[WEB4LIB] Re: Cold Fusion question

[Chris Poterala]

At 09:42 AM 1/21/00 -0800, Howard Batchelor wrote: Dear all,

>I too would like to keep up with this discussion. I work at UCLA, where
>one constituent library has deployed CF very successfully. I have also
>had recent successful experience running CF for museum collections, but
>these two situations had a factor in common: both were serving up long
>lists of consistently formatted object records: jpeg, some metadata,
>descriptive notes. I have never tried to scale CF to handle many
>disparate types of records.

>CF is attractive to non-programmers. It really isn't that hard to learn
>if your databased records are in good shape and the data model for your
>collection is efficient.

Cold Fusion's "success" and someone's learning it don't depend upon the
shape or efficiency of your data.  A poorly designed database and whacked
queries will hamper just about any application server.  

There's a lot to CF beyond simply running a query and spitting those
results back to the client.  CF works splendidly with COM objects, has no
problem with Java or Javascript, integrates just fine with ASP, heck, it
does a bunch of stuff, and does it well.

You're right about CF's attractiveness to "non-programmers."  I like the
tag methodology for programming in CF; it's similar to HTML in that
respect and that similarity provides a great deal of comfort to those
learning it.  That being said, sharing a tag-based methodology gets
confused with "it's like HTML" and that sometimes hurts CF when discussing
it with folks who have never heard of it but assume it can't be robust.
HTML is a mark-up language, CF is a programming language that's written as
if it were a mark-up language.  

>The word from the database people I work with is that CF won't scale
>because it embeds SQL in html, as opposed to the methodology they prefer,
>which is to generate html on the fly from an application server in
>response to a query. The news about Ford and Boeing seems to question
>this wisdom.

Mind if I beat these folks over the head with my Cold Fusion manuals?
(slightly sarcastic)  What does "embeds SQL in HTML" mean?  I'd ask the
database folks if they've ever written anything in CF.  

CF does EXACTLY what you mention; generate HTML on the fly from result
sets generated from data returned by a query.  It IS an application
server.

I've been fighting the "It's lightweight, it doesn't scale well" arguments
for too long.  CF will work with any ODBC compliant datasource, be that
Access, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.

Detractors of CF that I've met seem to normally come from the
Perl/Unix/C++/ASP side of the fence, poo-pooing CF as some sort of sickly
cousin.  An application server shouldn't have to be difficult to program
in and CF's "ease of use" almost seems to clouds its strengths.  

If you want to check out case studies on CF, visit Allaire's site at
http://www.allaire.com.

Cheers,
Chris

Chris Poterala, web developer/project manager
cpoteral at ford.com          -  Ford Motor Company
potsie at alumni.si.umich.edu -  Public Affairs New Media
Voice: (313) 594-0850