Comments on: Why developers are dumping PHP for ColdFusion

By: Xung

Xung — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 04:39:09 +0000

I was part of the politico.com team when it was just two developers. I setup vertical cluster (followed by horizontal clustering) with CF. It handled huge loads really well (but the DB was another story). Can PhP do that? Can PhP allow you to cluster vertically while you wait for money and expertise in the horizontal clustering?

By: Christopher Walker

Christopher Walker — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:37:32 +0000

Ray you’ll never win against guys like eturino. Because they are so set in the idea that actually paying for something (CF) is against some developer secret creedo. They will find any reason to support why open source is superior to a commercial product. I work with one of these types. Everytime he argues we should dump ColdFusion and go to PHP I direct the CFO and CEO to Facebook, the slowest, clunky social networking site on the web. Sure its pretty compared to mySpace, but I can’t be convinced that Facebook’s latency is entirely due to bandwidth. (Perhaps mySpace is precompiled cfm?)

But here is the biggie. In Ray Camden’s own site, Sean Corfield offers a script library where developers can run PHP code within ColdFusion pages. http://scripting.riaforge.org/

Thats my 2 cents worth.

By: Dani

Dani — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 05:58:47 +0000

Raymond and Eturino, thanks so much for this discussion.
I’ve read somewhere that if you are a CF developer, you’d better learn another language. I’ve got to this discussion trying to understand why. I work with CF and so far the types of projects I’ve been involved with I haven’t felt I needed another one. I work with intranets for small (50 to 100 users is small?) organizations.
I’ve tried to learn PHP many times, some of my clients had a PHP hosting when they contacted me. So far, none of them had any problem switching to CF hosting.
Until now .
Raymond, is there any recommendation you could give me, being you and I CF developers (you with much more experience than I) to learn PHP in order to use it as an extra tool?
The one thing it really bothers me about PHP in the integration with HTML (compared to CF). Is there any good book, something like “PHP for ColdFusion developers”?
Thank you guys!

dani at thiez dot com.

By: prashant

prashant — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:20:34 +0000

thanx for ur suggestion…

By: Matt Burgess

Matt Burgess — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:06:50 +0000

Just as a correction, the document above incorrectly lists code that is not required at all to make a query. The mysql connection string is ALWAYS put in a config file, and does not need to be done to make the query. This is like suggesting you need to reconfigure the DSN for each query.

$result = mysql_query(”select * from counter”);

This is a more accurate code sample. And it's no more complex than the CF version.

By: prashant

prashant — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:12:48 +0000

Hey Architect….You actually seem to be more of a PHP Fanboi btw….Anywayz,the above comments from a CF Expert are more than enough to justify the points being explained…

By: Architect

Architect — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:57:47 +0000

well done eturino, well structured response that should own all the fanbois.

By: eturino

eturino — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:17:52 +0000

Of course you can. I can give you one: mine! A dozen countries, in the top 10 in every one of them, etc.
I'm not saying "i've seen CF and I don't like it", I'm saying we use it at work and I still wouldn't recommend it.

By the way, try the documentation for previous versions. And before you can say "CF don't do that, because it is documented otherwise", try it. We've seen many non-documented behaviours, even when the documentation says precisely that CF doesn't do that. Or try to change the JVM in your server. Some months ago we discovered a hidden bug in our code that the same server with another jre ignored. Same java version, different build.

Large companies are really slow to change its systems. CF was an option (a valid one) several years ago. With CF 5 or so. Later, it was still better to adjust your CF code to upgrade (even with the license costs) than to migrate everything in another language. Now, we're paying that years ago we decided to wait. Now it seems to cost too much, so I think we're stuck with CF for at least 2009. But not a single developer in my company likes CF. We disagree on to which other language/platform we should migrate, but nobody prefers CF.

I'm sure, US goverment pays for more CF projects than Java or .Net ones. Yep. Really sure. And new ones, of course. Come on, we've all seen goverment still paying for web developments with CGIs.
Tell me large WEB companies use it. Tell me Facebook is migrating to CF, or Twitter, or even google. I'm not saying they prefer PHP (Google doesn't develop in php), but none of them uses CF. In fact, I think in web terms we're one of the biggest websites using CF. And we don't like it