ColdFusion

how good is it?

[u4eas]

Hi, I am a designer not really a Dev guy. I use basically all of Macromedias products. I am thinking about setting up a ColdFusion server at work and start playing with it. I wanted to know what other people in the industry think about it.

Pros and Cons?

(I am not worried about cost, mostly worried about learning curve and what I can do with it.)

Here is the first project I want to do if I do dive into CF world:

I would like to make a store locator where one could search for stores based on zip, city, state, country, or area code.

Any words of advice on CF would be greatly appreciated.

u4ea

[SinclairUser]

Hi,

Are you going to have all of those variables stored in a database and just query against them or are you going to have to derive any of them from partial information?

The reason I ask is that I worked on a project for Experian and they wanted to standardize marketing data based on some of the above mentioned criteria and it got pretty complicated trying to work it all out. I used perl on a linux box and it was not easy.

[u4eas]

all info is in both SQL and ACESS DB's
(two versions of the same DB)

[PaulPaul]

ColdFusion is an excellent product, and I recommend you take a stab at creating your app in CF..

[lorax]

u4eas,
re: pros/cons - there has been a lot of discussion on CF on this Board so I won't repeat it. Do a a search on Cold Fusion and you'll get back a plethora of stuff to read.

FWIW I used to use CF but have since switched to PHP. CF is a relatively easy language to learn and had a good support community at the time I was using it (pre-Macromedia). Can't speak to it's support base now. But I know it's still out there and has a good following.

[u4eas]

just got CF Dev edition set up on my design station, it sure is awesome...

I have just been playing with some tutorials off of macromedias site...

I seem to be picking it up pretty quick =)

Thx for the help

u4ea