Ask a Jedi: Moving to ColdFusion

This email just makes me happy all over. I'm always thrilled to hear about someone moving to ColdFusion. One of his questions involved hosts, so I figured it was a good one to share. Ola asks...

I have been following your blog since the launch of CF8 and have grown interested in moving to CF for my website projects. I am still unsure if this is the right platform for my kind of work since most of my clients are small companies that I usually recommend shared hosting service to. In the past I have used PHP, but I really love the ease of use and learning curve of CF. I am also considering Ruby on Rails. I use a lot of the adobe products and have started playing with FLEX which seems to have the best integration with CF.

You certainly won't get any arguments from me here. I have respect for PHP and Ruby, but I definitely think you can't beat ColdFusion for ease of use and RAD - and it is definitely a great way to serve up content for Flex or AIR apps. I've yet to see a language that does this type of work quite as easy as ColdFusion.

My concerns are first finding hosting companies for my clients.

There are plenty of CF hosts out there. I don't personally recommend any - just because I don't feel right doing so w/o being an actual customer. But for my clients I've worked with Host My Site and CrystalTech. Both seem to be good. Point is though - there are definitely plenty of hosts out there offering CF. Oh - I did use CFXHosting in the past. They were good too. I now host with someone who prefers to remain anonymous as they aren't quite ready to sell hosting just yet. I'm sure everyone of my readers has an opinion on hosting, but let's just say that you have options, and plenty of them. Check out Ben's list.

Second I prefer to write clean semantic XHTML, code in textmate/dreamwever and would like to know if CF tag generated code as in CF Form does not introduce deprecated code into my markup. Please advise. I would like to embrace one platform for the kind of work I do but, unsure CF is right for the non enterprise web design business space I work in.

First off - only a subset of ColdFusion's tags actually generate output. That number grew in ColdFusion 8 with the introduction of the Ajaxy-UI tags, but in general, you are responsible for your own output. ColdFusion will not help or hurt your output being XHTML, clean, etc. For the tags that do generate output - if you don't like what they output - then don't use them. Simple as that. As cool as the new Ajax tabs are, if you feel the output isn't good, then you can certainly find another tab solution from another framework. You specifically mentioned CFForm. I personally don't use that very often. I've used it a bit more now with CF8's Ajax stuff, but just to get the async posting feature, not for any layout type stuff. And I certainly do not recommend Flash Forms to anyone now (use Flex!).

Comments (16) Nov 8, 2007 9:16 AM Views: 1613

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Re: hosting, it might not be a bad idea if the questioner has enough clients and/or start up funds to invest in a box at Rackspace (or some other managed host) and CF8, and do the hosting personally. It might result in an extra source of income, anyway.
# Posted By Sammy Larbi | 11/8/07 9:39 AM
As much I love ColdFusion, and I do, when it does generate xhtml content, it does tend to be un-compliant. Anything that embeds image or objects will do so un-compliantly. (CFimage, cfchart, cfform flash only, etc)

That shouldn't be an obstacle however, as most XHTML produced why your application will be your own. And there are ways to get around tags that output un-compliant HTML. Ben Nadel has a great post on taming cfimage that could be applied to other tags.

As for Cfform, it is in the clear as long as you don't use flash forms, and you don't mind inline JavaScript.
# Posted By Terrence Ryan | 11/8/07 9:54 AM
The only general comment I'd add about making a move to ColdFusion is to get into a user group in your area. It opens many doors, and it is a tremendously helpful community.

A list of user groups can be found here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/usergroups/index.cfm

Cheers,

Davo
# Posted By David | 11/8/07 12:15 PM
Ray,

another thing to mention for the xhtml stuff is that there are a lot of replacement functions on cflib for the built in output functions that generate valid xhtml code.
# Posted By tony petruzzi | 11/8/07 12:22 PM
@Terrence, you probably know this trick so this is for other XHTML nerds out there ;-) Wrapping your cfchart or cfimage or whatever in cfsavecontent will allow you to improve the HTML output if you search & replace using a good regex. e.g. replace > with /> Then just output the result.
# Posted By Gary F | 11/8/07 1:45 PM
Hosting recommendation: http://www.edgewebhosting.net/

