I should say about my Cold Fusion experience that 1) I have three sites running, 2) they are all version 3.1, 3) they are all very low volume sites (not e-commerce), and 4) I don't use cookies or do much fancy stuff.  On the other hand, I do pass in cgi variables and test for their existence and values, compute result strings, and turn triply-nested database queries into nicely formatted tables.  I reuse frames and fragments of pages, as well as javascript blocks.  I have never had any Cold Fusion failures on any of the sites in two years, running on Win 95 or NT.
 
Perhaps version 4 is something to be cautious of.
 
Tom Passin
-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas B. Passin <tpassin@mitretek.org>
To: zope@zope.org <zope@zope.org>
Date: Tuesday, November 09, 1999 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: [Zope] Zope vs. ColdFusion for e-commerce development

As a Cold Fusion user, I would say Cold Fusion is great, but it does depend on what you expect to be doing.  If you were anticipating developing a lot of custom tags for Cold Fusion in C++, or a lot of Java applets, I'd say that Zope would be interesting since you can basically develop in Python, which is good, fast, and easier than C++.
 
On the other hand, it you were going to do basically standard stuff like hit ODBC databases and create frames, forms, and pick lists, and manage session variables, I'd say Cold Fusion is for you.  I don't think that the price should be much of a consideration (but don't forget $300 for Cold Fusion Studio, which I highly recommend), since the cost of your time in getting up the learning curve will be dominant in either case. Possibly you could make do with the $1000 version, especially at first, to lower the cost.  Cold Fusion is much better documented than Zope, and I think simpler as well.
 
As for the tagged language aspect, which both CF and Zope have, CF's tags are much simpler to understand and use.
 
But if you think you are going to need a lot of custom programming, it could be a whole other ball game.  Zope could be great.
 
Tom Passin
From: Ben Galbraith <ben@galbraiths.org>

Zope Folks,
 
I'm with a new e-commerce startup and we're currently evaluating the development tools we'll be using to create our website.  The platform will either be Sun hardware running Solaris 7/Apache, or Intel/Linux boxes.
 
We initially evaluated four solutions: mod_perl, PHP (using Apache module support), ColdFusion, and Zope.  We've eliminated mod_perl because of maintenance nightmares, PHP because, well, we just did, and now we're down to ColdFusion and Zope.  Initially I favored Zope, but there are a few concerns I have about it.
 
First off, the size of the ColdFusion development pool and it's development history suggest greater stability and a more mature feature set.  Second, it seems that ColdFusion offers all the functionality that Zope does and then some.  Third, ColdFusion seems to offer similiar performance.  Fourth, the database connectivity seems to be equal to Zope's.  Fifth, their tag-based programming language seems to offer equivalent functionality to Zope's.  Sixth, I can find more ColdFusion developers than I can shake a stick at, but I have to explain to everyone I meet what Zope is.
 
So, as my lack of information leads me to believe, there are only two drawbacks to ColdFusion as compared to Zope: (1) I have to pay $3.5k for each license, and (2) Zope has a superior model for delegating ownership to different people for the website.
 
Could you correct any misconceptions I have and explain to me why I should choose Zope over ColdFusion?  I want to select the tool by Wed. or Thurs., so a quick reply would be appreciated.
 
Thanks!
 
Ben