We had a nice meeting last night (on this opening day of the NFL season -- let no one be confused about where my priorities lay, I was at the meeting).
Jake Munson showed off the shiny new Adobe ColdFusion. It seems to be a nice tool for creating web pages quickly and easily. There are some features that ColdFusion gives you with a single tag that would take a bit of work in ASP.NET or a 3rd party component. But it is hard to cover an entire application framework in a 1 hour talk. Some of the Flash based tags were pretty cool (charts, grids, calendars).
The one point against it though: I pretty hefty price tag on the server software.
There was one point that did come up in all of this: there are some niches emerging in the web development space.
- ASP.NET seems to be for the more "hard core" developer (the type of person who was doing Windows Forms development and is not being asked to make web pages). These are the guys/gals that already know VB or C# and are comfortable in them.
- JSP: Same as ASP.NET, just substitute C# and VB for Java.
- ColdFusion: less of a developer type, more of designer type. The Flash integration helps with that.
- Ruby/Ruby on Rails: Hard core developer gone a bit nuts. Doesn't like language constraints, loves code generators.
- PHP: somewhere between ColdFusion and Ruby on Rails. I imagine that if someone were looking at ColdFusion, but didn't need Flash, they would probably end up here instead.
- ASP/VBScript: These developers are ... who am I kidding? The only reason I've found people are still using this is because they don't have the time to convert it to something else. Legacy code happens. That is who COBOL is still around.
And that was one of the end questions that wasn't really answered: why would you pick ColdFusion over PHP?
I know why I would stick to ASP.Net over both of them -- I already know C# and the .Net Framework and I love the versatility they give me. I would probably say the same thing if I was Java developer.
So many questions, so little time.
One final note: our beloved leader, Jim McKeeth, has announced that he is leaving Boise and heading to Seattle. As such he is stepping down from the BSDG board and I (Chris Brandsma) am now taking over. I promise not to make people sing "Hale to the chief" when the meeting starts.
So, we are looking for a new head lackey -- I mean Vice President. Must be in the Boise region to apply and willing to present from time to time and willing to share knowledge.
