Worth learning?

[OptWizard]

Is cold fusion worth learning..I heard it was easier than ASP and What i need to do si make a form and use for tracking..

thanks

[amica_webmaster]

Well, that depends upon your goal. If you are interested in learning it as a skill that will make you attractive to employers, then the answer may be yes, as many websites are using it now, and I see it mentioned often in web related job descriptions. But if you are looking at it as a way to make your own sites work well, that's another matter. We use on my employers vast website, and I don't feel the site performs all that well serving up its dynamic content. It can be very frustrating for the user. If we had the option, I rather we used static pages.

Meta

[Bot]

I've seen many languages and Cold Fusion is by far the easiest to maintain integration with HTML on. ASP is strait up garbage. It's a resource hog which results in being slow. When was the last time you saw a fast ASP site.

Now that we are a few years down the line we can see that Java is impractical and anyone moving onto it is basically retarded.

As of this date 3-4-2003 the only thing that matches up to Cold Fusion (on an overall efficiency standpoint from conception to maintenance over 3-4 years) is PHP.

Not only is PHP free... it can out run Cold Fusion big time. This is because PHP can be compiled to run in some kind of binary mode which makes it really fast to execute.

The only thing I don't like about PHP is that it is nasty to look at/hard to find your way around in by scanning through. This is the reason I stay with Cold Fusion. Cold Fusion is very easy on the eyes and you can find your way around pretty easy.

[SEOCub]

You don't sound much like a programmer if 'easy on the eyes' is what cuts it for you, Bot. :rolleyes:

I don't know much about Coldfusion or the tools used to help you there. From what Bot states, it is possibly mostly tool-driven ie the tool generates the code. I could be wrong.

There is no doubt, however, that PHP is powerful as a server-side scripting language. If well-written, it can contain the most beautiful and concise code ever. The same holds for ASP. Each has its pitfalls and workarounds are needed but then your question was was not about either of those two.

[Bot]

Cold fusion does have several tool driven things - but I hand code everything from scratch.

When I say easy on the eyes... I mean when I go to edit a page - it's pretty easy to scan through and find the segment I'm looking for.

Yes, it is still a matter of how neat and clean each programmer is when scripting... but I was mainly referring to how well Cold Fusion goes together with HTML code. CF was originally designed to blend with HTML and the design has had the desired effect.

You can devide segments and functions into clear blocks of code on each page making it much easier to find your way around.

[Webmaster T]

Cold Fusion is proprietary and IMO, too expensive! When you look at it from the perspective of "how much more sellable am I if learn it?" then it isn't the first choice based on installed base for services. It's kind of like deciding do I write a program for the Windoze or Mac Platform? Install base is huge in one case and tiny in the other. As to code I use included files and totally segment design and programming. The design team does their thing and my code just gets dropped in as an include.

[iTISTIC]

I definitely agree that Cold Fusion would not be my first choice as far as learning a language to dynamically control web page content.

I, myself, am a seasoned ASP developer and now use 99% ASP.NET in place of ASP for many, many reasons.

I do not agree, however, that ASP is a resource hog, and slow. I do not want this to turn into some war over ASP and PHP, as I have done sites in both languages, but I see no speed difference between the two on equally equipped servers with even heavy traffic. I would be willing to code any routine in ASP that you have in PHP and put them side to side on the same server to see how well they match up -- not to prove me right, or prove you wrong, but just because it would be interesting to see the results. I manage web sites completely coded in ASP that receive millions of page views a month and not one of these is "slow" by any means what-so-ever.

Having gotten that out of the way, I would definitely recommend ASP.NET over all web based scripting/programming languages available at this current time. You get complete object oriented programming, compiled code, and many many more benefits that are too many to list here.

[srikanthsh]

Better go ahead with .net

There was a little demand for coldfusion. Some application developers used it. Now, I find many of those are migrating (or migrated) to other technologies.

BTW. it is very easy to learn coldfusion if you have been in touch with web designing or development.

[Bot]

I keep hearing mixed opinions on .Net. I've never used it so I'm not going to pretend to have a valid opinion about it.

But, as I'm sure you will agree... it definitely has that "BIG NEW THING" buzz around it. The kind of buzz marketing people purposely generate about something they are selling.

It always takes a few years to see that something is truly PRACTICAL.

[Webmaster T]

Originally posted by iTISTIC
Having gotten that out of the way, I would definitely recommend ASP.NET over all web based scripting/programming languages available at this current time. You get complete object oriented programming, compiled code, and many many more benefits that are too many to list here.Agreed but I'm not sure I'd want to go with it when you look at it from an SEO standpoint. I've seen some pretty nasty stuff in forms, seems like some sort of meta data used by .NET forms that will add wasted characters which does affect KW density etc.

[Bot]

meta data used by .NET forms that will add wasted characters That would be consistent with their product line

:D