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What is special in Coldfusion 9 except high pricing? What is for an entrepreneur in Coldfusion 9? Why would someone choose Coldfusion instead of Java,.NET or PHP?

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    Surely this would be more appropriate on Stack Overflow. Sep 16, 2009 at 1:35
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    The #1 cost in any software project is Developer time, not software licenses, hosting, or hardware. Sep 15, 2011 at 17:21

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The tldr version of my answer: don't be put off by the price tag on the box. Look for value over the duration of your project.

Regarding cost:

Adobe ColdFusion is a complete package and bundles third party components, some of which contribute to the licensing cost - eg performant database drivers.

There are other CFML engines emerging - Railo is wicked fast and free, OpenBD also has free versions.

Adobe has also introduced a free academic license.

You refer to .NET as an alternative - how much does a Visual Studio licence cost? One of the most popular IDEs for CF developers is free open source - the CFEclipse perspective for Eclipse.)

Regarding learning curve:

You can learn the basics very quickly, and get a really good return on investment. The CFWack is a great resource that will see you getting data out of your database and into web-based reports with very little effort.

As with all systems, the advanced stuff takes longer to learn, but ColdFusion prides itself on rapid application development - the ROI for a developer's time is great, and salary is always the most expensive component of a software project. The license cost is insignificant over the medium to long term.

I've used Adobe ColdFusion since version 5 - from my perspective it continues to get better. Version 8 was an amazing upgrade, and version 9 (which is in public beta) looks to be better yet. (You can purchase maintenance which typically includes the next major release for free.)

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  • If you're a CF house or if you know CF inside-out then I suppose that's one reason why you'd have a preference for it, but Visual Web Developer 2008 Express is also free of charge and is now a competent and mature .NET IDE. I won't mark you down but I can't mark you up, as you seem to have a preference for the product that might be colouring your response. Sep 15, 2009 at 15:09
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    thanks for the comment mh - yes, I definitely do have a preference for CF and didn't try to hide it.
    – Antony
    Sep 15, 2009 at 23:04
  • Visual Studio Express is free. It is full features with the only limitation being that it can't connect to a TFS server.
    – MDMarra
    May 17, 2012 at 0:27
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ColdFusion 9 made many things easy. Let's name a few...

Although many of these libraries are open-source (e.g. Hibernate / BlaseDS), and you can integrate them for free in your ASP.NET or whatever, you don't have to dig thorugh their documentations to use them because Adobe has made them Very easy to use. Most of them only require a tag or two! (strength of CFML!)

For the price of CF, yes you're getting quite a lot of value. You've got to evaluate your needs and what CF provides, before just labeling it 'expensive'. :)

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  • as of cf8 the pdf generation was still done in third partly libraries.. a leftover from macromedia but given the greater pdf control i'd imagine they would have incorporated inhouse pdf libraries. would like to know more about this.
    – ethyreal
    Oct 17, 2009 at 1:16
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In the beginning, the power of ColdFusion was that it could communicate directly with databases, where other web development systems could not. (That's back in 1995.) Nowadays, it has lost this advantage but still has some powerful features and it has built a reliable user-base in the past.

Nowadays, I think it has become too big a beast to quickly learn and use in any environment. While it is easy to learn, the biggest problem tends to be its price. (There is, of course the free Developer version.) It suffers big from its competition with PHP, although PHP does have a few problems with maintaining a fixed syntax. PHP is too much in motion.

Also, ColdFusion is now written in Java, making it available on many different platforms but by doing so, it lost some of its value to MS Windows. While Java is still very fast, many Windows developers still feel more comfortable with applications written in C++. It has actually become less native for Windows, which probably caused them to lose some of their Windows users.

But the main reason to use ColdFusion would actually be the same reason why they lost some of their Windows users: It's platform-independent! So you can develop a site on Windows and easily port it to Linux. This isn't really possible with .NET application since Mono doesn't support .NET completely. And while PHP also offers platform-independence, it never gained a good reputation as a reliable system simply because the huge changes between the multiple major versions.

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    "It's too big a beast to quickly learn...it is easy to learn"-could you clarify that a little? What's the learning curve like? Sep 15, 2009 at 12:04
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    Well, I learned the basics quickly within 5 days. I managed to share that knowledge with a colleague who learned from me in three days. Together with additional documentation we managed to get a project working within a month. But we realized that at that moment, we still used less than 10% of what ColdFusion had to offer. That was back in 2000. It has grown a lot ever since. Sep 15, 2009 at 15:31
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I echo the sentiments about it being cross platform, but a big part of the picture is the built in capabilities. You can create PDF's, talk with Microsoft Exchange, dop down and call Java, or drop down and call .NET. It has solid abilities to consume SOAP or REST webservices. Add to this in ColdFusion 9 that you can communicate with SharePoint and Office Documents. The end result is a tool that can talk to nearly every other system out there, and that functionality is built right into the standard product.

Add to that, while it can do a lot, the syntax is relative easy to learn, and most operations can be performed with a very little bit of code. ColdFusion does have a cost, but I make the argument that the value ColdFusion provides is worth more than the cost.

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  • Very well stated! I completely agree.
    – Evik James
    Nov 17, 2011 at 20:54
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I used ColdFusion as far back as 4.5 back in 2000 and up to ColdFusion 6 (MX?). Back then the biggest reason for ColdFusion was it's simplicity and that within the language, you could create some impressive web applications in a much shorter time frame than ASP/JSP/PHP.

While I haven't used it in years, the newer features today make it seem more compelling than before and in comparison to free alternatives. It may not be for everyone, but if your looking for specific features that ColdFusion offers, it may be the better option. Most people will stick with PHP, ASP.NET or J2EE as they're mostly free and will probably work just as well. I've always looked at ColdFusion as the "rapid web app" of choice with lots of bells and whistles. If time is a factor for development, ColdFusion is probably the better choice.

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This type of question has be asked and answered ad nauseam on stackoverflow.

Here are the Q/A this myself and a great deal of others have left lengthy answers for.

ColdFusion-vs-PHP

Java-or-ColdFusion

What-is-the-status-of-coldfusion-today

Is-coldfusion-a-good-choice-for-web-development

As to entrepreneurial value I think that depends on your business model and development team.

ColdFusion is a robust enterprise class Java application with loads of built-in features. Some of these features are basically wrappers around the extensive Java libraries and as such make utilizing those libraries concise and simple. Should you not like ColdFusion's implementation you can load any jar's or package'd wars you like, roll your own solution... its really all up to you.

Aside from the other great answers, I personally feel the beauty of ColdFusion is the ability for both beginner and Advanced developers to be productive with solid contributions on the same team.

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The #1 cost in any software project is Developer time, not software licenses, hosting, or hardware.

In my experience CF has saved me 30-50% in project development time consistently for the past 10 years. I work with a variety of languages.

$1200 isn't very much if it saves 50% on your labour cost of a project. There are also Open source (Railo, etc) engines if you like CFML but can't afford it.

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Here's what I tell anyone who's considering ColdFusion:
Do you know HTML? (Yes, good. | No? Then how will you write websites in the first place?)
Do you know SQL? (Yes, good. | No? Then how will you query a database in any language?)
If you can answer yes to both of those, then you are only a handful of tags away from being able to write CFML. Coldfusion code is VERY readable if you understand HTML and SQL. Get a datasource name attached to your database in the CF administrator and you are seconds from having a data driven website functional.
The overhead of learning the language is almost negligible. You need to know HTML and SQL before you can code in ANY other web programming languages, which along with cfquery, cfoutput, cfif/else are about all you really need to hit the ground running.

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