Hi Webdude,
I did a lot of research on alternative languages to Witango. I
personally really
didn't like ASP and PHP, so I ruled those out for me. I ultimately settled on
2 languages: ColdFusion and Ruby on Rails.
If you want to get up to speed as quickly and easily as possible on a new
language, then I would definitely recommend ColdFusion as the easiest language
to learn. It's also very easy to convert Witango code to ColdFusion code. I've
done it for a couple of sites. In fact, when I built a ColdFusion
site, I actually used
the Witango builders to get started and converted the results html to
Coldfusion.
That was faster than doing ColdFusion from scratch. :)
ColdFusion also has many practical features built right into it. For
instance, it has
the easiest PDF function of any language. You simply generate css based html
like you normally would and then surround it with ColdFusion's open and close
pdf tags. That's it! It's very cool.
One downside to ColdFusion is that it is just a page-oriented language. There
is no built-in way to organize your application's higher level
structure like you can
with taf's. However, there is an open source framework called Fusebox that you
can use for doing that. It also enforces the model-view-controller
way developing
applications, which is good. However, Fusebox then becomes another thing that
you need to learn. There are some very good books for learning ColdFusion on
Amazon, and it's free to download the developer edition. There are also open
source RAD environments available for it.
Another potential downside to ColdFusion is that may not have long
term viability.
If it weren't for the fact that Adobe is supporting it, it would
probably be on its way out.
Its user base is relatively stagnant. However, as long as Adobe keeps
supporting it,
it will probably stay viable.
Ruby on Rails (RoR), on the other hand, is an exciting up and coming
web development
language. I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned it. It is the
fastest growing
language out there, and many PHP developers are moving to it.
RoR has a longer learning curve than ColdFusion. You have to first
learn the Ruby
programming language. You then learn the RoR platform. What's really cool about
RoR, though, is that like Witango, it tries to do a lot of the work
for you in order to
minimize development time. It succeeds at this better than any of the
other languages,
and it may even be faster than Witango. Once you get fully up to
speed with RoR,
you will be able to develop applications faster than you can on PHP,
ASP, and ColdFusion.
There are tons of free modules available for it like there are for
PHP (though not as many
as PHP yet). As I said, there is a lot of excitement about this
language/platform, so
there is a lot being contributed to it and it is growing rapidly.
There are many many
good books available for learning it. There are a number of different
open source RAD
environments available for it as well. I would recommend NetBeans from Sun.
The one downside of RoR is that, like Witango, it is a relatively
slow interpreted language
instead of a compiled one. This means that you have to put in a
bigger effort to support
very high volume web applications. However, we are already used to
that with Witango. :)
Since you are starting out looking for a new language, I just wanted
to share the results
of my many hours of research into language alternatives. Good luck!
Best regards,
Stefan
At 12:47 AM 10/24/2008, you wrote:
Janet,
I feel your pain. I have been busy downloading stuff and poking
around. I have read hundreds of pages on just the install stuff for
Apache, MySQL, PHP, ColdFusion, .NET... I even spent a day on
nothing but open source. I have a spare server I have been thinking
of using just to try some stuff out. What is really daunting is the
pages upon pages and gotchyas on just an installation... not to
mention the additional downloads needed to make it work in Windows.
Funny... I have about 60 sites, some getting well more then 100,000
page views per day... well over 1,000,000 visitors per month in all
- all on one MSSQL dedicated server and two dedicated Witango
servers runninng Witango 2000. Never a slowdown and has been rock
solid for over 8 years. 16 e-commerce sites, 2 Data Access
Managements sites, 4 forums, 12 internal employee sites for some
very large corporations, one very large directory site, 2 online
streaming PDF sites and a smattering of... well, just websites. Now
I am losing sleep because I am so worried about what direction to
go. I spent a very large amount on the corporate license thinking
that this was the way to go and have spent much time and resources
in developing all I have going. I never upgraded because of the
20,000 plus I dished out and I remember the days when it was
discussed that the editor would be able to output ASP and possibly
PHP code... but that never happened or was just a pipe dream.
Frankly, I thought it would have been a great idea to port output of
the editor to more popular languages. Anyway... enough crying in my
beer. I went this route and now I am going to have to do something
about it. I just spent most of the day trying to install PHP and
getting the "hello world" to work. Tomorrow, I might try to see if I
can actually connect to a database. This is going to take me a little while...
-----Original message-----
From: "janet" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:55:41 -0500
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Witango-Talk: Open Letter to Phil and Sophie
> I was wondering what to say until I saw this email from Webdude
>
> "Well, I have a problem and maybe some of you could help me. I have been
> using nothing but Tango and Witango since I started developing many years
> ago"
>
> Yes this is my story also.
> Pretty good at SQL ( MS SQL) triggers, stored procedure, views, groupings
> , maxvalues etc just a happy place for me, also HTML and Witango. I found
> that if I had good array results then the Witango stuff was easy.
> So I have looked at other RAD visual products. With ASP.net you end up with
> blocks of code either in VB or C+, there is s Borland PHP RAD, Cold fusion
> and Dreamweaver etc. But it seems that the builder tools all create either
> PHP, VB, C+ or something.
> How come Witango shielded me from all of these languages?
> I know Witango is an XML code generator so why isn't there any other
> products creating XML? I am asking the wrong question?
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