that article is strikingly inarticulate. if you've got to tell me to scroll to the bottom, then it's a complete failure at selling railo, whatever it is
I am getting a 404 with the link right now. Railo is a JBOSS project that is an open source version of CFML. Here's what they say about Railo in comparison to PHP:
• Simplicity
More powerful tags for simple file, email, database and other common operations.
• Best Practices Support
If you want to build OO apps using TDD, you can do so. If not, you can still hack out working scripts in minutes.
• Frameworks
A wide range of frameworks designed to make it quick and easy to build well designed web applications.
• OSS Projects
RIAForge has hundred of pre-built projects so you can quickly deliver anything from a blog to a content management system.
• Robust deployment
Railo CFML is easy to manage and deploy, but it's sitting on top of the Java Virtual Machine so it can be deployed to any servlet container or J2EE application server and can take advantage of all of the tooling available for deploying and maintaining Java applications (JMeter, Maven, etc.).
Haha! Having developed with both languages I can honestly say that Coldfusion (one word) simplifies 90+% of the tasks that you would need to use on a regular basis. Is PHP more feature rich, perhaps, but you're not land locked with CF. It allows you to delegate to any other jvm runnable language(in the same execution context, ie. Pass variables between) if need be.
You (and others) should give it a try, you will be pleasantly surprised by its simplicity.
I've done my time in Cold Fusion hell, I know what I need to know.
Perhaps I've got a negative attitude about the intelligence of developers because I've been a maintenance programmer for too long. I've seen so many apps that almost work in ColdFusion because some guy didn't know if he was using a session scope or an application scope or request variable in CF.
I worked at a place where there was a ColdFusionMafia that existed just to bamboozle management into shelling out $8000 for server licenses. They'd go blah blah blah about how Cold Fusion was a great force multiplier but most of them couldn't code their way out of a paper bag they just knew a bunch of tricks that almost worked but couldn't be bothered to get HTML and SQL escaping right.
To be fair you can write pretty decent code in CF if you know how to code but if you knew how to code why would you be coding in CF?
The ColdFusionMafia ultimately got the organization to spend upwards of $500k worth of software licenses and people's time to implement a commercial CMS product that was ultimately abandoned. They pulled me off a project that was really worthwhile and it ended up in a project failure that caused my whole group and everybody above it all the way to the top of the organization to get fired.
Some recruiter called me the other day wanting to know if I want to code ColdFusion in Ohio and I'm like I'd rather be shuffling punched cards....
Sounds like a bad job. I've had bad jobs but I've never blamed the language.
CF is easy to get started in, so is PHP. I've seen some horrible spaghetti code in both languages. That doesn't make either of them bad.
I like CF because I like writing fewer lines of code to get things done. That doesn't stop me from looking at other languages seeing if something is better.
In fact some members of the community are blogging the seven languages in seven days book, not all of us have blinders on;<).
http://www.getrailo.com/com/index.cfm/whyrailo/developers/
(Scroll to bottom where they address why for PHP devs)