php or coldfusion

September 16, 2006 6:59 AM

Open question, php or coldfusion?

What do you feel about these two? Is ColdFusion dying?

A little background, there was a merger, one team knows php one knows coldfusion, something has to give.

posted by stormygrey to computers & internet (18 comments total)

Keep whatever you have the most experience in, and whatever platform you have your toolset in.

Given a new probject, I would much prefer PHP, Java, (people seem to compare PHP against RUBY these days), etc over something like Cold Fusion.

Use whatever works best.
posted by SirStan at 7:03 AM on September 16, 2006

There are currently two team and two websites, so this all has to merge. I am putting together a position paper on how to choose. I don't get to choose.
posted by stormygrey at 7:05 AM on September 16, 2006

matthowie should answer this question.

matt, apologies, i dearly love mefi but couldn't resist the obvious...
posted by Funmonkey1 at 7:06 AM on September 16, 2006

It seems to me that php is more widely supported/used. You'd probably do well to use php if you want to be able to do maintenance on this project in the future—if the current team disbands, you'll need to find people with the expertise to do work on it, and more people are going to have php expertise.
posted by limeonaire at 7:06 AM on September 16, 2006

I use both, and I'd go with PHP.

PHP is much more commonly used than ColdFusion.
As a result, a lot more software is available for PHP than there is for ColdFusion.
Also, your hiring pool is bigger with PHP.
PHP is free; you have to pay for ColdFusion.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:07 AM on September 16, 2006

kirkaracha beat me to mentioning that last point—php is free, whereas ColdFusion is proprietary. Also, if the project needs to be moved to a different server in the future, it's easier to find/configure a server that supports php.
posted by limeonaire at 7:26 AM on September 16, 2006

I'd go with PHP. It's well supported, has lots of opportunities for acceleration (cf eAccelerator) and generally gets the job done.

Blast from the past: f3k thread this reminded me of
posted by heresiarch at 8:01 AM on September 16, 2006

PHP is free, more widely supported by webhosts and such, much more widely used, and has far more extensions and libraries developed for it. The combination of PHP and Apache is vastly more stable than the usual combination of IIS and ColdFusion.

Since Allaire was bought by Macromedia (and it's now Adobe), the main focus of the ColdFusion product is integrating with other Adobe/Macromedia products. ColdFusion is never going to acquire easy tools to work with SVG files, for example, because SVG competes with Flash.

I've used both, and there's no contest: PHP.
posted by jellicle at 8:05 AM on September 16, 2006

Kirk got it: if you stick with CF, it will be much harder hire new employees a year or two from now. If you go with PHP, there will always be a large pool to draw from.
posted by mathowie at 8:48 AM on September 16, 2006

PHP.
posted by delmoi at 10:10 AM on September 16, 2006

ColdFusion really, really sucks. It's not open source, and it doesn't scale anywhere near as well as PHP either. Of course, PHP has its issues, but it's not as bad as ColdFusion -- and almost any random webhost you might care to use will have PHP installed.
posted by reklaw at 11:00 AM on September 16, 2006

As much as I hate CF (as a CF developer), that won't be my reason for saying go with PHP.

In the long run, you're going to have a much much much easier time finding PHP developers than you are CF devs. The company I work for has been searching for months and MONTHS to find competent CF devs - they're super hard to find.
posted by jaded at 11:25 AM on September 16, 2006

i always liked CF alright, but unless you're taking advantage of its more sophisticated features, it's hard to see why anyone would use it.
posted by ph00dz at 1:05 PM on September 16, 2006

No question whatsoever, PHP. Its a screwed up language, but there's much a much healthier ecosystem around PHP. There's a ton of existing code, a ton of documentation and a ton of libraries. Whether you're worrying about templating systems, database adapters, xml support or whatever, you'll have more and better options in PHP.
posted by gsteff at 2:32 PM on September 16, 2006

Absolutely PHP. It's free, there's a huge pool of developers (and even if most people who say they know PHP are little better than the folks who say they know HTML because they learned how to make text blink, there's still a large pool of talented developers within that huge pool), and, well ... have you noticed how often Metafilter doesn't work? Welcome to the world of CF.
posted by dmd at 7:22 PM on September 16, 2006

to append to dmd: myspace [is CF] too, how often does that break? and when not broken it's always real zippy too. from a developer's perspective, i'd say it's likely fantastically coded as well (in the "fantasy" sense of the word)
posted by qbxk at 7:35 PM on September 16, 2006

To append a bit more: Myspace was originally written in ColdFusion, but they ran into scalability problems and are rewriting/have rewritten the whole thing in ASP.

See this post for details. So Myspace isn't a good example for "why to choose ColdFusion".
posted by jellicle at 7:54 AM on September 17, 2006

Incidentally, a friend of mine who's an experienced web dev pointed out that if your project meets the following conditions, ColdFusion might actually be a good bet:

1. Your servers are Windows-based and one of the following
2.a. You have complex application needs that can be better resolved by Java than .NET
2.b. You have preexisting experience/content/applications that are written in Flash and interact with the server a lot,
2.c. You have diverse departments for content/design/development and at least two departments use Dreamweaver
and
3. You have the budget to stay current with ColdFusion

As he noted, many very large, 100% Windows companies benefit from ColdFusion in these ways.

He did note, however, that CF is still crap and better ways can be found to do everything it does...except sometimes when you're working with Windows servers.
posted by limeonaire at 3:48 PM on September 18, 2006