From Coldfusion to J2EE

[Jimmy Chiu]

My developing group is going to make a decision of “moving from Coldfusion to J2EE”.
Can anyone (who has experiences on Coldfusion MX and J2EE) of you give me some insights on advantages(hopefully from architecture standpoint of J2EE) to help us make this technical change happen?
[ March 10, 2003: Message edited by: Jimmy Chiu ]

[Geeta Ramasami]

Hi,
Could u pl brief me about ur project.In coldfusion generally u won't have the seperation of the layers like presentation and represetation.
In j2ee there r so many design patters.The mostly adopted one is MVC.
U can have all the presentation logic in the JSP, and have a servlet which can act as a controller to retrieve the user request and call some DAO class to perform the database operation.The model would be the DAO class where u put all the database access logic.
I have done a CF project wherein in the same page wi'll query the DB and display it as well..So if i have an idea of ur project i can put forth some of my ideas.
Cheers
Geeta

[Jimmy Chiu]

Geeta,
Thanks for your briefing.
The project my team is going to do is still in the air, but it just looks like a normal web application with many special legal rules that have to be applied. There is a possibility that the application would access different DB systems. Our client doesn’t require much fancy presentation layer work, by the way.
Then current version was written in ASP a few years ago, it is having many problems which clearly are business logic errors. And no one is going to (or want to) fix it. They are expecting to a 100% replacement.
I have a few questions for you, since you have done at least one CF project.
1.Is any security issues in CF every concerned you?
2.If I want a invocation to Java code from CF, is there a performance hit (I was told there should be a performance hit by Macromedia speak person, but personally I am not so sure.)?
3.If the back end is Java Servlet, front end can be either CF or JSP, which one would you choose?
Thanks

[sunitha reghu]

Hi,
I have devloped some in app in CF and now developing one in J2EE. Coding,maintence, db querying is very very easy in CF when compared to JSP. As Geeta has mentioned whether to go for cf or j2ee depends on the complexity of the ur project. There is no problem regarding the security. The new version of CF, CFMX supports J2EE so u can have cfml pages and jsp pages, beans or servlets.MX supports weblogic, websphere,jrun.MX also supports flash remoting. so if ur app using flash then its good use cf. cf5.0 and prev versions are written is c++. so performance is better when compred to J2EE. But MX is in java so performance is same. For CF I spent only $50 for the book and $ 150 for certification. For j2ee i bought so many book. JSP,SERVLETS,BEANS etc and my company spent more than $5000 for my training. If the project is a simple, CF is very. If the project is complex J2EE will be a better choice.

[Geeta Ramasami]

Hi,
As sunitha said if ur application is a large scale application, then go in for J2EE architecture.As u r asking if the BE is servlet and front end is JSP or CF, i wud suggest CF as CF has more additional features and its very user friendly when compared to JSP.There are no security issues in CF..Like J2EE, in CF also u can seperate the functionality into different tiers..
But in j2EE u can use EJBs whose functionality is very extensive, that user need nto worry about the security issues, transactions etc..
In CF u have to handle this manually..
I donno if CFMX provides these features and i haven't worked with the latest version of CF..

Cheers
Geeta

[Naveen Sharma]

hi all,
as we are discussuing here either CF or J2EE,
i think both have their own advantages and disvantages.
In CF devlopment is very rapid in FE as well as BE
but J2EE Architecure is very robust and secure(generally used for large applications), also takes pretty good time to develope.
In CFMX, one can develope CFCs (Cold Fusion Components), writing your business logic ones and using again and again (like beans in java), they also have provided a very good support for xml and web services. if you compare these features with J2EE, there it will surely take more time.. cannot say anything about performance...coz CFMX is again java based..
well i think, CF is better for small aplication, and also we can use J2EE architecture with CF when ever we find it neccessary, like in some transcation management and secure area, although we have transaction manaagement support in CF too.
Cheers
Nav

[Jimmy Chiu]

Geeta,
If the front-end is CF, how do you invoke a Servlet? (<cfinclud>?)
Sunitha,
In your mind, is there anything that J2EE can do but CF couldn’t do?
Naveen,
As far as you know, does CFMX support portal?
Thanks all!

[Naveen Sharma]

Geeta,
If the front-end is CF, how do you invoke a Servlet? (<cfinclud>?)
--------------------------------
Certainly Not, use (<cfobject type="java">
Sunitha,
In your mind, is there anything that J2EE can do but CF couldn�t do?
-----------------------------------
Code once written in J2EE can be embedded with any technologies (as middleware) now days.. but with CF you have to stck with it... e.g your business logic is written once with J2EE architecture, it can be merged with JSP, CF, PHP etc

Naveen,
As far as you know, does CFMX support portal?
---------------------------------------------
As far as i know it doesnt,
but they have provided such a simple way of integration, that you can use sun one portal server (formerly known as iPlanet Portal server)
, and integrate with your CF code... Thats why i have told you before, if you want your code(business logic) written once and run with multiple platforms, go with J2EE, No matter What FE you choose..
* Working in J2EE, you will find it has tremendous scope
Cheers
Nav