> > > Well.... I can think of one REALLY good reason why ASP users might
> > > deal without nifty things like built in HTTP, etc. where CF users
> > > might insist on said functionality:
> >
> > > Cost of ASP: $0.00
> > > Cost of ColdFusion: $1199.95 (From Necx.com)
>
> > If you compare the labor costs for training and development for
> > entry-level and mid-level CF developers vs ASP developers, that
> > $1199, or the $3000+ that you'd pay for CF Enterprise Edition,
> > will pay for itself in less than a week, I suspect.
>
> I'd like to see some actual statistics backing up that claim.
> I hear people use this argument all the time. "CF ultimately
> costs less because it's so much easier to learn and faster to
> develop applications with." Well, this is definitely not true
> all of the time, and given that there are so many people out
> there who know VB (I think VB is still the most widely used
> programming language in the U.S.), it's not that difficult to
> find an ASP programmer, or to train someone who already knows VB.
Unfortunately, of course, I don't have any "actual statistics". I'm sure
that's no surprise to you. What I do have is anecdotal experience, which you
might argue is useless. Nevertheless, I'm going to let fly with it.
1. The problem with developing web applications isn't really learning a new
language, but learning a new programming model. Traditional VB programming
and ASP programming using VBScript share a language, but not much else. It
can be difficult for even experienced programmers to learn and understand
the HTTP application model, where state management is a concern, where you
don't really have an "application" in the traditional sense, but rather you
have a bunch of individual scripts which are used in a coordinated fashion.
I've taught CF to hundreds of students, and often the ones who have the most
difficulty are the experienced programmers, as they have to forget about how
things work in the environment to which they're accustomed.
2. The demand for web development has inclined a lot of people without prior
development experience to get involved. These people have to learn a lot of
things at once - whether you use CF or ASP, you're going to have to learn
how relational databases work, how SQL works, how the HTTP request-response
model works, etcetera. If you can make any portion of that easier, it will
mean less overall learning is needed to get productive quickly.
3. All other things being equal ("ceteris parabis", as one of my teachers
was inclined to say), CFML is easier to learn than ASP, and has a lower
learning curve. It doesn't have to be much lower to cover the cost of the
product. If it's ten percent easier, let's say, and it takes a developer ten
percent less time to complete a project, and said developer is working a
forty-hour week, and you've got twenty developers working on a project who
are paid $100/hr, then over the course of a week your labor costs would be
$8000 (assuming I've done the math correctly - a shaky assumption indeed!).
Now, admittedly, as your ASP developers got more experience, their labor
costs would start to drop and approach those of the CF developers.
As you mentioned, you've got good developers and bad developers, but I'm
assuming that a good developer can do more with something that's easier to
use than with something that's harder to use.
I'd argue that the data access model alone might make that ten percent
difference.
4. Most of the complexities of CF development aren't really CF issues;
learning how to do more in SQL and JavaScript are two examples. To me, the
beauty of CF is that it's so simple that I can focus on other things outside
the world of CF. Now, I know CF and ASP. I personally write a decent amount
of ASP code, and have worked with ASP on and off since its release.
Nevertheless, I feel much more comfortable with CF; I find myself having to
look up specific objects, methods and properties in ASP quite a bit. There
are some things I prefer about ASP, but I find myself fighting the language
a lot less with CF.
> Now, that said, I do like CF better, but it's not because the
> syntax is so much easier or that the performance is so much
> better. It's because there is so much built in functionality,
> and that functionality is very easy to use.
What makes that functionality easy to use?
> I am a huge supporter of CF, and I will continue to advocate
> the use of CF over ASP for the time being, but when CF 5.0
> releases, it better have a lot of fixes in it, or I'll have
> to re-evaluate what language is my language of choice for
> web development.
I'd second this wholeheartedly, and argue that this should always be
everyone's position. If a better tool comes along tomorrow, you'd be a fool
not to use it because of some misplaced product loyalty.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
voice: (202) 797-5496
fax: (202) 797-5444
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