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JSP vs Coldfusion

 
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You guys may or may not know that Coldfusion is now basically a j2ee based scripting layer (CF is all written in java and CF pages compile to java byte-code)

I have been doing CF, along with JSP, for a few years now. Recently, due to what I perceive as a lack of demand for CF, I have begun to think about dropping CF and using PHP as my second language (second to Java/JSP)

My question is, is CF still a valid / viable technology these days? I have seen many threads around the web saying that CF is old hat and on its last legs, is this a common belief? I see many strong reasons to think so given that J2EE and .NET compete and PHP seems to be there for those not needing to standardise on either of these two. Is coldfusion going to become a legacy way of doing web aps?

Any opinions welcome.
 
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I never used Coldfusion but It always seems to me that I need to pay for a CF server to use it. If that is really the case, I think it is the reason it get "old".
 
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CF is a proprietary technology from a smallish company. I've myself never once encountered an environment in which it was used in 7 years of internet/intranet application building (5 years of which were as a consultant to a variety of clients, most of them multinationals).

I don't think it's dead (once in a while you see cfm filenames on websites after all) but the market seems very small indeed.
That could of course be a lucrative market for someone that already knows the system, but tracking down customers/employers could get tricky and finding one in an area you can work in even trickier.
 
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The organization I wok for uses it and we have a few large accounts with Big 3 Automakers doing B2B apps. Also many of our competitors in the Ford market utilize CF.

Personally (and obviously a somewhat biased opinion) I believe Cold Fusion is a few years ahead of JSP as a front end tool for Java. They have been doing the strictly tag thing in web applications since the inception of the language (which is somewhere around 10 years old now). It is a proprietary technology that you do have to pay for but I wouldn�t necessarily consider Macromedia a �smallish� company. I also think that CF has matured much more smoothly than JSP has.

The fact is though that JSP is much more prevalent in the market, but I believe if your looking for the best RAPID development tool that can still support good MVC style apps than Cold Fusion is your best bet... IMHO

As far as a comparison against PHP goes, I use both. I utilize PHP on almost all of the web based side projects I do.

But the big differences between these languages come down to organizational type decisions. stuff like..
PHP open source support vs. macromedia�s paid for support
Scripting code embedded within HTML vs. tag based code embedded in HTML
[ March 19, 2005: Message edited by: David L Turner ]
 
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With Coldfusion MX you can use Java tags instead of CF as well as filters.
So it could be a "Java environment" if you need
 
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