On 11/7/05, Peter Hardy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sean, > > It's not often I disagree with you but on this occasion I think I do.
I'm on Sean's side with this one. > When hunting for contracts / customers, we're competing with companies who > are using JSP, Asp.Net etc. The competition can set the whole thing up > without the licensing overhead which we have to pass onto the Customer. For > smaller apps (the kind where we would consider using shared hosting for) > this gives the JSP / Asp.Net developers a competitive advantage. Given that > Coldfusion is sold (to some extent) on how good it is for building > <emp>small sites</emp> quickly, your argument seems a little > counter-intutive. If you can't deploy your entire application on a competative basis with another provider's application, then you will and *should* lose the contract. A web "site" is a package -- design, development, maintenance, and a host of other costs. If you can't get your costs competative with ASP/PHP/JSP developers, then you need to take a look at your business and get it so it *is* competative -- or find a different kind of client. If we're talking about *small* sites, there are myriad options for delivering robust, stable, dedicated ColdFusion sites. For example, you can deploy VMWare GSX server (2 cpu) for less than 2k, buy a copy of ColdFusion MX 7 Standard for about $1100. Now you've got totally isolated copies of ColdFusion on your server -- and if the sites are truly small, you can support 10-15 on a decent 2CPU commodity server. So we've taken about $3200, split it across at least 10 projects, so the added cost is on the order of $300 per client. That wasn't so hard. Plus you get the huge bonus of being able to scale quickly and easier by putting in a good infrastructure -- blades and more VMWare make it easy to cluster, etc. You are also competing with folks in other countries who earn far less per hour. And they know how to write PHP/JSP/ASP/etc too. So their costs are EVEN LOWER -- so how are you going to compete? > It could be argued that the speed of development using Coldfusion would > offset the cost of the license but I don't think this is strong argument. Depends on the project -- for example, if you must deploy on Linux, ASP.NET is a lot harder to deal with unless you've got a Mono-compatible all-C# application. > Personally, I can build a web app in Asp.Net more quickly than in > Coldfusion. And once I've finished an application I can roll it out to as > many clients as I want (maximising return on time / effort /money invested) > without having to pay additional license fees. Then using ColdFusion for those applications is a poor business decision, period. For example, a default instance of Drupal (a PHP community application/framework) gives you a killer community application in about 15 minutes that's free of licensing fees -- no amount of CF magic will catch up with that. I personally am not a huge fan of it as a framework, but what I could do in 10 hours of dev time with it was amazing -- my PHP development was slower and the framework was weird, but 10 hours of tweaks gave an amazing site that would have taken a week or more of CF work to implement. And don't get me started on Ruby on Rails :) For these "small" sites, Rails is often a perfect match. > And be honest, the license fee for Enterprise version of CF is completely > insane. I think it's far less grating than the price difference for Windows Server Std vs Enterprise. Or MS-SQL vs MS-SQL Enterprise. The bottom line is that if you can't afford the feature, you can't afford the feature. The bottom line is that if your tools are too expensive for your job, you're using the wrong tools. -- John Paul Ashenfelter CTO/Transitionpoint (blog) http://www.ashenfelter.com (email) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------- You are subscribed to cfcdev. To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected] with the words 'unsubscribe cfcdev' as the subject of the email. CFCDev is run by CFCZone (www.cfczone.org) and supported by CFXHosting (www.cfxhosting.com). An archive of the CFCDev list is available at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
