Hello Andrew, Thursday, June 30, 2005, 9:15:22 AM, you wrote: AS> Coldfusion is also free (Blue Dragon) and has just as much support AS> as PHP, although. PHP can not run in a J2EE environment, limiting AS> it to small scall websites and limiting the prospect of expansion AS> or server migration. You like to tout CF as being J2EE/Enterprise ready. For this the free version of Blue Dragon is NOT suitable, by the developers own admission. You need the $6000 Enterprise version of CF (and you can add on a few more thousand $ for extended support). This is before you've bought any of the extra components you need to finish your application. 1) Blue Dragon is also not just a "free" version of CF it would appear, even on the developers web site they describe the free version as "Functionality is robust and useful for most basic CFML applications." - it's the words "most basic" that concern me here. 2) It doesn't support the newer CF 7 features. 3) The free version does not deploy into J2EE at all. 4) It only runs on Windows, OS X or Linux (sorry, but lots of very big hosting companies prefer the stability of FreeBSD, Solaris, etc). If you want Solaris support it costs $2499 per CPU. If you want FreeBSD support, you're stuffed. 5) It only supports ODBC database connections (via JDBC), so unlike PHP you won't be connecting to Oracle, MS SQL, SQLite, etc. MySQL is supported, but not built-in. If you want to do CF seriously, you need to invest thousands and that's before you've paid your programmers - this is the bottom line. Perhaps that is why even the Blue Dragon developers themselves claim its biggest advantage is: "You've invested heavily in CFML.. so have we. Protect your investments." - and how do you protect them? by deploying Blue Dragon so you can then interface directly with .NET applications rather than migrate totally to them. This doesn't strike me as being the approach of a growing, competitive well supported language. It sounds more like "shit, people have woken up to the massive cost of using CF, how can we slow the drop-out rate?" if that is Blue Dragons primary selling angle, it says a *lot* about the state of serious CF development. When it comes to investing it think long-term. Zend are aggressively attacking the enterprise market and we will see more and more movement in this direction, to the point where I am quite sure their objective is to make PHP itself enterprise capable *regardless* of J2EE. With the rate things change around here, we won't have to wait too long. If you don't actually need to build an enterprise scale site (and let's face it, that covers most of us) then you're good to go with PHP *right now* without actually spending a dime. Take that $6000 CF budget, invest it into training for your entire team and build your own framework, with the knowledge that no matter what happens, your work is safe. Anyway, time to get back to my project for BMW - just one of those "small scall websites" (sic) things I guess? Best regards, Richard Davey -- http://www.launchcode.co.uk - PHP Development Services "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." - Isaac Asimov -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
