Cold Fusion, Zope, and ACS

[jnoller at allaire.com (Jesse Noller)]

Le Sigh. 

	[Sorry, as an Allaire Employee, and an Open-Source Advocate, I find
myself answering this quite often.]


My personal view?

	Coldfusion, above all, is practically dummy-proof. Not to mention,
it's damn easy to learn. 

To quote a recent article:

PHP. PHP has developed an especially strong following in the open source
community, since both PHP and its preferred database (MySQL) are both now
open source tools. It is used by a number of technical Web sites, including
Slashdot. It can integrate with a wide array of databases, including some
fairly esoteric Unix-based databases. And it has all the advantages of an
open source tool: committed user base, ability to modify or extend the code,
no licensing fees, and ports to many operating systems.

Unfortunately, PHP has two crucial problems: performance and database
portability. The development team has done a remarkable job of improving the
performance over the past two releases, but it is still slow in comparison
to most of the other competing tools. More importantly, each database that
PHP supports requires a separate set of commands and offers a different
array of features, capabilities, and bugs. Migrating from MySQL to Oracle
requires changing every line of database code and probably changing some of
the PHP functions as well, depending on the features available in each
database library. That's not even considering inherent differences between
the databases themselves. PHP is fine, as long as you're going to run it
with a single database, particularly PHP/MySQL. But its hard to use if
you're building systems for a number of other people, or if you prototype in
one database and deploy in another

Coldfusion also has inherent failover capability, as well as clustering
software, etc,etc.

Personally? I see each as a seperate tool for seperate needs. PHP has too
much in common with Perl for my taste. Not to mention. Coldfusion runs well
under NT, as well as most flavors of Linux, soon BSD, as well as Solaris.

::shrug::

-Jesse

-----Original Message-----
From: Seth Gordon [mailto:sgordon at kenan.com]
Sent: Monday, September 11, 2000 5:35 PM
To: discuss at Blu.Org
Subject: Cold Fusion, Zope, and ACS


Last week, my employer sent me to a class at Allaire to learn how to
use Cold Fusion, a Web-application language that is used a lot around
here.  It seems that both Zope and the ArsDigita Community System are
two open-source tools for dealing with the same kinds of problems that
Cold Fusion deals with.

So I'm wondering: what are the relative merits of the three
platforms?  What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?  (This is
just out of curiosity -- I'm not planning to do any advocacy for Zope
or ACS within my organization, especially since I have no experience
with either of them.)

--
"The big dig might come in handy ... for a few project managers
 whom I think would make great landfill."  --Elaine Ashton
== seth gordon == sgordon at kenan.com == standard disclaimer ==
== documentation group, kenan systems corp., cambridge, ma ==


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