20211107-php_vs_coldfusion.txt
When I was in high school, my school's website used extensions I had
never seen before (and very rarely since): cfm. I came to learn it was
ColdFusion (Adobe). My teacher was the webmaster and liked it well
enough. Of course at the same time he was teaching my class HTML +
tables layout (yikes). Understandable since HTML is a virtual
necessity to understand CF anyway, and he wasn't going to teach any
kid in his class how to mess with the school's website. (Sadly the
school district later converted to 100% cookie-cutter school websites
for uniformitiy. As usual, I am conflicted as I believe easier
navigation is better, but still get sad about the loss of such a
unique site.)
This was before I knew what PHP was. So today out of curiosity, I was
looking up PHP vs Coldfusion. It was predictably (in retrospect)
littered with articles on how much better CF was than PHP, because the
vast majority of people who would even compare CF to PHP would be the
ones using CF (or selling it) themselves. I was a bit disappointed in
my brief search for a fair comparison was naught, I did learn why CF
was so rare: CF costs money and PHP is free (ironically an idiotic
firm headed by some nut with an identity disorder said CF was actually
cheaper "in the long run" because PHP "required" professional programs
to make use of it). No wonder I found so many "Is CF dead?" posts. And
no, I won't be illustrating parallels between :70 and :80 beyond this
sentence as I'm sure anyone reading can see those for themselves.
The best comparison I did find was a simple code comparison drawing
from a MySQL + PHP database pull and a CF implementation of the same
sort of db pull. Of course MySQL is totally optional to PHP, but this
is not in the interests of CF apologists. PHP, despite (I'm sure)
waning popularity in favor of JS frameworks, remains far ahead of CF
in popularity. PHP may be a little harder to learn, but its popularity
and open-source development makes it more likely to last and have more
applications than CF. Unlike a debate I mentioned earlier, PHP and CF
are in direct competition: Website + database design & implementation.
It's a good sign that something standard and open wasn't shafted by a
company with 100% control over the development of a web standard. It
almost seems comical in 2021 to think that individual companies
largely defined web experiences, although I still get nostalgic for
those "Best viewed in <browser> at <X>x<Y> resolution."
