O.K. Programmers, here is one for you. Help me out

[David Whatley]

We are going to be building a web ap, that will have forms to be filled out, vendor selection, and vendor reviews in it. The Forms will be self populated from data we have, comming out of SQL. Any other data entered will go into the SQL DB and then be used in other forms when needed. We will also be sneding and recieving data from other applications.
If you were in charge of the project, what would you develop in, and why?
I am being pushed toward CF as that is the language of one of our developers. CEO wants .NET
I get to make the choice, so help me out here

[athompson]

David: if you have in-house programmers or someone in-house who will maintain it, go with what they know. The only wrong choice is the one where you are at the mercy of someone who used a language for which there is no widespread support.

If you use PHP there will always be a million people available to bid on fixing/upgrading. There is nothing inherently wrong with CF, but the pool is smaller. It will in all possibility cost more to build it in .NET.

I say that because (certainly here in Austin) everyone who puts a sign out front of their house to be a web design/program shop, wants to use free tools. Who wouldn't.

I built our corporate site with ASP and am about to move it to .NET, but we have me to do that and support it.

People will generally recommend what they are comfortable with. There really is no right/wrong language. Kind of like Nikon vs Canon.

Personally I would not go with CF, but that's me.
-ANDY

[kachina]

Not a programmer but a former IT Director...

-PHP or .NET (.NET if the CEO is already pushing for it)
-Budget for support (contract-to-hire) for the first year until the in-house team comes up to speed.

[zeroendless]

Doesn't matter much if you have the right guy within budget for the job. But...If i already have data in SQL, (ms-sql, mysql ..etc?), i would tried to stick with it. CF would not be my first choice for any app. Get new crews :( :) :)

[Tapper]

Well, depends. Is this the first of many? Does it need any backend connectivity besides a simple database? How much load will be placed on it? What kind of hardware must support it.

I can tell you, you'll probably end up stuck with .NET, which is cumbersome as hell, and only runs on winders machines. It has plenty of hooks, and can build powerful apps, but there's a fairly steep learning curve, and it also isn't well optimized for high-load use.

Cold Fusion does work, but it's also a pig, and not very portable. There's also not that many people available that are fluent in it, so long-term support is problematic. I'd avoid it.

In our datacenter, we use a number of environs. Our main development staff uses Java, jscript, and a variety of backends like websphere and so forth.

I've written a fair slew of online apps, and I long ago settled on LAMP stacks (Linux Apache Mysql PHP). Since I know algol languages like C, PHP is a snap to learn and use, and there are literally millions of free toolkits floating around for it. The whole stack is open source, so no license fees, no costs other than machine and development time. And it can scale exceedingly well, if written correctly. Scraping forms in PHP is ridiculously easy. There are jillions of people out there that can write in PHP too.

Unfortunately, CEO's know jack about development, open source, or anything else. They see .NET in every magazine, so that's what they think the "right" thing to use is. So $50 says that's what you'll get stuck with.

[David Whatley]

The first of 2. And they are related. And yes, it will need to share data with other apps, that are not ours. Load? Well that depends. Up to 200 million hits a year would be about max. Realistically, about 30-60 million a year. With multipal page views.

As far as the $50 bucks? "I" will make the final decesion, so that wouldnt be fair. Also, if I am convinced .NET is the way, then I would be betting against myself and thats
Would you like to hear more about it off line?

Originally Posted by Tapper

Well, depends. Is this the first of many? Does it need any backend connectivity besides a simple database? How much load will be placed on it? What kind of hardware must support it.

Unfortunately, CEO's know jack about development, open source, or anything else. They see .NET in every magazine, so that's what they think the "right" thing to use is. So $50 says that's what you'll get stuck with.

[AndrewCCM]

Most all of our web apps in our datacenter are CF.. However, there are several in .NET.

I can attest to CF being somewhat of a "pig". It works very well..but we do find ourselves frequently having to reset one thing or another due to memory leaks, contention, etc..

I am not a programmer, so I cannot recommend one over the other. Seems like our hard core developers use .NET and our "WEB" developers like Cold Fusion.

FWIW.