[Zope] Zope vs. ColdFusion for e-commerce development

[Ross J. Reedstrom]

On Tue, Nov 09, 1999 at 08:52:23PM +0100, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> [I know little about ColdFusion, quite a bit about Zope]

Good, I know a little of both. ;-)


> 
> > Ben Galbraith wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Does ColdFusion run on Intel/Linux yet?
> 

Just released last Monday (11/1)

> 
> > Second, it seems that ColdFusion offers all the
> > functionality that Zope does and then some.
> 
> Acquisition? i.e. a way to decompose functionality for your website..it
> has some very powerful uses. Unfortunately it's hard to explain. :)

I miss this all the time with CF: The only way I've found to decompose
and reuse is CFINCLUDE, which requires a pathname. Very clunky.

> 
> Ability to extend it in the (in my opinion) friendliest scripting
> language in the world, Python? Extend it in *significant* ways; you can
> build whole new components. You can do simpler (but still very powerful)
> extensions through external methods as well. 
> 
> And Python can do a *lot* of things.

An example: I wanted to store usernames and passwords in an SQL table,
but crypt() the passwords. Took me less than an hour to modify the
UserDB product to do this. I never accomplished it with CF: would have
to drop to C to do it, and I didn't have the Win32 compilers or CF SDK
(or whatever it takes).  Ended up writing a C extension to PostgreSQL
to do it, instead!

Ross
-- 
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> 
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St.,  Houston, TX 77005