Scott, I'll disclaim that I don't have direct ColdFusion experience, but assuming that your developers are using the current CF runtime, and knowing that the current CF Runtime is a J2EE container, I'm not sure how much good news there is for you. Both AOLserver and J2EE containers use a threading model, and have database connection pools available, so AOLserver's usual advantage is nullified here. Back in the 2.3.3 days, AOLserver would have commanded far less memory than other servers with embedded languages, but because of the way AOLserver has handled Tcl initialization since 3.0, AOLserver thread startup is actually quite heavyweight (either Jim W or Dan S had horror stories about threads requiring many seconds to startup because of the time required to initialize large amounts of Tcl code in the libraries and modules). ADPs would normally be a good rapid development tool with quick turnaround, but JSP offers very similar functionality. On top of that, nobody has any friendly AOLserver/Tcl/ADP front-end design tools, whereas CF was an environment built around the idea. Depending on the complexity of your application, it's entirely possible that the developers can get it going faster, and can deploy it on comparable resources, and with comparable performance if they use CF rather than AOLserver. It is very hard to compete against an app development environment like CF with it's front-end when we don't have even a Dreamweaver behavior that makes life easier, and if you don't do anything like I suggested recently regarding conditional and repeated content, it's really hard to do dynamic page development in anything other than a text editor. Again, from an ease-of-use standpoint, AOLserver has a hard time competing with CF.
Now, if the app tests the boundaries of CF, you start to get a fighting chance with AOLserver, because AOLserver has finer-grained APIs, and you can adapt an AOLserver to fit your problem, where, with CF, you'll end up doing more fitting your problem to CF. The problem remains, though, that the CF environment is fairly rich, and unless you're going to OpenACS, AOLserver lacks a lot of the richness (and even with OpenACS, you still don't get friendly development tools -- I don't consider emacs a friendly development tool). If you're going to just try to have a shootout between AOLserver and CF, I think you're going to lose, unless you can mold it to the problem, and show how AOLserver can adapt better and quicker to your problem. Pete. On Thursday, January 30, 2003, at 03:44 PM, Scott Goodwin wrote:
Hi all, can those of you with Cold Fusion experience please respond to me directly with your opinions on Cold Fusion vs Tcl in AOLserver? I need to make a case for moving a heavy Cold Fusion developer group to Tcl in AOLserver. Specifically I need to convince this group that the pain of the switch is worth it in the long run. I don't need philosophical advice (e.g. "Use what you know"). I need specific advice on why Tcl/AOLserver is a better solution than CF for web apps. Please reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thanks! /s.
