The ColdFusion Podcast Episode 34

Posted At : October 9, 2006 10:42 AM | Posted By : Bryan Kaiser
Related Categories: Episodes

All news this week as Bryan gets ramped up for MAX. He'll be there live and in color with microphone in hand so hook up with him to be on the next episode! Several good links for developers getting started with CF this week as well as some useful tips for those more advanced.

Update: I (Bryan) somehow managed to cut out a small chunk of the audio while we were talking about MAX. All we said was that I was going to get Michael in via Skype for some of the discussions. Sorry about that!

Running Time: 23:13

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Hey guys, early bird pricing for CFUnited 2006 was $649 for four days, $549 for three days or $249 for one day.

# Posted By Peter J. Farrell | 10/9/06 12:19 PM

Peter,

Thanks for the info. So the cost of the DVD is the same as the full conference price. I still think it's pricey, but I really do like the idea.

Bryan

# Posted By Bryan Kaiser | 10/9/06 10:31 PM

You criticized Adobe for taking a long time to "fix" the named parameters on stored procedure invocations but if you'd bothered to read the blog you link to in your show notes you'd see it was due to JDBC itself and not something that Adobe had control over:

"When CFMX was written, the JDBC 2.2 spec did not allow for named parameters, therefore CFMX ignored the dbvarname attribute in cfprocparam. Previous CFMX versions only supported stored procedure access via positional parameters. CFMX 7.0.2 JDBC drivers are JDBC 3.0 compliant, and this hot fix will re-enable the dbvarname attribute providing named parameter support."

The problem could only have been fixed with the 7.0.2 release at the earliest so it's only taken a few months (since the release of 7.0.2) which, when you consider all the QA effort involved, isn't bad.

Sometimes you guys make some very flippant comments about stuff that does a disservice to your readers!

# Posted By Sean Corfield | 10/10/06 6:59 PM

Sean,

You're absolutely right that this wasn't Adobe's fault. We were just having a little fun at Adobe's expense. I had read the post a couple of days before the podcast and honestly didn't remember all the details when we were recording. I'll have to make sure to go through everything a little closer to recording time in the future. At any rate, we certainly didn't mean to disparage the hard working folks who make all of this stuff happen.

Bryan

# Posted By Bryan Kaiser | 10/11/06 3:49 PM

Do you guys think that Adobe will ever consider releasing a free non-developer version of Coldfusion? They can take out the more advanced enterprise features and give the base server away. Ruby on Rails is popular because it is simple and free. PHP is a great language but it suffers from coding bloat. Example: You need 5 lines of code to do this in Ruby on Rails. You need 10 lines of code in Coldfusion. You need 40 lines of code in PHP.

I'm not a professional developer so flame me if I'm completely out of line. Love the podcast!!

Fake "Sean" take a chill pill they everyone makes mistakes even adobe.

# Posted By Scott | 10/23/06 6:54 PM

@Scott, it's an interesting question and one that gets asked a lot. Would a free commercial version of ColdFusion cause mass adoption? Anyone remember CF Express? That was free for commercial use I believe but was feature-limited (correct me if I'm wrong - it was substantially before my time). As far as I can tell from talking to CFers today, CF Express was a bit of an embarrassment? The most common complaint was that it was *too* limited.

So taking out features to create a free edition might not actually satisfy enough people. You can't please everyone all the time.

And I think it's worth pointing out that BlueDragon has a free edition - for *non-commercial* use. Originally it was also free for commercial use but as of release 6.2 it changed (to free for non-commercial use only). It's hard to say how many non-CFers have adopted CF because of this free non-commercial edition.

Rails is popular because it's the latest cool toy but there are some serious concerns about scalability and stability (it *will* mature and it will *probably* address scalability issues but it's still too young for that). PHP is popular because... well, I'm not entirely sure... it's free, sure, but it takes longer to code in PHP than it does in Rails (or CF)... but the syntax is butt-ugly and it's a real script-kiddie, hacker language. I've written my share of PHP and whenever I use a higher-level language, I'm always reminded of how low-level and unpleasant PHP is.

Deep down there's really no difference in actual deployed cost for shared hosting between PHP and Rails and CFMX (check out GoDaddy for ultra-cheap hosting, for example, but there are lots of sub-$10 a month hosting offerings for all three languages). Development is also free for all three. IDEs are also available for free for all three. Non-free IDEs are also available for all three.

So if hosting costs the same and development costs the same, why isn't ColdFusion more popular?

# Posted By Sean Corfield | 10/23/06 9:47 PM

Exactly Sean, great point! I agree with what you saying on developing in CF for pretty much the same price as a PHP/Ruby developer. Local Development, with a CF Host, using CFEclipse IDE. Hey why the hell not. ya know until I can afford an actual license for CF. This is the route to go!

# Posted By sal | 10/24/06 8:18 AM

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