[Zope] Any other ColdFusion coders out there?

Mon, 4 Oct 1999 20:41:14 -0500

Paul,

Thanks for the kind words.  Yeah, there are some very interesting things
with ColdFusion that people really need to know. These are things, such as
the Win32 emulation under Solaris, that might affect peoples decision. I
report, you decide.

Anyway, as for Spectra, I'm under an NDA, but I can discuss the major parts
of it that are public.

First of all, as I said before, they have attempted to make an object
publishing environment out of a non-object oriented programming
language/application server. To answer your question, I do think that
Spectra is limited by having CF as a foundation. I think that
Spectra is *going to be* slow and clunky given it's CF architecture... try
taking a procedural language and trying to write an application
like you would in an object oriented language... it's simply going to be a
bunch of work-arounds and quick fixes... it's not going to be clean code,
it's not going to be elegant... it *might* work, but it will be clunky and
slow... see what I mean?

The one thing I must give Allaire credit for is the way that they have
marketed Spectra... What they have done is taken a clunky, slow, hard to use
product and marketed the hell out of it. The one thing missing from Zope is
that kind of hardcore marketing.  Zope can do everything Spectra will do,
and it can do it NOW. And it can do it faster and better and is easier to
use, is more extensible, etc. But, like I have seen from other posts on this
list, at least Allaire tells you what you can do with Spectra. And, no
offense to ColdFusion developers, but the majority of them are not that
technically skilled so telling them what they can do and how easy it will be
to implement is *just* what they want to hear. What's funny, is the exact
same things would  be much easier to implement in Zope.

Hope that I answered your questions in a round about way. I like ColdFusion,
but you have to take if for what it is...a procedural development
environment... if you want to work with objects (and enjoy the benefits of
doing so) then Zope is the obvious choice.

I plan to offer up more data on the comparison of ColdFusion and Zope in the
coming days... the problem I have in completing that comparison is that the
comparison should be between Spectra and Zope... and a comparison between
Python and CFML should be made since Zope is based on Python and Spectra on
CFML... ;-)

Hope this helped,

Tad Murphy
"cybertad"
http://www.zope.org/Members/cybertad/

----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Everitt <paul@digicool.com>
To: Tad Murphy <murphyt@cybertad.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 02, 1999 8:04 AM
Subject: Re: [Zope] Any other ColdFusion coders out there?

|
| Tad--
|
| Wow, this has been an incredibly instructive series of posts.  Looking
| at your member page, I'm learning quite a bit about CF that I didn't
| know.  For instance, I didn't know it ran *under Win32 emulation* under
| Solaris!  Holy moly!
|
| Anyway, I wanted to say thanks for taking the time to jot down the
| notes.  What is your impression of Spectra?  Is it limited by using CF
| for a foundation?
|
| I'm pleasantly surprised that you view the ZODB as a strength.  I worry
| that people grounded in traditional tools like CF will never overcome
| their distrust.
|
| --Paul
|
| Tad Murphy wrote:
| >
| > Zope is *much* more scalable than ColdFusion... and that won't change no
| > matter what ColdFusion does short of converting to an Object model.
| >
| > So many folks say that "scalability" is based solely on the size and
power
| > of the hardware, but this is simply not true.  Zope runs on more OS's
than
| > ColdFusion right now, and, given a little work, could run on even more.
| > Because of this, the hardware part of the scalability issue is put to
| > rest...  meaning that some of the OS's that Zope runs on, themselves,
run on
| > super hardware.
| >
| > But there are other issues to deal with as far as scalability.  One of
| > Zope's greatest assets is the ZODB and everything associated with it
like
| > dynamic cataloging, transactions, undo's, etc.
| >
| > And then there is the fact about Zope being Open Source and ColdFusion
is a
| > commercial product.  Changes can happen within Zope in an instant if
needed.
| > A few weeks back when we discovered the major Acquisition problem with
Zope
| > it was patched and an updated version of Zope was released instantly.
| >
| > As well, it seems that Allaire might be transitioning from CF to Spectra
and
| > I would not be surprised to see a version of Spectra out soon after this
| > first one that doesn't rely on CFML, or what we know as ColdFusion
now,at
| > all. There are reasons that Allaire has invested in other technologies
such
| > as JRun. Just a thought...
| >
| > Tad Murphy
| > "cybertad"
| > http://www.zope.org/Members/cybertad/
| >
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|