Hi Scott, I do agree that ColdFusion is probably still viable. It's just not a vibrantly growing platform. It's probably safe to switch to that language though, and I agree that it would be the easiest to switch to from Witango of all of the other languages.
I take issue with the idea that RoR is a fringe language. As I said before, studies have shown that it is the fastest growing language out there currently (this is not true of Python). Much of the growth is from new developers and people switching from PHP. I would provide a link to that study if I had bookmarked it, but I didn't and a quick Google search didn't find it. RoR is not one of the big 3 languages yet, but I'm guessing that it will be one of the "big 4" languages before long. Best regards, Stefan ---------------------------------------- From: Scott Cadillac <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 11:45 AM To: witango-talk@witango.com Subject: SPAM-MED: Re: Witango-Talk: Open Letter to Phil and Sophie Hi Stefan, Just a quick comment here, in my experience ColdFusion seems alive and well in the Corporate Intranet world. I see it all the time, including lots of new big projects. In fact, if I ever got bored enough with ASP.NET I might go back to learning it all over again. I actually did ColdFusion 3.0 before I learned Tango starting at version 3.5. Thanks. Scott, On Oct-24-2008, at 11:39 AM, Stefan Gonick wrote: > Hi Webdude, > > I did a lot of research on alternative languages to Witango. I > personally really > didn't like ASP and PHP, so I ruled those out for me. I ultimately > settled on > 2 languages: ColdFusion and Ruby on Rails. > > If you want to get up to speed as quickly and easily as possible on > a new > language, then I would definitely recommend ColdFusion as the > easiest language > to learn. It's also very easy to convert Witango code to ColdFusion > code. I've > done it for a couple of sites. In fact, when I built a ColdFusion > site, I actually used > the Witango builders to get started and converted the results html > to Coldfusion. > That was faster than doing ColdFusion from scratch. :) > > ColdFusion also has many practical features built right into it. For > instance, it has > the easiest PDF function of any language. You simply generate css > based html > like you normally would and then surround it with ColdFusion's open > and close > pdf tags. That's it! It's very cool. > > One downside to ColdFusion is that it is just a page-oriented > language. There > is no built-in way to organize your application's higher level > structure like you can > with taf's. However, there is an open source framework called > Fusebox that you > can use for doing that. It also enforces the model-view-controller > way developing > applications, which is good. However, Fusebox then becomes another > thing that > you need to learn. There are some very good books for learning > ColdFusion on > Amazon, and it's free to download the developer edition. There are > also open > source RAD environments available for it. > > Another potential downside to ColdFusion is that may not have long > term viability. > If it weren't for the fact that Adobe is supporting it, it would > probably be on its way out. > Its user base is relatively stagnant. However, as long as Adobe > keeps supporting it, > it will probably stay viable. > > Ruby on Rails (RoR), on the other hand, is an exciting up and coming > web development > language. I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned it. It is the > fastest growing > language out there, and many PHP developers are moving to it. > > RoR has a longer learning curve than ColdFusion. You have to first > learn the Ruby > programming language. You then learn the RoR platform. What's really > cool about > RoR, though, is that like Witango, it tries to do a lot of the work > for you in order to > minimize development time. It succeeds at this better than any of > the other languages, > and it may even be faster than Witango. Once you get fully up to > speed with RoR, > you will be able to develop applications faster than you can on PHP, > ASP, and ColdFusion. > > There are tons of free modules available for it like there are for > PHP (though not as many > as PHP yet). As I said, there is a lot of excitement about this > language/platform, so > there is a lot being contributed to it and it is growing rapidly. > There are many many > good books available for learning it. There are a number of > different open source RAD > environments available for it as well. I would recommend NetBeans > from Sun. > > The one downside of RoR is that, like Witango, it is a relatively > slow interpreted language > instead of a compiled one. This means that you have to put in a > bigger effort to support > very high volume web applications. However, we are already used to > that with Witango. :) > > Since you are starting out looking for a new language, I just wanted > to share the results > of my many hours of research into language alternatives. Good luck! > > Best regards, > Stefan > > > > At 12:47 AM 10/24/2008, you wrote: > >> Janet, >> >> I feel your pain. I have been busy downloading stuff and poking >> around. I have read hundreds of pages on just the install stuff for >> Apache, MySQL, PHP, ColdFusion, .NET... I even spent a day on >> nothing but open source. I have a spare server I have been thinking >> of using just to try some stuff out. What is really daunting is the >> pages upon pages and gotchyas on just an installation... not to >> mention the additional downloads needed to make it work in Windows. >> Funny... I have about 60 sites, some getting well more then 100,000 >> page views per day... well over 1,000,000 visitors per month in all >> - all on one MSSQL dedicated server and two dedicated Witango >> servers runninng Witango 2000. Never a slowdown and has been rock >> solid for over 8 years. 16 e-commerce sites, 2 Data Access >> Managements sites, 4 forums, 12 internal employee sites for some >> very large corporations, one very large directory site, 2 online >> streaming PDF sites and a smattering of... well, just websites. Now >> I am losing sleep because I am so worried about what direction to >> go. I spent a very large amount on the corporate license thinking >> that this was the way to go and have spent much time and resources >> in developing all I have going. I never upgraded because of the >> 20,000 plus I dished out and I remember the days when it was >> discussed that the editor would be able to output ASP and possibly >> PHP code... but that never happened or was just a pipe dream. >> Frankly, I thought it would have been a great idea to port output >> of the editor to more popular languages. Anyway... enough crying in >> my beer. I went this route and now I am going to have to do >> something about it. I just spent most of the day trying to install >> PHP and getting the "hello world" to work. Tomorrow, I might try to >> see if I can actually connect to a database. This is going to take >> me a little while... >> >> >> -----Original message----- >> From: "janet" [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:55:41 -0500 >> To: witango-talk@witango.com >> Subject: RE: Witango-Talk: Open Letter to Phil and Sophie >> >> > I was wondering what to say until I saw this email from Webdude >> > >> > "Well, I have a problem and maybe some of you could help me. I >> have been >> > using nothing but Tango and Witango since I started developing >> many years >> > ago" >> > >> > Yes this is my story also. >> > Pretty good at SQL ( MS SQL) triggers, stored procedure, views, >> groupings >> > , maxvalues etc just a happy place for me, also HTML and Witango. >> I found >> > that if I had good array results then the Witango stuff was easy. >> > So I have looked at other RAD visual products. With ASP.net you >> end up with >> > blocks of code either in VB or C+, there is s Borland PHP RAD, >> Cold fusion >> >> > and Dreamweaver etc. But it seems that the builder tools all >> create either >> > PHP, VB, C+ or something. >> > How come Witango shielded me from all of these languages? >> > I know Witango is an XML code generator so why isn't there any >> other >> > products creating XML? I am asking the wrong question? >> >> >> >> ________________________________________________________________________ >> TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to >> >> http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf > ===================================================== > Database WebWorks: Dynamic web sites through database integration > http://www.DatabaseWebWorks.com > ________________________________________________________________________ > TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf
