Today I went to a free Cold Fusion seminar in London. It was held by Macromedia, who have become the corporation behind the server side technology since their merger with Allaire in May.
I’ve never used the language before, although I had a rough idea of what went on, but I can say that I was very impressed by how easy it was to create database driven pages very swiftly. Certainly it looked much quicker than what I use, PHP – although that’s to be expected when PHP is free and Cold Fusion has a 1200 dollar price tag for the development studio alone.
Most hilarious though was the part of the seminar when the constantly Ummming and Emmming “Sales Engineer” showed a slide that had Cold Fusion doing a db query and output in four lines of code compared to 20-odd lines in PHP. It was total bullshit, as the CF code had no error handling, graceful failure, or page formatting code in there when the PHP code did – yet the Sales Engineer was presenting it like for like.
I pointed this out – saying I was slightly annoyed and that he didn’t have to tell lies to convince me that CF was a great looking product. Several Ummm’s and Emmm’s later he admitted that it was wrong to compare code from one language with that of another, and that the ASP code they showed was slightly bloated too. So why did he do it!?
I’m not entirely sure how they do it, but the Tom Clancy endorsed Net Force books seem to be getting better and better. This, to my mind, is the cream of the crop – gone are the tedious explanations about the “mysterious man who lives in isolation with the mountain goat who painstakingly builds one weapon every six months before meditating for a similar duration” every time someone pulls out a gun!
Proof, if it was needed, that you cant please all of the people all of the time and that there’s not much point in trying to, either.