Could any one give us the advantages and disadvantages of coldfusion vs. php?

Anything coldfusion could do but php could not do? Anything coldfustion could do better than php?

If I am happy with php and I have the power to choose the web server platform, do I need to learn coldfustion too?

Thanks!

    Having worked in both, I'd say immediately the one thing I miss is the ease of forms and tables, and real debugging capability.

    Cold Fusion has built-in forms tags that allow you create a form easily. I have read there are APIs now, and functions built to allow you to create tables/forms. Coldfusion has built-in tags to do the dirty work.

    And you can turn on debugging to view really detailed errors in your Cold Fusion code, quickly see environment variables, etc., directly in your project.

    I love PHP though. 🙂

      Originally posted by kilbey1
      And you can turn on debugging to view really detailed errors in your Cold Fusion code, quickly see environment variables, etc., directly in your project.

      And in my experience, leave them visible for all the world to see afterwards, giving crackers an ideal attack debugger. Of course, the same thing could be said of PHP.

      http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10252141&highlight=cold+fusion
      http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10228272&highlight=cold+fusion
      http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10212511&highlight=cold+fusion

        What can I say, I've talked about this before but I just cannot resist the topic.

        For a period of time I was hired to deliver some applications (nothing really fancy) in ColdFusion. I felt pretty much frustrated at first since writing code in CFML is REALLY ugly and annoying... but in the end is the same old s***. The language is OK, you can pretty much do the same stuff you can do with PHP and viceversa with some counted exceptions. For example:

        • PHP has a bigger set of API's.
        • PHP has a nicer support for arrays (associative arrays)
        • Everyone knows this, PHP is free (even though some ppl would prefer to say cheaper)

        For ColdFusio you have:
        - Better built in debuging.
        - Comes with Verity's Search Engine which rocks no matter what other people tell's you. There's just no open source alternative for php as good as verity's out there. Some times I think you are actually buying the engine and that CF is the added value.
        - CF gives you a lot of sugar so you can do the easiest things even easier. Sending e-mail is just one example as it is their form tags. Just keep in mind the complicated stuff is harder to develop in CF than PHP.

        Anyway, there's already a bunch of libraries for php out there that do all the "dirty work" as kilbey1 mentioned before. PEAR is just one example of a Repository where you can find tools for automatic for handling and some other of that stuff (sugar). Even better, there's a lot of open source applications already built in php... thousands and I am not lying. This makes PHP the language of choice for open source web infrastructures. Let me list some benefits of this:

        • Larger development community (WAY larger), you'll never feel alone.
        • More popular (its used in more sites than CF). And this is because it works so nicely with Apache (again, Open Source)
        • You'll find it easier to integrate open source infrastructure if you are using PHP. With all this sudden interest by the corporate IT world to take advantage of OS, You'll find lots of extensions to plug to you php installation to communicate with all the stuff (well, most of the stuff). I dont know if you get me in this point...
          😕

        Anyway, the main reason I stayed with php over CFMX is because is such a pain to write in that UGLY CFML!!!

        Dont know if you agree, flame me if you dont 🙂

        Regards,
        a

          a year later

          My only experience with coldfusion went like this:

          Installed it on small linux system
          Started services
          System went to 100% utilization, maxed all memory and consumed all swap space.
          Uninstalled it

          That was an immediate turn off from even wanted to play with the language.

            i heard a saying that Cold Fusion makes easy things easier and hard things impossible.

              Pohopo, that's EXACTLY how I feel about CFM.

              CFM is more like a limited tool kit that can do all the simple stuff but as soon as you try to get "out of the box" it punishes you.

              PHP is like a ar of cold rolled steal and a bunch of machine making tools. You might spend half to day building a tool, but after that, you've got the exact tool you want. And nowadays, there's lots of pre-made tools.

              I had a similar experience as mentioned higher up in the thread performance wise running a CF server. We set up a simple page that just hit the db and returned a couple rows in some simply formatted page. PHP/Apache/Postgresql could run it at about 700 reader threads, with http auth turned on, it dropped to about 150 threads. The page was taking something like 250 milliseconds to load. With CF the CF server would die and not come back at around a dozen or so threads, and it was taking several seconds per page view at that level.

              It simply doesn't scale well.

              I had a buddy that worked at a shop that made an ecommerce site with CF, that had 4 servers. They had to put a squid type proxy in front of it, and have a script visit every page of the site through that proxy when they restarted the servers, with the site OFF the internet, or it would simply crash under load. And they only had somehting like 1,000 products on line.

              He was so proud of all the work he'd done and his ingenious solution for handling load. I was embarrassed for him for having to do it.

                i heard a saying that Cold Fusion makes easy things easier and hard things impossible.

                The same thing has been said about Visual Basic. I've been told that Cold Fusion is immensely expansable - you just have to write the code behind your own custom tags. I tried CF years ago - didn't get excited about it.

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