Is CF Worth Learning?

Is CF worth learning? It seems like PHP dominates the scripting languages. Old school scripters go with Perl. How good is CF?

 

CF is very easy to learn and great for knocking things out quickly.

But, you're not going to find nearly as many free scripts as you will with php. Also CF hosting is going to be more expensive. Any and every host will give you php for free. PHP also has a lot in common with other languages so it would be easier to make the jump to another language.

Sounds like I'm pushing for php, but IMHO, CF is best for quickly knocking things out and still my lang of choice ... though I do more actionscript than anything else these days

 

Cold Fusion is a proprietary programming language - if you use it, you're tied into buying Macromedia products for ever.

PHP, Perl, Ruby and Python are all completely open source languages. You can use them safe in the knowledge that you can continue to do so for as long as you wish without concerns that they will become unsupported or end of life.

My advice: steer well clear of any proprietary languages like ColdFusion.

 

I've used CF for a very long time, pretty much since the beginning. It all depends on what you want to do with it. It was a good way to start for me, it's very similiar to html and it's really easy to do lots of things. I prefer php and use that for all my personal projects but there are still a lot of larger companies that use CF (the one I work for), so it might be useful to know depending on what you are trying to do (get a job, etc.)

A lot of what you'll learn when using CF will transfer over to other languages. It was fairly easy for me to learn php becuase I had been using CF for so long.

 

One of the counless advantages PHP has over CF is its web hosting is normally much cheaper than CF.

 

is it really that expensive to find a good host?

I have been looking into it for weeks now and can't seem to find a VPS that has CF MX 7 hosting.

I want to run a web community software that requires a Microsoft Windows 2000 (or later) server running IIS 5 (or later), Macromedia ColdFusion MX 6.1 (or later), and Microsoft SQL Server 7 (or later).

I know nothing about coldfusion but I found this script and wanted to give it a try for what I had in mind

 

you could try looking at http://www.freshlookhosting.com/ not sure of there full specs but it's quite cheap.

JP

 

CFML (ColdFusion Mark up Language) is non-propietary and can be processed by Macromedia's ColdFusion, New Atlanta's BlueDragon and a few others. I haven't seen a downside to being tied to Allaire-Macromedia-Adobe(soon) but there has always been upside to ColdFusion as it's usually two years ahead of ASP, JSP and for some things PHP. I do use PHP for a lot of my own stuff since all kinds of good stuff is available for free. If I am coding it, it's CFML all the way.

Hosting can be found for very low cost. I use CrystalTech and Experthost, both are pretty go and around $15/month. I hear good about HostMySite at $11/month. I see GoDaddy offering CFMX for a $1.95 add on to the basic plan (PHP).

 

I worked on a huge project (job site similar to Monster) a few years ago written in CF and Oracle. Although I was the DBA on staff, I spent more than a few hours with the CF programmers trying to untangle various DB problems they had with CF. They finally decided to bag it and rewrite in PHP - much easier and *much* cheaper...

With the quality of open source tools today, I'm hard pressed to understand why anyone would use *proprietary* tools anymore - but that's just me

 

Five years ago before Macromedia owned CF and it was cheaper more people were developing in CF, but now the cost to run it on a server is so high. I think when Macromedia bought it went to shit. Sure they have a lot of new features, but to spend 2-6k on top of the cost of a server and the OS is just crazy if you ask me.

 

I agree CF was ahead of it's time, had features 5 years ago that .NET just introduced...

 

I do a little bit of development for my clients with ColdFusion and I've found it very easy to pick up and put together my own stuff. No experience with PHP so I can't really compare how easy it is to learn

However, I come across PHP a lot more - both clients who are already using it, hosts who support it, and people (even clients) who know about it.

So my recommendation would probably be for you to learn PHP first if you currently know neither language - and then if it seems useful to know both, learn ColdFusion later.

I'd move to using PHP, but I'm trying to do less development and more marketing, UI, and design.

 

CFMX runs on top of Java so it can be very powerful. As others have mentioned, it is very easy to get started using CF. It can do pretty much anything you want, and hosting is not as expensive as some of the open source advocates make it out to be.

myvaluehost.com is hostmysite.com ‘s low cost subsidiary.


CF is easy to learn, it runs on almost every platform, and CF coders can often command higher salaries that PHP developers in a corporate environment.

Check out: forta.com for more CF info.