
I have considered looking at RoR, as I really like the look of Ruby (not so bothered about full-stack frameworks such as rails anymore), but I’m not sure if I want to spend the time learning something else new right now on this project. So right now my options are as follows:
1) Stick with CakePHP, which doesn’t seem quite as mature and focused as RoR, and continue with the love-hate relationship with it.
2) Go with Coldfusion, probably via a hosted solution.
3) Look at RoR.
I’ve not looked seriously looked at RoR for about a year so I’m hoping that there are some really solid examples and documentation to get me up and running in a very short time if I go that route.
4. Jason - 4th Mar 2007 - 3:42 pm
Well, for #1, I guess it depends if you are past the point of no return on this particular project or not.
There are of course more tutorials available now for Rails, however, a lot of them are a bit out of date, and what they tell you to do won’t work any more :(, so you will often find yourself referring to the rails API documentation and figuring stuff out for yourself.
Buy the 2nd edition of “Agile web development with Rails” for what is probably the best overall Rails documentation. The book was only released at the start of ‘07 so it is not massively out of date yet :). “Programming Ruby” is something I would consider an essential companion book as well.
Ultimatly though, it is a decision that only you can make ;)
5. Javier Julio - 5th Mar 2007 - 2:24 pm
Nice to seeing you using ColdFusion heavily Dave. Thought I’d drop a note to let you know the host I use. It’s very affordable unlike other CF hosts, well from a shared hosting perspective but you most likely will need something dedicated and I don’t know prices for that area. But either way you should check them out: http://hostfolio.com/web-hosting-plans-coldfusion.asp
6. Dave - 5th Mar 2007 - 3:27 pm
Javier:
Thanks for the tip on the host, I’ll defiantly take a closer look as it does seem quite cheap.
However at the weekend I did decide to really look into RoR as I had been looked into it a little about 18 months ago and I see that it has moved on lots since then.
7. ColdFusion Developer - 21st May 2007 - 5:21 pm
ColdFusion is always my fav. scripting language to work with. I am using it since CF 5 :) The only problem I had been facing that there are very few coldfusion hosting providers and most of them are quite costly. But late December, 2006, I found http://www.hostingatoz.com/shared_hosting.cfx . They are dirt cheap yet their servers are doing quite good. Responsive support is always a big plus.
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