I think my first post should be about the language I love, ColdFusion and the reasons I have continued my love affair with the language for so many years and really hope I can for many years more.
I have worked in ASP and PHP, but don't like either as I never liked
their syntax and found them overly cumbersome and poorly designed. I
had expected .NET to be a far more advanced version of ASP, but
recently when I studied it, I was surprised to find that only now, with
version 4, is it starting to catch up to ColdFusion in many aspects and
yet it still seems to me to be truly aweful way to try and build an
enterprise application. Sure I can see the value in using Visual Studio
as it is fairly good and provides plenty of great tools like StyleCop,
but I just plain don't understand why anyone other than an absolute
novice would choose to develop with ASP.NET Web Forms!
ColdFusion code can be written in ways that make it appear as bad as
ASP .NET, all languages have programmers that suck at what they do,
sadly because Visual Studio is a good IDE many think that ASP .NET is
equally as good a platform for applications. Wrong.
I can see the promise in ASP MVC, but I just get a strong sense that
Microsoft will never get it right, I have seen plenty of hacks online
to try and make it work well, but when all these sorts of things have
been common in ColdFusion and done well for half a decade, why do
people try to bend ASP .NET to do what ColdFusion already does so much
better? Why is there such a strong bias these days toward .NET in
development when it offers nothing but broken deadlines, inflated
production costs and a vendor lock-in to Microsoft that will do nothing
but damage the industry in future. We all know when Microsoft acheive a
dominant position they discontinue funding and make no advances till a
rival appears a decade latter (ie. ie6nomore.com), why support
stagnation when you can advance the internet further by moving away
from such a poorly managed company and its poorly managed products?
Anyway enough with that rant (for now).
I have worked in JSP and I can see that it shares much with ASP
.NET that I don't like and seams to not be as productive. But why would
a company use JSP when they can use ColdFusion and rapidly increase
production output while taking advantage of all their current JSP/Java
code and J2EE experience!
ColdFusion has so many enterprise level features and has a new lease
on life with the huge level of support being thrown at it be Adobe,
with a roadmap heading more than three years into the future. The
number of changes to its scripting language in the latest release CF9
only exemplify that it is a growing language and only likely to get
bigger and better in future. The rise of a major open source version in
Railo is very exciting and I see it making substantial inroads into the
Open Source community through Railo and if CFJS (a ColdFusion powered
server-side JavaScript implementation) ever appeared I am sure CF would
become the platform of choice for vast numbers of new developers who
would see it leading web development forward.
ColdFusion is the most exciting thing happening in web development
today behind jQuery and I am glad to be experienced in and enjoying the
success of both.
