[WEB4LIB] Re: An Informal ColdFusion Survey

[Stephen Westman]

It is my understanding that, when deciding to use ColdFusion, you need to 
take into account whether you are (or will be) using any flavor of Unix for 
your web services.  Last year, we were looking at implementing ColdFusion 
here at my institution.  In doing research, I came across a review of the 
product 
(http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/software/coldfusion_problems.html0 
that indicated that it might have scalability and other rather nasty 
problems on Unix servers (which we use for all of our Web services).  Since 
that review appeared I did some more investigation on Allaire's web site 
(as well as posting to this group) to see if the problems detailed in that 
version (4.0) had been fixed in 4.5.  While Allaire did appear to have done 
a rewrite of much of the code to be for the Unix platform as part of 
version 4.5 (previously it had been a port of Windows code), it appears 
that problems do still exist.

Given the mission-critical nature of our web services, I decided to look 
into PHP as an alternative.  While it requires a bit more of a programmer 
mind set to use the product, the level of expertise is not onerous for 
someone who has had ANY type of programming experience.  In addition, we 
have had wonderful success in doing rapid web-site development using the 
product (far quicker than when we were using perl for our database-backed 
web publishing).  For example, it took me about an hour to create my first 
"webbed" database application in PHP (and that hour included learning PHP's 
syntax). It has been extremely stable and the response time (using mod_php 
with Apache) is very good.  Also, given that the main Ohio State University 
web server has moved to a php/MySQL-based home page, it is also obviously 
scalable.  More information can be found at:

         http://www.WebDevelopersJournal.com/articles/why_php.html
         http://idm.internet.com/articles/200005/php_05_30_00a.html

Our development time was also reduced by using the PHP base library 
(available at http://phplib.netuse.de/index.php3) which includes good 
authentication, session handling, and database handling tools (check out 
http://phplib.netuse.de/about/features/ for more details).

As far as support is concerned, PHP is increasingly well documented (here 
are currently over 30 books listed at amazon.com) and loads of web pages 
(see the "Why PHP site above to get started looking for them) that can get 
you started (as well as providing example source code that you can adapt to 
your own needs).  Given that the (increasingly) large number of users on 
the web (from under 500,000 in January of 1999 to almost 5 million at the 
end of last year - see http://www.php.net/usage.php for more details), 
there are several forums as well as a large number of web sites where PHP 
development is discussed.  There are even PHP user groups appearing in a 
large number of cities around the country and world.  For a listing, go to:

         http://www.phpusergroups.org/

There are even locations (including some user groups, as in the user group 
from Ann Arbor) that offer classes in the use of the language.

The bottom line (IMNSHO) is that, if you are using an NT platform for your 
web services, ColdFusion could be a good product to use (although you 
should probably at least look into PHP since there are reports that it 
works better even in the NT environment).  However, if you are using (or 
would ever consider moving to) Unix or Linux for your web server, I would 
consider PHP to be a much safer investment of time and energy.

At 05:02 PM 01/18/2001 -0800, Dan Lester wrote:
>Thursday, January 18, 2001, 5:30:09 PM, you wrote:
>
>RW> Just a quick comment: you should probably consider looking at the 'open'
>RW> PHP as a more progressive alternative to the proprietary Cold Fusion.
>RW> PHP is 'cross-platform friendly' to the best of my knowledge, and just
>RW> surpassed the 'being used on 5 million websites' mark quite recently.
>
>Nothing against PHP or other open source solutions.  However, CF is
>well documented, well supported, and has solid training available for
>a fee.  It doesn't completely ignore the "open source" world, as a
>great many custom tags have been written for CF by users, and made
>available for others to use.
>
>In many environments it is better to spend a little money on a
>commercial product rather than putting all your eggs into a basket
>supported by everybody and nobody.
>
>And, yes, we use both commercial and open source software, plus
>shareware (paid for, of course), postcardware, etc.
>
>cheers
>
>dan
>
>--
>Dan Lester, Data Wrangler  dan at RiverOfData.com
>3577 East Pecan, Boise, Idaho  83716-7115 USA
>www.riverofdata.com  www.postcard.org  www.gailndan.com
>

Stephen R. Westman
Digital Resources Systems Administrator
Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Avenue Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210
(614) 688-0142
westman.2 at osu.edu