I happen to like ColdFusion, and haven't had a problem with it running on NT or Solaris. Wonder what happened in your situation (not a bash, just curious as to what went wrong) To be honest, I am split between ColdFusion and Zope. I currently look at the needs of my customers, and then decide as to which tool I will use to solve their concerns. I like Zope because it's object oriented. Simply put, it's easier to design a site, because you have a framework on which to build. I didn't have that with ASP. But, on the other hand, with ColdFusion, you could follow the Fusebox standard - which would provide you with a framework on which to build. Fusebox is good, but only if you stick to the standard (and we all know about developers sticking to the standard!) However, Fusebox isn't completely object oriented; I have to hand it to them - it tried hard, but is in no way a match for the power of Zope. But, I have to say that the ability to write CustomTags was cool. I could try to design my site in more of an object oriented fashion, and could actually get a lot done. And you could usually find free custom tags on Allaire's site that did some wild things. Usually it was like plug and play, so if things were done right (following the standard), you could produce code that was pretty close to being object oriented. It just lacked the power of acquistion, but in all other aspects, it was pretty good. Now, I haven't had the time to learn Python yet. However, when I do, I know it will be more powerful than CustomTags. Now for documentation, well, Zope is getting better. I can usually find what I want now, and when I can't, this list has been a help. Thanks to all of you (Casey, Dieter, Andy M., Chris M., etc..) I like ColdFusion's simple database connections. I'm trying to connect Zope to Oracle, and I'm having some problems. can't pass judgement yet - except that it was much simplier to do it in ColdFusion (from the CF Admin interface). The only REAL thing that I prefer is ColdFusion's comments.(See the post going on about dtml-comments) But, that too, can be fixed, I'm sure. But for now, dtml-comments are hidious, which makes me comment code with HTML comments. But, if you view the HTML source, you'll see those comments. Oh well... And this is one is for Seb --> ColdFusion allows you to script as well. So if you don't like using their tags, by all means, write scripts to do what you want! HTH Tommy Innovation: The Best Way To Predict The Future ... Is To Create It.
-----Original Message----- From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of seb bacon Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2001 4:25 AM To: Mojo Clark Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] ColdFusion - I want to remain a Zopista, please help
* Mojo Clark <mojoclark@hotmail.com> [010725 02:27]:
I am looking for reasons why Zope is a better choice than ColdFusion. Any knowledgeable responses greatly appreciated.
I don't know much about ZPT but it is potentially the answer you are looking for, as others have pointed out.
I *have* had a lot of experience, both with ColdFusion and Zope, and Zope wins hands down for me. (Hmmm, a surprising answer from a poster on the zope list...;)
<rant>
My experiences with CF have been almost entirely negative. We tried deploying it on Solaris, and integrating it with iPlanet Directory Server. From the start, things started going wrong. Although Solaris is an officially supported platform, we had a huge array of problems, from installation to performace. Things got so bad we ended up having conversations with Jeremy Allaire. Although they claimed to support Solaris, it was based on win32 compatability libraries rather than a native port, and furthermore there only seemed to be a single Allaire developer who knew anything about it. Their tech support was terrible. If you must go with CF, deploy to NT only and go for a known stable version rather than the latest release.
Furthermore, CF is a badly-designed language, IMO. You have to do everything using these stupid tags (I believe things might have progressed slightly since I was cursed with a CF project). There was an API for writing Java extensions, but of course it was buggy. We also used Spectra, which is the more constructive comparison with CF (you should compare CF with DTML, and Spectra with Zope / CMF). Again, this was about 16 months ago, but at the time, it was an appalling product, packed with bugs and hacks. It claimed to let you do stuff out of the box, but we had to completely rewrite most of it to our own requirements. The CMF doesn't claim to fit things out of the box, but at least it's honest :-) The CMF also lacks somewhat in documentation at this stage, but it's getting better. CF documentation is quite good, but the knowledge base and tech support are not.
Going with Zope gives you access to all the source code, ZPT, and the CMF. Going with CF means you'd have to buy a shoddy support package, rely on Allaire to produce hotfixes, and have to do lots of code that looks about as attractive as a workflow system written entirely in DTML.
</rant> (Can you tell I don't like Allaire? ;-)
seb
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