I think it is correct to say that stripped of VS.NET and other fancy IDE's, a CF application of moderate difficulty could be constructed and deployed more rapidly than an ASP.NET application of the same ilk.
However, you really can't strip the IDE from the "Development" part of RAD. So when you correctly include the nifty set of tools involved in the entire development arena of .NET, it may be just as 'RAD'ical as CF. (yeah, i'm a child of the 80s)
Brian
----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Watts
To: CF-Talk
Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2004 1:53 PM
Subject: RE: RAD (was RE: Best choice for ColdFusion Studio IDE...)
> My point is that CF without any tools provides RAD
> capabilities, while Java and .NET do not.
My counterpoint is that I think you're exaggerating the difficulty of
writing ASP.NET code in any generic text editor. It's simply not that
difficult. I pointed out some tools other than Visual Studio, but I also
pointed out that the code itself isn't that complex in most cases.
I also think it's a mistake to base your comparison on how easy it is to
develop without tools. Who cares, really? That's what tools are for! Even if
ASP.NET were as difficult to read as obfuscated Perl, who cares if you can
generate the code without knowing how it works by just clicking your mouse?
Sure, it might be more difficult to maintain that code, but we're talking
about "Rapid Application Development", not "Rapid Application Maintenance".
And there's no reason why that code can't be maintained through the same
tool, either.
> Thus, I am making the assertion that if CF had the same
> kind of tooling as Java and .NET then its RAD capabilities
> would be greater increased. Do you disagree with this assertion?
Well, actually, yes, I do.
The feature that makes Visual Studio stand out as an ASP.NET IDE is its
success at abstracting how web applications work - at a very basic level -
away from the programmer. That is, you can take someone who's been building
desktop forms-based applications, who has no experience with web
applications, and put that person in front of Visual Studio and say, "build
me a web app". Visual Studio makes the most out of the (largely illusory)
event-driven model that ASP.NET allows.
The feature that makes CF "RAD" is the simplicity of the code itself. On the
other hand, you have to have more basic knowledge about how web applications
work to even get started with CF. CF doesn't abstract the HTTP
request-response process away from the developer. Fortunately for all of us,
this basic knowledge is easily acquired, and the guy in the previous
paragraph would quickly run into limits in the places where the event-driven
model breaks down.
So, I'm not sure whether a Visual Studio-workalike for CF would make CF
developers any more efficent than they already are. In addition, I don't
think it would make them more efficient than ASP.NET developers using the
same development model, since ASP.NET supports this model while CF doesn't.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
phone: 202-797-5496
fax: 202-797-5444
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