> I'm going to bring this one in from the Blackstone Beta thread yesterday > because I think we all need to talk about this.
Why? I thought this was a technical discussion list? If this were a list about, say, Porsches, would it be appropriate to talk about how much better Ferraris are? (Oh, and by the way, as Sean as implied, they're not.) > ASP.NET is taking market away from CF! Do you have any statistics to back this up? I think it's certainly possible, but even if it's true it says little about the comparative value of either CFMX or .NET. > CF is still outrageous to purchase. The licensing for the .NET SDK > is free as is the licensing to deploy. If you think the pricing for CF is outrageous, you should look at the pricing for, well, any enterprise product you can think of. The pricing for CF Pro is quite reasonable for small businesses, and the pricing for CF Enterprise is quite reasonable for large ones. The .NET platform is only free if you purchase Windows, which you seem to be conveniently ignoring. > Blackstone is not equivalent to .NET in power and performance. Yeah, > maybe it's easy for us to code our simple CFML, and yeah that > <cfdocument> is pretty neat, but there are a few factors making CF'ers > like me change hats, and put on the .NET one! Will MM ever > come up with a true development language like .NET? Are they going to > keep putting more icing on the same cake, while Microsoft bakes fresh > ones? Honestly, I don't know what the hell that paragraph means. If CFML isn't a true development language, I wonder how we've developed all these applications? If you have a problem with "simple CFML", there are plenty of more complex languages for you to use, like C# or Java. Feel free to use those - the rest of us will be happy to continue using CF to develop applications more quickly and easily. As for Microsoft being the one who "bakes fresh" cakes, well, that's sort of the problem. Every couple of years, MS comes along and changes everything for developers. ASP.NET is very nice, and C# is very nice, but there are a lot of pissed-off VB 6 and "classic" ASP guys, who find themselves having to relearn almost everything to continue using MS tools. Those VB 6 guys, after just learning to use .NET and Windows Forms, will have to switch gears again to learn XAML when Longhorn comes out. Here's an interesting take on this problem: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html > Tim Uzzanti: > "If you believe CF can handle the same traffic loads that .NET can > handle, then you are completely confused on the technologies and their > infrastructure. I have no idea if 75% of fortune 100% companies use CF, > I would love to see some documentation for that, but the Fortune 100 > companies ARE NOT the Top 100 sites on the Internet either! I know plenty of large-scale sites using CF. I'd seriously doubt that you can scale ASP.NET up to equal CFMX running on, say, a Solaris 64-processor box. Good luck with that! ASP.NET is inherently limited by Windows. I don't know who Tim Uzzanti is, but I don't see why I should take what he says at face value. My experience says otherwise. Oh, wait. Now, having Googled "Tim Uzzanti", I see he runs a web hosting company. I wonder if he has any incentive in seeing people use .NET rather than CF. He wouldn't have to pay for CF licenses if none of his clients used CF, right? How many large-scale applications has Mr. Uzzanti worked on, exactly? All his servers are Windows servers, aren't they? I wonder if this has anything at all to do with his enthusiasm for .NET - something he's already paid for? > Asking someone who maintains and manages 10,000 hosted applications on > Cold Fusion and someone who manages thousands of .NET applications would > probably give you a pretty good opinion of what they see? Is it in my > BEST interest to tell a customer not to use CF, or is it in my best > interest to suggest what might be the best technologies from my > experiences on their requirements? Hosted applications? What's the specific relevance of talking only about hosted applications? Most big applications run on dedicated servers. > Someone mentioned ediet.com which has a traffic ranking of around > 280,000 and in comparison CrystalTech is around 23,000. Microsoft.com > which is in the top 10 is using ASP.NET and Dell.COM which is in the top > 100 is also using ASP.NET Uh, and this is relevant how again? How many servers do MS and Dell use to keep this working? The fact is, there are huge sites using practically any technology you can think of, and scalability needn't be a problem with CFMX or ASP.NET or J2EE or whatever. > Cold Fusion MX out of the box has a setting to support no more than 10 > simultaneous requests at one time. Macromedia suggestions that you never > exceed 40 and this isn't optimal for a large scale sites. This is a load of hooey. CF uses a queued threading model, which is more efficient than creating threads on demand. Even with large-scale CF applications that are heavily used, you typically get best performance with a pretty small number of threads per processor. If the overall processing time for a thread, including waiting in the queue and actually being processed, is less with a small number of threads per processor, why exactly is this not optimal? > There are other factors that one needs to think about when writing an > application. Think about the ability to use Threads in .NET. Depending > on your application, sitting and processing 10 requests back to back may > take 5 minutes but if you had the ability to run the 10 tasks > concurrently you may be able to respond back to the customer in 30 > seconds. First, asynchronous processing isn't that common in web applications. Second, you can use asynchronous processing in CFMX applications now, by hooking to JMS - it's not easy or trivial, but it can be done. Third, I've heard that Blackstone will provide an easier way to do asynchronous processing. If that's true, why would you complain about Blackstone not providing what you need? > You have to realize, .NET isn't just a web based language, it > is a Development language for desktop and server applications as well. And this makes it better for web development? How exactly does that work? > CrystalTech uses SmarterMail which is built on the .NET and it > outperforms all other mail servers that are built on C and C++. Really? Benchmarks, please? I seriously doubt this. > One last comment that I would also provide to a potential customer who > may want to move from a shared environment to a dedicated environment is > that you will need to purchase a license for CFMX. If this is a large > site and will expand to multiple servers then they will need to purchase > a $4,500 license possibly x 2... Again, this isn't something that > affects CT, but would affect the customer..." One last comment that I would also provide to a potential customer who may want to move from a shared environment to a dedicated environment is that you will need to purchase a license for your operating system, if it's Windows, along with all the other stuff that you typically need on a production box (backup software, Tripwire, management client, etc.) Of course, all that stuff is a tiny fraction of the actual cost of running a production application, and you'll typically spend much more on labor paying programmers to maintain an application, than you will on the actual cost of the platform. Oh, and by the way those costs will probably be much lower with CF, since it's so easy, so you'll pay for your CF license pretty quickly. Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software http://www.figleaf.com/ phone: 202-797-5496 fax: 202-797-5444 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Special thanks to the CF Community Suite Silver Sponsor - CFDynamics http://www.cfdynamics.com Message: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=i:4:187296 Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/threads.cfm/4 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=s:4 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4 Donations & Support: http://www.houseoffusion.com/tiny.cfm/54
