Choose ColdFusion, ASP, JSP, other??

[multiplex77]

Hi,

I have a very general question to ask all:

I have a large web application that my company plans to develop, involving lots of database queries, security concerns, and form inputs.

Which is the best language to develop in? ColdFusion, ASP, JSP or others (PERL, etc)?

Thanks for your opinion on this.

 

[Jawa]

Well, as my opinion goes I say CF.

Perl is a tad bit antiquated, albeit very robust for certain apps, i.e., reporting

ASP, I have never been a fan as 1. It works best on IIS and I feel a bit bloated in terms of code development

JSP, is great, robust and very scaleable, but the learning curve a dev time is high. It is very portable (especially with Tomcat)

PHP is robust and real easy to learn and use


Cold Fusion, is best at querying, forms, and rapid development. It works great on Apache and IIS, and with just about any database. My company has sucessfully built and continues to build very large apps with CF.


OK, that is my 2 cents on it.

These are just opinions, I know people with differ. BTW, I have built with all of the above.

 

[tleish]

A few good comparison articles:

WebMonkey
Server-Side Scripting Shootout

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/46/index1a.html

ZDNet
Four scripting languages speed development

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2646052,00.html

- tleish

 

[denzillobo]

I have worked on most of the web development softwares available.
ASP does not work on Linux.

Perl is ok, but not preferable It is too old fashioned.

JSP is good.

In my opinion, I believe ColdFusion is the best.
It provides lots inbuilt tags, functions, methods etc which makes life very easy for a developer. It does not take to much time either to learn to use CF.

I have done a number of sites and applications all developed in ColdFusion with great ease and satisfaction.

DENZIL DENZIL

 

[tleish]

All the languages have their strengths and weaknesses, I've come to realize it all depends on your situation. Things to think about are company budgets, development time, maintainability, scalability, etc.

For example, I was at a previous company where they had me built a ColdFusion Intranet. The problem I thought was, I was the only one who knew ColdFusion, and the company had 10 Java developers who have knew JSP very well. After I left the company, the Intranet went away, because nobody knew how to maintain it. It was a poor choice maintenance wise.

I could give other examples, but the bottom line is what best fits your situation. Some programming languages take longer to learn than others, some cost more money for training, learning, developing or for the software itself. Look at what platform your company is primarily running. If you're primarily running IIS, then a linux based language might not be the best choice. Some languages are faster to to develop applications than others. You also want to look at how scalable you want to make the application, for instance will this application eventually need to work with a store register application or a budgeting software.

All these are things to consider. While my preference is ColdFusion, I still will develop in other languages if it fits the situation better. - tleish

 

[cfelix]

I am not a company owner, but I am a developer. I would have to say that Cold Fusion is great when time is of essence. However, Cold Fusion has a lot of limitations in which must developer end up coding Java Programs that are called by a Cold Fusion template. If the developer is not a Java programmer development time will in turn be higher than expected.

In the other hand, JSP as sammut said is great, robust and very scaleable, but the learning curve a dev time is high. It is very portable (especially with Tomcat). Take into account that after learning the language there will not be any limitations in which another language will have to be used. I have build applications using Cold Fusion and using JSP. Even though, ColdFusion is easier to learn and to implement I prefer to build applications using JSP.

 

[Jawa]

cfelix,

As a side note to all this my company is currently involved with beta testing CF6 (NEO) (CFMX). I agree with what you said and find NEO to address some of the limitations of CF. It is a dandy app server that really has mattured to address older CF issues (i will not bring them up here ).

 

[multiplex77]

Thanks for all your replies! I'm sure a lot of developers have benefited from that. I sure have!

How about speed? I've got varying reports about ASP and JSP being slow. I've developed larger applications in CF and smaller ones in JSP. I found ColdFusion to be a little slow. JSP was also slow but only for the "first run". But for large database-driven apps, is the speed and resource use significantly different between the three?

The greatest drawback for CF is that it is so expensive compared to ASP and JSP which are practically free (they are, right?)

Thanks again!

 

[imstillatwork]

CF may be more $$ to set up...But developement time even on a small team will pay for itself in a few days usually. Don't let the initial cost fool you. It saves you in the end. try to explain that to your clients too.