Edgeweb is great. Might be pricier than some alternatives, but you pet what you're gay for. Er, I mean you get what you pay for. In a previous job we used them for years, and during that time I never had a complaint about the service. One caveat: we had colo servers there, and could remotely admin everything ourselves, so I can't vouch for hosted sites and whatnot, but like I said -- never a complaint about the service.
# Posted By Dave Anderson | 11/8/07 3:13 PM
I know exactly where Ola is coming from, since I also work with only small companies and organizations and also had to weight the pros and cons of CF versus "free" PHP. I'll still use some OS PHP stuff like the Joomla CMS, depending on the situation. But whenever I "roll my own" code (which is most of the time), I've embraced CF and haven't regretted it one bit. I also endorse Host My Site as a good CF host for shared or VPS plans. For more "budget" hosts, Ola might want to look at these blog posts:
http://www.rabidgadfly.com/?p=41
http://www.rabidgadfly.com/?p=48

Just keep in mind that sometimes you get what you pay for if you go by just cost (that goes for CF or non-CF hosts).
# Posted By Tony Garcia | 11/8/07 3:15 PM
Raymond,

Thanks so much for the quick response. I am definitely feeling like this is the way to go. I also want to say thanks to everyone else that chimed in. All your feedback is definitely valuable. Nice to know that CF has a very helpful tight knit community.
# Posted By Ola | 11/8/07 4:37 PM
Tight knit is one way to describe it. ;)
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 11/8/07 4:45 PM
Crystaltech is my recommendation for hosting.
I've used hostmysite as well. I found they weren't as good as crystaltech, and they had some unresolved issues with mysql dbs. Go with crystaltech.
# Posted By Dynamic Developer | 11/8/07 5:47 PM
I will just say that those planning to switch over to CF and using CF hosts need to take a very careful look at their list of tags that they disable or restrict usage of as opposed to planned projects that may either need these tags immediately, or down the road with eyes to future growth. And make their decisions on these CF hosts accordingly. It wouldn't do to be in the middle of a developing a critical project and and be in for a nasty surprise when codes fail and the host refuses to enable needed tags, or spend lots of billable hours trying to find workarounds.
# Posted By Lola LB | 11/8/07 6:31 PM
For hosting I've had good success with both Ayera and HostMySite. They were two of the only hosting companies that had knowledgeable staff and were willing to work with me on custom requests.
# Posted By Mike Petersen | 11/8/07 10:00 PM
I second Lola LB, check what your potential hoster does/does not allow. HostMySite (where I am hosted) allow almost everything, even stuff I wasn't expecting, and do allow customisation if asked nicely.

It would be quite a headache to write a site and use a whizzy new function only to find later that your host doesn't (and will never) support its use on their servers!
# Posted By Hapex | 11/9/07 5:27 AM
I ran into the "Lola Syndrome" with DailyRazor for one client. the didn't support several tags I needed and had to disable some features in my application.
# Posted By Michael White | 11/10/07 9:40 AM
This summer I made a complete switch from other environments to Coldfusion. I also use Dreamweaver CS3. I renovated the site www.mecumauction.com. There is an extensive suite of admin functions for handling the lots and the photos. I could have not done this work without the tight integration between CF and DW in the time I had available. I'm sure that many of you readers are far better engineers than I - but the client is delighted and so are their customers and for me, that's the test.

I've been doing n-tier web development since 2000 and I have never been more productive than I have with CF.

As for hosts, I strongly recommend hostmysite. The support is simply phenomenal and I discovered that when the first interation of the Mecum website over taxed the shared environment. We're on their VPS environment now. They worked very hard to get the site switched and dealt with an obscure MySQL driver issue. I was very pleased.
# Posted By cfgurney | 11/11/07 9:35 PM
I have worked with Coldfusion since 2001 and have to say it is probably the best decision I have made in web dev.
I have yet to find something it can't do. It is highly stable, poweful and secure; and backward compatible (can it turn straw into gold perhaps?). I have written big, small, fun, experimental all with great success. It is also easy to return to years later without having to spend hours interpreting code. There are some issues with it and Dreamweaver if your careless but otherwise I can't fault it.
Now Adobe (was Alliare when I started) and still 1999 compatable. What else can claim that? It may not be the cheapest but then what of any value is!
# Posted By Paul Birkeland-Green | 11/17/07 3:53 AM
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