Database Centric Website Development - Dreamweaver Coldfusion

[jeremytaxman]

Coldfusion or PHP/DreamWeaver for Commercial database maintenance application? pros and cons please .....

back-end database most likely Oracle, but support for MySQL and SQLServer desireable.

may be deployed over Internet or Intranet .... Unix or MS servers.

Any end-user licence implications ? such as having to deploy CF or DW components to hosting / customer environments and therefore having to pay for licences.

From what I've read ColdFusion seems specifically designed for the job, but it only ever receives limp endorsement. PHP/Dreamweaver model seems universally accepted albeit requiring more work.

TIA

[DimPrawn]

Personally I like

Visual Studio
.NET and C#
Entity Spaces EntitySpaces, LLC > Home
Database of your choice

[jeremytaxman]

... can I also preempt the Java, Oracle's APEX, CGI recommendations by eliminating them too :-)

[Fishface]

CF on MS is straight forward - no troubles.

License will be $3000 approx

runs with java nicely - connects to Oracle no problems.

can be sluggish if you dont tune it right.

Can be very useful to get stuff done quickly.

[NickFitz]

Good God, is ColdFusion still out there? I assumed it had long since gone the way of its experimental namesake.

There are a lot more PHP than CF developers out there, and the number of CF developers isn't getting any bigger, so PHP is the better long-term option out of the two.

As far as the database aspect is concerned: use the PDO data-access abstraction layer to avoid dependence on a specific database platform being baked into the PHP code itself. Also, avoid or minimise db-specific SQL constructs. That way it should be possible to switch to a different db with minimum hassle, assuming you have a comprehensive test suite.

PHP is free as in beer.

Oh, and DreamWeaver sucks. I'm not sure why you're lumping it with PHP: one is a bloated, expensive and not very good desktop application for designers who are confused by HTML tags, and the other is a free scripting language that can be closely integrated with many web servers. I've done a lot of PHP work; but I've never used DreamWeaver, nor seen it used. I think somebody I worked with back in 2007 had used it several years before when they were starting to learn.

[Platypus]

Oh, and DreamWeaver sucks.

I think that's a bit harsh! I'm not a regular web-site designer or PHP coder and so I find DW a very useful tool, much easier than writing HTML / PHP in notepad.

However for someone who lives and breathes webby stuff, I can see why you wouldn't need it.

[NickFitz]

I think that's a bit harsh! I'm not a regular web-site designer or PHP coder and so I find DW a very useful tool, much easier than writing HTML / PHP in notepad.

However for someone who lives and breathes webby stuff, I can see why you wouldn't need it.

Fair enough

If you think that's harsh though, try recommending MS Front Page

[eek]

Fair enough

If you think that's harsh though, try recommending MS Front Page

How about Microsoft Expression. I've never got it to work with any Visual Studio project I've wanted to use it on and supposedly its fully integrable.

As for language it depends on what operating system you want/ need to host on.

If its windows go for C# and Sql server. If its Linux php (although personally I would go for Modperl) and Mysql. You can go for Oracle put welcome to the world of their randomly changing licencing charges where the only rule is that they change it in their favour and want more money.

Pud from F***company did spec his infrastructure recently.

Its a good read and not as daft as you would think (dropbox for deployment to test instances is brilliant and lazy).

[jeremytaxman]

Thanks Guys ... very good contributions. So CF is dead it seems as 3k server licence is simply prohibitive. My customers will have Oracle, and I don't want to pay extra licence costs when I sell them my product.

Back in the day I used Perl / CGI and Hotel Metal Pro as my WYSIWYG editor jumping into a text editor as required ... but that was 1999. Personally I dislike Java, not the language and have made good use of it, but Java projects ... too many opinionated people taking too long to knock out mediocre apps - and don't get me started on Hibernate.

A GUI maintaining data in a database is a basic app .... and we've had many 4GLs doing it well over the years during fat client days... Oracle SQL*Forms, Delphi, VB even Access can knock up a form and access any database via ODBC (ok limitations) in about 2 min.

So I'm looking for a 4GL to the basic things over the web ... like data entry sceens (forms) with validations, and I don't want pages refreshing everytime a field is entered, or a dependent drop-down is re-populated. All of these are basic things and I shouldn't have to drop down into manual scripting with a text editor, basically the 3GL approach. Reverting to a text editor should only be necessary in special cases such as optimisation.

I mentioned DW because I previously found HM Pro (rip2005) useful, and could be good for developing a more professional site in less time. But HTML is lightweight enough to code by hand.

So are we saying go for PHP and HTML editor of choice - possibly developed using NotePad

[PAH]

Solutions such as Iron Speed may be worth investigating.

There's one or two alternatives out there:

List of rapid application development tools - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Would be quicker to knock something up in Notepad than decide which is the best of those.