[Zope] ColdFusion - I want to remain a Zopista, please help

[seb bacon]

* 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