RE: Cold Fusion or ASP or IDC/HTX or ?????????

rkm ( rkm@marshall.net )
Wed, 18 Feb 1998 16:23:05 -0500

I rarely disagree with Dale but to call any product a *must* is to step over
the line. I agree that it is a solid product and worth consideration, but I
don't use it and don't miss it. I develop database driven pages using ODBC
with access, FoxPro and VB5 using SQL server. I have two problems with the
Cold Fusion approach to web applications:

1) It is expensive (OK, all things are relative, don't start a flame here
please... see #2)

2) It ties my development efforts to a third party product. If I use it I am
now at the mercy of a third party to keep up with upgrades of the OS, my
database engine, and the source code etc... For the same reason I try to
avoid using third party OCX's and prefer to "roll my own".

VFP offers numerous tools for publishing to the web, including server
components that can do things Cold Fusion can not do. As M$ releases future
versions this will be even more prevalent, and third party vendors (in
general) will struggle to top the functionality that is native to the M$
packages.

I think the Cold Fusion product is excellent, but it is far from being a
"must". Actually, and this is just to make a point, I would be much more
likely to agree that visual interdev is " very solid, powerful and
a must" for anyone authoring a web page. <g>

My $.02

Richard K. Marshall
http://www.marshall.net

> I personally have never used ASP, but have very in-depth
> working knowledge of Cold Fusion and use it frequently for
> web <-> database interaction. Its very solid, powerful and
> a must for anyone integrated a database to a web page.
>
> Dale E. Reed Jr. (daler@iea-software.com)
> >
> > For the moment we implement our Web Databases
> > using the ASP pages provided with IIS4.
> >
> > I am now interested if Cold Fusion offers advantages
> > over ASP for developing Web Database applications on NT?
> >
> > Can anybody recommand using Cold Fusion over ASP?
>