WebProNews: ColdFusion Is Quicker, Too Bad About Underlying Java

Based on Lee's article I wouldn't exactly class Lee as an "Expert Author"! Sounds like a review of CF 4.5. To quote the article "Its [ColdFusion's] Java support does, however, make it capable of running on many more operating systems than it otherwise would be - for most purposes, having written a page in ColdFusion is as good as having used Java for it, but much less difficult.". Lee get with the program: ColdFusion IS Java (in fact ColdFusion is Java productivity layer!)

Based on Lee's article I wouldn't exactly class Lee as an "Expert Author"! Sounds like a review of CF 4.5. To quote the article "Its [ColdFusion's] Java support does, however, make it capable of running on many more operating systems than it otherwise would be - for most purposes, having written a page in ColdFusion is as good as having used Java for it, but much less difficult.". Lee get with the program: ColdFusion IS Java (in fact ColdFusion is Java productivity layer!)

Sometimes, I think that people are asked (or maybe expected) to write articles on subjects that they have scratched the surface of... This one just might fall into that category. When it comes to comparisons.. I think the only fair way would be to devote much time: 3 people (or 4 or 700) get together, discuss various technologies each is familliar with... then, they take the time to plan out an app, plan how the app should run and create the app using the different technologies. Then, spend a bit more time analizing the app and testing the heck out of it... even optimizing them all as much as possible. Then, I'm sure, someone could write some interesting articles on such comparisons. (PHP VS CF VS ASP.NET VS Ruby VS....) Would also mean lot's of work.... or think of it as the dev Olympics!!!! Ok, I'll shut up now. (I need a cup of coffee!!!)

Perhaps he was making his claims based on myspace.com? hehe Man those guys have some architectural issues going on...

The problem with comments such as this author made - and possibly what gets under the skin so - is that the assertion is based on a logical fallacy - preaching to the choir, I know, but it doesn't hurt to offer a way to articulate what is wrong with this statement, I think. This is a problem that faces everyone in a technical advisory position, and this is a good forum to take it on, I think, at the Internet door-step of the product evangelist. (btw, keep posting the juicy jobs, I say! Show me the money!) The second fact in that statement is true. Coldfusion does run on Java. No argument. But the conjunction, 'because' cannot be applied because the assertion that Coldfusion is sometimes slow and unreliable is based on a faulty assumption: that Coldfusion determines the end user experience. If you make it a little bit better and say that the software written on coldfusion is sometimes slow and unreliable, well, that is true. But only because it is true of all software, not because it is Coldfusion. If this kind of statement comes up at work or with your customers, it's worth it to be ready to respond: prove it.

Forgive my ignorance. But Josh, can you point me to some web application frameworks that are based on C++? Is .Net based on C++? Thanks, Ali

Ben, You should write an article for them. I read Lee's and wow. The comment on it uses ODBC. Hmmm, I thought it was JDBC. But the real problem is it's too short and vague offering not objective comparison. Shoot, just the other day was on MSFT site and got several .Net errors. To me seemed like a FUD article. who knows

"ColdFusion on the web can sometimes be unreliable and slow, mainly because it runs on a Java framework." Not sure how I respond to that one... in his defence though, I can't think of a reliable study that defends java's performance against, say, C++. Not being a java person myself, can you guys forward me to something like that? But from my experience, I haven't ever had reliability problems (other than annoying bugs that are fixed in the next release) but as for performance, if you aren't use best practices (such as caching) the performance problems are your mistake, not the platform you are using to create your app.

I'm still trying to figure out what he meant by writing "ColdFusion also integrates surprisingly well with Macromedia's flagship product, Flash - but don't let that lead you into developing nothing but ColdFusion-scripted websites with fancy Flash interfaces, whatever you do." Someone needs a hit with a shovel at this time of the year, I mean, dude, RIAs rock!!!

Derrick, I see your point... it would still be to some degree like apples VS oranges.... The dev/maintenance was part of what I was mentioned... and I would love to see the results of such a comparison as well. Thanks for your comment, Yves

I would argue, Yves, that with such a comparison, you are still not going to be able to determine objective benchmarks that are applicable to the value of one application server over another. For instance, the code for looping over a collection of objects could be written several different ways in the various .Net languages, and it wouldn't be fair to the .net platform to use what might effectively be a non-optimized pattern... while code in coldfusion is written for you that has already been tested and re-tested. One metric that would be worthwhile in an application server 'Orange County Build-off' like you mentioned would be how long it took each team to build, debug and maintain a set of user requirements. Or, to a business decision-maker, the number of times that user requirements are met on time with coldfusion projects versus c# projects, as an indicator of the quality of the developers that select each language. Now that's a comparison I'd like to see!