ASP, CF, PHP, and a partridge in a pear tree

Having been off this list for the past few weeks, among others, it's nice to
see familiar faces debating topics and issues which never seem to go away.  So
I might as well jump in here ...

It really makes no difference whether you use ASP, CF, PHP or anything else as
long as the product accomplishes the task at hand with the resources available.
 Then again, one must also consider the preferences and biases of those who
foot the bills.

I've used both ASP and CF in medium and large corporate settings.  While both
satisfied the requirements of the individual areas, I prefer CF over ASP any
day of the week for two reasons.  In the case of the first, we were able to
build a CF web server from the ground up much faster and with fewer
complications than an ASP server.  Maintenance of the CF servers was a snap
compared to ASP servers.  We were able to lock down security tighter and with
fewer technical issues than with ASP servers.

The second reason was ease of getting a site up and running once the servers
were online.  We managed to get a CF site connected to an Oracle database
producing output in about the time it took to write all the CF queries just to
put something on a page.  Our Oracle DBA wrote up a Q&D (quick and dirty) SQL
for us to test the system and 30 minutes later we were good to go.  Conversely,
when we had our ASP servers installed and running, it took what seemed was
forever for the Oracle DBA and sys admins to establish the connections and SQL
just to get any sort of raw output.

And it both cases once everything was operating, I found CF was easier, faster
and more efficient in writing the HTML output than ASP.  I also found
maintenance and tweaking of CF was easier than ASP.

Of course, in both cases, scalability was not an issue at the time.  When we
addressed this issue, it came down to the different needs of each were not
really comparable.  This needs to be more fully explored.

All in all, from the standpoint of efficiency, effectiveness and quality of
understandable code produced by the actual web developers, CF won hands down
for me.  Your mileage may vary, and that's the point. Comparing ASP with CF is
like comparing Ford with General Motors.  Unless you can factor out the
personal, hidden biases each proponent has and stick mainly to the technical
crap, the argument is peeing in the wind.

I offer no comments with PHP because in our evaluations of it *at the time* it
was not mature enough to meet our needs.  This is not to say that opinion still
stands if a comparison were done today.  Then again, several years ago Linux
wasn't seen as much of anything either.  My how things have changed. :)



Dennis


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