NYCPHP Meetup

[Ricky Robinett]

Hey Peter,

I'm prefacing this by saying I love PHP and it is my language of choice, but I also have extensive experience with ColdFusion and I don't feel like all your statements about it are completely accurate (also playing devil's advocate a bit :) ).

1) From my experience, ColdFusion development is typically faster than PHP development, so even though it costs more per hour it can end up being less hours of development time. In a similar way, someone who hires the cheapest PHP developer could end up spending more than hiring a more expensive PHP developer due to the speed and quality of work.
2) A lot of the selling point of CF is that you aren't meant to extend it. It should inherently have what you need already. Although this is not the case 100% of the time I think they do a pretty good job of offering a lot of things that you have to extend PHP for (CAPTCHA and PDF creation/manipulation are a couple that come to mind immediately).
3) Although ColdFusion costs to be on a server, it offers a lot of monitoring information. With ColdFusion Enterprise you can also restart separate server instances (thus not having to take all your sites down for server reboot).
4) True
5) A few high traffic sites (www.senate.gov, http://www.dsireusa.org/i, http://www.energystar.gov, http://www.economist.com, http://www.mayoclinic.com/). Also, MySpace was on CF for a while.
6) This is completely dependent on what your app does, I can think of many instances where CF updates and maintenance on a site are quicker and much less expensive. I can think of situations where PHP is quicker and less expensive. 

PHP definitely handles the huge loads better than ColdFusion, and it's something to consider when building an app but I also think it's important to give all languages a fair look. 

Thanks!
Ricky

.....................................
Ricky Robinett
Developer
Zend Certified Engineer, PHP5
Adobe Certified Expert, ColdFusion 8

Nylon Technology
350 7th Avenue, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10001
 
212.691.1134 x25 direct
212.691.3477 fax
ricky at nylontechnology.com
www.nylontechnology.com

-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org [mailto:talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org] On Behalf Of Peter Sawczynec
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 1:42 PM
To: 'Org, Talk at Nyphp.'
Subject: [nycphp-talk] PHP Compared to Cold Fusion

Good Day All:

Can anyone in their long experience of coding in numerous languages
enumerate some of the pros and cons of Cold Fusion (CF, CFML) especially
when compared to PHP.

My basic thoughts are that CF:
1) is more expensive to program ($$ per hr. pd. to programmer)
2) not as simply and totally extensible as PHP  
3) expensive special server side software to invest in
4) CF hosting more expensive per mo.
5) almost no heavy usage sites use CF (i.e. CNN, Facebook, BBC)
6) more expensive to maintain, update or add on to code
 
Anybody got other techie reasons why CF would pale compared to PHP say
in raw speed, etc.

Thanks in advance.

Warmest regards, 
 
Peter Sawczynec 
Technology Dir.
blūstudio 
941.893.0396
ps at blu-studio.com 
www.blu-studio.com 



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