I have one vote against CF. I do know that it is both easy and powerful, and I certainly don't knock it for that. But it's yet another closed-source platform. I'm no open-source zealot, however the prospect of moving several sites from CF to another solution because Adobe kills it or is bought my MS or goes in a direction you don't like, is daunting. I like having full control over the platform. I like being able to take my code and go home if the project wants to go in another direction. I like to be able to propose and submit code to my platform of choice. And I really like knowing that the whims of an executive board can't make me change my code.
I say this from experience. I've been in situations where we've bought some portal solution or web platform, only to have it go in a direction that doesn't fit our customizations a year later, and we were left holding the bag. It was awful and we were left with a very expensive POS. I know CF has been around for a long time. It was one of the first web platforms on which I developed, but I much prefer PHP, Ruby, Python or even Perl now because of the reasons I mentioned. In the Enterprise space you don't have a good open-source option until Java is fully open, but for apps like you are proposing some good ole PHP+MySQL is too good and ubiquitous to pass up. And like others have said, if you need the structure, use Symfony, Cake, RoR or another framework. Another reason I don't like CF is the actual code. It just feels like you're not coding. I enjoy writing code and programming, and <cfloop> just doesn't feel right to me, but that's just a personal preference. Writing Ruby is euphoric. It's just beautiful code. But, it's not very prevalent yet (though I do love RoR). Hosts for RoR are harder to find that CF. Writing PHP is utilitarian in that you can get in and get out easily and it just works. And now with version 5 the object orientation features no longer suck. I haven't tried Python yet though I really want to. I've seen apps built on Python (Trac) and they are great. And while Perl is powerful, I just don't feel right using it to write web apps, and it can be very difficult to read. This is certainly nothing against the CF devs here. I know that CF is very much available, easy, powerful, etc., etc.. But, I'm just gun-shy about devoting so much of my time to a platform over which I can exert no control. Paul _______________________________________________ jQuery mailing list [email protected] http://jquery.com/discuss/
