ASP vs. Cold Fusion

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cory

I realize this is a Microsoft group, but what are the
advantages/disadvantages of cold fusion? People are telling me the coding
required in .cfm is much less than .asp? Is this true? Which one is
better?

Any input is appreciated.

Thanks
Cory
 
I realize this is a Microsoft group, but what are the
advantages/disadvantages of cold fusion? People are telling me the coding
required in .cfm is much less than .asp? Is this true? Which one is
better?
Click to expand...

They aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, and one may be better than
another for specific tasks and talents. You'd need to evaulate them
in terms of your organizations abilities and needs.

Jeff
 
I'm part of the only ASP group in an otherwise CF shop, so I've worked
with both for the past few years. The two languages are very
different -- because they have different target audiences that value
different features. When, for example, opening and looping over a
recordset, ASP will require more code than CF. However, with ASP you
will be able to control whether you use ODBC/OLE DB/OO4O/what have you
to open the database connection, whether that connection is kept open
for other recordsets on the page, whether the recordset is read-only or
writeable, etc., etc.

"Better" is subjective. It all depends on the current skill set of the
people who will be doing the coding -- whether they're more comfortable
with scripting or tag-based coding -- and whether you need the
flexibility and extensibility available with ASP, or would prefer the
quick coding and out-of-the-box functionality of CF.

I would say that the main pros and cons are:

ASP:
takes more code to do some tasks
has fewer built-in features (but can be easily extended with COM
components)
much finer control
easy transition for VB programmers (most sample code is in VBscript)
CF:
some things _must_ be tag-based (database access, for example)
- so you can't just cfscript everything
- so you _must_ transition to the tag paradigm
ODBC/JDBC connections only (unless I'm missing something)
difficult to extend using COM components (again, unless I'm missing
something)
easy transition for HTML programmers
 
cory said:
I realize this is a Microsoft group, but what are the
advantages/disadvantages of cold fusion? People are telling me the coding
required in .cfm is much less than .asp? Is this true? Which one is
better?
Click to expand...

I've coded in both. Two years ago I decided to standardize on ASP mainly for
support and documentation reasons. The responses I'd get from ASP newsgroups
are not only quicker, but more accurate (awwwww...). And while the
documentation may appear equivilant, when you start to use the docs you'll
find the ASP documentation is far superior to CF documentation.

Lastly, the majority of ASP programmers are professionals earning a serious
living, while too many CF programmers are hobbyists and/or anti-Microsoft.
 
cory said:
I realize this is a Microsoft group, but what are the
advantages/disadvantages of cold fusion? People are telling me the coding
required in .cfm is much less than .asp? Is this true? Which one is
better?
Click to expand...

The main difference may be that the Cold Fusion developer still has a
career ahead!8-))

For a new project or for someone new to web programming, I would suggest
any web language _other_ than ASP (which I like, but because Microsoft
is deprecating ASP and promoting ASP.NET).

My choices, in order, would be Perl, Java, PHP, then _maybe_ CF. Perl's
CPAN libraries http://search.cpan.org/ are incredible, already debugged
and documented, free and you can see the source code.

Good Luck,
Michael D. Kersey
 
The main difference may be that the Cold Fusion developer still has a
career ahead!8-))
Click to expand...

Perhaps. Locally, the demand for CF programmers has dropped way off,
ASP and .NET coders are in much higher demand. The larger shops that
had been pure CF have split or dropped CF entirely in the last two
years. Your market may naturally vary.

Of course, hitching your career to any single technology is pretty
much a foolish thing to do...
For a new project or for someone new to web programming, I would suggest
any web language _other_ than ASP (which I like, but because Microsoft
is deprecating ASP and promoting ASP.NET).
Click to expand...

Except of course that neither ASP or ASP.NET is a langauge. You
program in VBScript, JScript or in the case of .NET, C##. All
standard language technologies, and except for Jscript they have been
around in one form or another for years.
My choices, in order, would be Perl, Java, PHP, then _maybe_ CF. Perl's
CPAN libraries http://search.cpan.org/ are incredible, already debugged
and documented, free and you can see the source code.
Click to expand...

Except if you're in a Microsoft shop, Java and PHP are less fully
supported, and Perl can be problematic if you attempt to use some
libraries.

Jeff
 
I've coded in both. Two years ago I decided to standardize on ASP mainly for
support and documentation reasons. The responses I'd get from ASP newsgroups
are not only quicker, but more accurate (awwwww...). And while the
documentation may appear equivilant, when you start to use the docs you'll
find the ASP documentation is far superior to CF documentation.

Lastly, the majority of ASP programmers are professionals earning a serious
living, while too many CF programmers are hobbyists and/or anti-Microsoft.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the informative responses. I am not doing the programming, but I
have had someone trying to sell me a .cfm app. I was hesitant about it as I
researched some sites running .cfm and maybe it was just the websites I
viewed but they seemd slower loading than an aspx website. I was also
concerned about support and the portability of cfm. Meaning, if I chose to
leave my host with Cold Fusion I have to find one who supports it and those
who do seem far fewer than .aspx.

Anyways, I have chosen to go with asp.net for my app so hopefully it works
out.

Thanks again.
Cory
 
cory said:
Thanks for the informative responses. I am not doing the programming, but I
have had someone trying to sell me a .cfm app. I was hesitant about it as I
researched some sites running .cfm and maybe it was just the websites I
viewed but they seemd slower loading than an aspx website. I was also
concerned about support and the portability of cfm. Meaning, if I chose to
leave my host with Cold Fusion I have to find one who supports it and those
who do seem far fewer than .aspx.
Click to expand...

ASP.Net pages *should* generally run faster than ColdFusion pages because
ASP.Net pages are compiled (except for the first viewing of the page). I'm
not sure if ColdFusion pages are compiled or not, but my understanding is
that they are not.
Anyways, I have chosen to go with asp.net for my app so hopefully it works
out.
Click to expand...

I don't think you'll be disappointed. :)
Regards,
Peter Foti
 
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