[WEB4LIB] Re: Cold Fusion question

[Eric Hellman]

The reason that Cold Fusion has a reputation for "not scaling" has to 
do with its ability to deal with heavy traffic. Under heavy load, it 
tends to suffer from traffic jams that can completely freeze it up.

Note that by "heavy traffic", I mean the sort of traffic that no 
library site is likely to see unless it's oriented towards erotic 
literature, and probably not even then.

I've been told that eToys, for example, is a Cold Fusion application.

Scaling will depend on the types of queries sent to a database. If 
the database is a slow dog and the queries are complex, then the 
client application will need to do a lot more work on queuing and 
caching of thousands of queries, and an high-end application server 
such as Dynamo is appropriate. If queries are faaaast, then a 
light-weight application layer should be more than sufficient.

Eric

At 9:06 PM -0800 1/21/00, Chris Poterala wrote:
>At 09:42 AM 1/21/00 -0800, Howard Batchelor wrote: Dear all,
>  >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.

Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
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