MySpace Needs an Update

Don’t be dissin’ ColdFusion unless you’ve got something to back it up with… no one likes haters!

You obviously have nothing to back up your unfounded and biased opinions

Hummm, that’s odd… I don’t recall having expressed any unfounded opinions or having been asked to provide any substantiative reasoning or proof to back up my [unsaid] claims… (Of course, should I be asked to do so, I could, and would, respond promptly.)

My experience with ColdFusion has been the opposite of your original statement. I was hoping that you could share some sort of experience or knowledge that you’d gained from your experiences that might teach me something. Oh well, I’m beginning to doubt that you actually have any experience with ColdFusion so I guess I’ll just have to move on to more “intelligent” discussions elsewhere.

Just because ColdFusion has a smaller user base than other web platforms does not reflect anything of its capabilities. To extend the car analogy that you’re so fond of, you might as well claim that a Lamborghini has inferior performance capabilities when compared with a Honda or a Toyota simply because it is less popular.

Actually, the latest version of ColdFusion is very mature and robust. If you’ve only dealt with one of the earlier versions, I can see where you might think it is comparable to ASP, but it truly has matured a lot with that last couple of releases.

Despite what you think, ColdFusion is more than capable of efficiently running large, enterprise level web applications. Did you know that as of ColdFusion MX it is really a Java J2EE web application server under the hood? Only an ignorant fool would think to dispute Java’s maturity or scalability with enterprise web applications.

What makes ColdFusion such a great platform for web application development is that it has the power of J2EE “under the hood”, the ease of use of ASP or PHP, and the rapid application development features of Ruby on Rails.

So where’s the proof you say? There’s an extensive list of web sites that use ColdFusion at http://www.forta.com/cf/using/. Some of the notable sites I found listed there are:
BMW USA
Bank of America
Calgary International Airport
First National Bank
Hertz Rent-a-Car
Logitech
NEC-Mitsubishi
Pepsi
Reebok
Sanyo
Symantec
US Bank
US Senate
Pottery Barn
Victoria’s Secret

So why is MySpace so slow? I don’t really know. But I did read somewhere that they are converting from ColdFusion to ASP.NET but have left the original URLs unchanged to avoid breaking them. So the slow .cfm pages that you’re complaining about might actually be running ASP.NET and not ColdFusion. Maybe that’s why they’re so slow…

You can find stats to prove whatever point you want. (The result usually depends on who is funding the study…)

Here’s a few links “for” CF:
http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/46362.htm
http://clearsoftware.net/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=3AD583EF-E081-2BAC-69DEECDEFD01C4BE
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/cf_aspnet04.html
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/cf_aspnet08.html

If you’ve got your heart set on .NET, you can use BlueDragon to natively run ColdFusion on .NET. Or if Linux is your thing, it runs on that platform too. Try that with .NET! (Ok, yes, I do know about Mono, but I don’t know how mature that project is yet.)

When all is said and done, both CF and .NET are mature, enterprise grade solutions with similar capabilities and features. Which one you choose is more about personal/corporate preference.

You’ve misunderstood the quote. He’s not picking CF because it’s the underdog, nor would he pick it if it was the most popular solution. Rather he’s picking it for the strengths and qualities outlined in his article.

And I’d have to disagree with your statement about your main point for this blog post being about performance numbers since it took me so long to get you to divulge any reasoning behind your dislike of CF. It seems to me you were just ranting.

And I’m sorry if I disappointed you by not providing any performance numbers. They mean very little to me because as I said earlier, stats can be manipulated too easily to mean whatever you’re trying to prove.

As for you winning yet… of course you haven’t won yet!! For starters, you haven’t convinced me yet that ASP.Net is better than CF. And secondly, (and even more important) I don’t think that there is a real “winner”. I’m not out to try and win you over. I’ve used ASP.Net and agree that it’s a compelling platform. I’ll even acknowledge that it does do some things better than CF. But CF also does some things better than ASP.Net.

I just think that CF deserves a lot more respect than it is usually given by other non-CF developers.