On the video editing front, it’s too bad Sony Vegas isn’t available on Mac. I’ve tried it on PC and liked it a lot.

Using your logic, I could just as easily argue that PHP is a bad tool because I can hack the majority of sites out there that use it. But that would be poor logic both ways.

Just because PHP is used to build many large sites does not make it a good business decision. Those companies made a poor choice based probably on self serving input from their IT staff or because they are more in love with the concept of “open source” than….. profit.

I would argue that CF is better than PHP any way you want to look at it – but let’s keep it simple… coding in CF takes 30% less time, at least, than coding in PHP. Take a large project, cut the development time by a third, consider the money saved and then try to tell me PHP is anything other than a tool for amateurs.

Let’s try that again:

ColdFusion, being a J2EE application, has so many technical advantages over the rest that the discussion is almost silly to have.

First off, it’s ColdFusion, not Cold Fusion.

Second, PHP, .NET, ColdFusion, DJango, etc., pretty much all serve different audiences. I used to get heavily involved in the PHP vs ColdFusion debates… but I don’t so much anymore because it’s a non-debate. It’s a straw man, a red herring, a logical fallacy to compare .NET with PHP with ColdFusion. The motivations to use any of them are different, at least from a the perspective of building a business case.

From a programmers perspective they’re all web-dev platforms… and with the exception of CF building “J2EE for Everyone without the pain”, they all have a lot in common. From a business perspective, there are huge differences and, since the two debates often get mixed up, it’s hard to figure out which one is getting argued about.

The point is, the business cases for all of them are different… so none of them really bear comparison. From a technological perspective, only .NET and JSP really deserve to be compared to ColdFusion. ColdFusing, being a J2EE application has so may raw technical advantages of the rest the discussion is almost silly to have.

Wikipedia and Facebook run on PHP. MySpace runs on Cold Fusion. That’s three of the ten highest traffic sites right now. I’m not disrespecting Cold Fusion, just pointing out it has strong, free alternatives.

“CF is very easy to learn for most folks. I’d argue it is one of the easiest languages out there.”

I think you’re absolutely right, but it’s not a whole lot easier to use than free or far cheaper alternatives which run on commodity servers, and website visitors don’t care what your server runs, so if Adobe’s pricing scheme offends you, there’s no real reason to use Cold Fusion.

Let me put it another way, I’d cheerfully use PHP / Perl / Python / Ruby vs. Cold Fusion is a much closer contest than Photoshop vs. The GIMP.

“That said, Coldfusion has not gained ease-of-use and functionality at anywhere near the rate necessary to remain relevant in a world with PHP5 and Ruby-on-Rails,”

I think ‘ease of use’ depends on the user. But CF is very easy to learn for most folks. I’d argue it is one of the easiest languages out there.

“And PHP is supported by a commercial vendor who will sell you integrated development tools with real debuggers that run on any platform you care about.”

You can find commercial support for CF of course, from Adobe, and multiple debuggers exist, one of which is bundled with the product. The debugger is cross platform.

Does anyone know of an alternative that could offer the same features, maybe even free or open source?

Great. Is it any wonder people keep looking for alternatives?

I simply do not understand why any PROFESSIONAL developer would use anything other than ColdFusion to code sites. Other than Django nothing else competes. It is easy to learn, structured, easily secured, extremely powerful, extremely scaleable and best of all allows much much faster development.

Time is money. Yes the server costs $1200. So if you are building low end sites and you don’t care how long that takes then use a free tool for amateurs called PHP. Otherwise, the savings in development time completely outweighs “free”. And that is assuming the client is going to self-host where the server cost is even an issue. Third party hosting for ColdFusion sites is now so cheap that there is no reason, NONE, zilch nada for using anything other than CF. This doesn’t even touch on many of PHP’s other shortcomings – like the fact I can hack 3/4’s of the PHP sites I run across.

You say you are in a .net environment? With CF8 it no longer matters – Use ColdFusion and save yourself time and aggravation.

Oh I mentioned Django earlier. Cool environment but I wouldn’t bet my client’s businesses on it just yet.

PHP? Man, I’m just embarrassed for you.

It depends how you think about it. A person who is a serious hardcore Flash developer uses Flash all day and doesn’t need the other programs. A graphic artist — who gets paid less — uses each program (say) 25% of the time. What’s more, each program shares a huge amount of functionality (they’re selling you the same code in different wrappers — Illustrator’s vector graphics engine is reused in each program (except, sadly, Flash) — and so on.

“Their prices haven’t gone up compared to CS2, infact, you actually get alot more for the same price you paid for any previous CS.”

I think all the CS bundles have been overpriced. Back when Illustrator, Photoshop, and so forth were separate products, the bundles were more aggressively priced, and they didn’t charge you for an Illustrator upgrade when they only upgraded Photoshop. We’re basically paying for a tiny handful of new features and a recompile for Macintel.

The funny part is Quark is over half the price you’d pay for the CS3 Design Suite that gives you InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. When you put it all into perspective, the Adobe system makes alot of sense and saves you a ‘bundle’. For previous CS owners, their upgrade pricing is also extremely low, just a couple hundred to update your suite. I think by the time you seek out all these various options and mix and match you’d end up spending far more.

This is a great article and I strongly agree with the annoyance of Adobe’s updater’s. Great read, thanks!

I would love to own Dreamweaver and a copy of CS3 but I’ll have to wait till hell freezes over first.