I know the whole CF and why people are using it issue has been hashed out quite a bit but I would like to add my two cents coming from a different background than most web developers.
I started my programmer career with C. In C you have absolute control over everything going on in your program. You have a veritable dictatorship over what your program is doing. Yes the code takes longer to write and it is more prone to errors due to some of that very control you have. Most programmers have a hard time with some of the concepts in C (Pointers, Memory Allocation). Next I found C++ and ColdFusion practically at the same time. From day one I knew ColdFusion was a good tool. After working for about a year building web applications I knew ColdFusion was a *great* tool for building most web applications. This is in the 2.0 days, so keep that in mind. I already wanted to do things CF simply could not do, or did not do the way a project needed them to. When I had to I fell back on my C programming skills to create a CFX tag to give me the control I needed over my environment to accomplish my job. It is not CFs fault, it was just not equipped with the appropriate tools built-in, that is all. I did not curse CF. By then I understood very well what CF could and could not do. I did not expect it to do more than it should. For as long as I can remember there have been behaviors and functionalities in CF that did not do everything the way I needed for a particular task. Trying to *GET* CF to emulate the behavior or functionality would take more time and be less appropriate than just using the right language. (Usually C since there were not a ton of options in the 2.0 days). I have been doing CF since the 2.0 days and there are *STILL* things in CF that you simply need to have more control over. CF might do 99% of your job and it is the natural pick for a moderately complex web app or as a presentation layer for practically any web app. There might be this one piece of functionality that is not working right, and with the proper skill set and toolset you can make it work right in less time than you can use the wrong tool (CF) to finish up that one last bit of functionality. This is all Matt has been saying, there are times when you *NEED* the control. Saying that anything can be done given the time and money seems a little asinine to me. How much time? What about deadlines? Give me a unlimited resources and 2 or 3 years and I can assemble a team to build almost any web app too. The point is most of us don't have unlimited time, or money, so we all want to be as efficient is possible. The right tools in the right situation make that possible. When CF *IS* the only tool considered.... Jeremy ______________________________________________________________________ This list and all House of Fusion resources hosted by CFHosting.com. The place for dependable ColdFusion Hosting. FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/cf-talk@houseoffusion.com/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
