Joseph,
Great questions. If you asked me 6 months ago, I would answer you by saying
that the reason I use CF primarily is because it is a great RAD tool.
Today, I am thinking about how cool it will be to leverage my CF experience
once CF is tied to Flash better (better than Harpoon). The thought of this
alone gets my heart racing. A couple of years ago, M$ introduced their
"Agent" ActiveX component that allowed you to have a little character (like
those annoying M$ Office Assistants) that you could script to make talk. I
thought that this was pretty neat, but it required a slow download, and the
performance was hideous. Also, you were stuck with the characters that M$
developed. With Flash working better with CF, you could create some
compelling agents, IM programs, distance learning tools, training programs,
and more. There is probably a lot of potential here that we have not even
thought of yet. So the Flash potential and also UltraDev's *potential*
have me excited. Those are my hopes for CF.
My fears are:
- How well will CF be integrated with UltraDev?
- How well will CF be integrated with Flash? And I don't mean little
Harpoon calendars.
- Will MM fix/improve the advanced security features of CF? The "Users -->
Groups --> Policies" security model is cludgy.
- Will MM or Version 5.0 improve/automate remote file management? By this
I mean that I would like for CF to allow me to manage files on the server
much like FrontPage extensions do. You rename a file, and all of the links
to the file get renamed. FP is a newbie tool, but this is a HUGE time saver
when you have a really big site to manage.
- Will MM lower the cost of the server? The pro version should cost
$599.00.
- How will the real world performance be with the Java-based "NEO" (CF
version 6.0). I know they say it is faster, but I am just worried.
- How soon will 5.0 be out? User defined functions and querying a query
will be awesome. The User defined functions alone will add tremendously to
the CF community once you can download custom functions (loan calculators,
etc.).
Just my 2 cents.
John McKown, Owner
Delaware.Net, Inc.
30 Old Rudnick Lane, Suite 200
Dover, DE 19901
phone: 302-736-5515
toll free: 888-432-7965
fax: 302-736-5945
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Grossberg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 12:28 PM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: Is CF still relevant?
Now, before you dismiss this as a troll, please let me elaborate. This isn't
so much an instigation or a whine as it is a call for us to take a step back
and reevalutate things periodically.
Over the course of my career as a web programmer/developer, I have worked
with a variety of sever-side languages and technologies: ColdFusion, ASP,
JSP, PHP, Perl and Python. I like some more than others, but I'm not an
evangelist for any; they each have their uses. And I recognize some of CF's
strengths: easy to learn for people who know only tag-based HTML or don't
have significant programming experience; built-in admin tool; specialized
editor; comes with pre-built tags and web-based administrator. There are
also major flaws: broken/sketchy tags; no XML parsing; not OOP; relatively
small community; etc.
Right now, I work at a web development firm that is primarily "a CF house"
(besides me). Our more senior programmers are looking at honing their CF
skills, while our less experienced webmasters are trying to learn
ColdFusion. But, I can't help but wonder whether they are wasting their
time. Would they be better off spending their time learning ASP, Java or
another non-CF solution? Why or why not?
And how would we tell if and when it was time to give up CF and try
something else, as all but the most stubborn experts in also-ran languages
(Ada, SmallTalk), applications (Netscape, Lotus Notes) and Operating Systems
(Amiga) have resignedly done?
Lastly, why do *you* still use CF? Is it because it's what you're best at,
and you don't want to try something new (where, temporarily, you'd be a
novice again)? Is it because your ccompany's legacy code is all in CF? Is it
because you genuinely think that ColdFusion is, generally speaking, the best
solution for web application development in 2001?
Joe
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