PHP versus Cold Fusion

[gordon]

For scripting languages which one would you reccomend PHP or Cold Fusion? I will primarily be interacting with mysql for now.

Instead of lerning everything under the sun, I will concentrate on certain applications and then outsource when I need to use applications I am not as familiar with.

So for now I am trying to decide to use PHP or Cold Fusion. This decsion also effects hosting options.

[jamesa]

I'd definitely go with PHP:
- it's free
- well documented
- powerful
- will run on a wide variety of platforms (*nix, Windows, OS X, ...). Included by default on *nix and OS X systems.
- hosting that supports PHP is widely available (probably cheaper too)
- very simple language to learn
- built for web development

I started in Perl, but for the last few years I've been using PHP exclusively - from simple contact forms to full-blown content management systems and other cool stuff.

<disclaimer>I never used ColdFusion.</disclaimer>
<bias>ColdFusion seems too proprietary</bias>

[olwen]

I went with PHP by default, but I like the fact that it's readily available, and runs on my Win98 machine. There's a host of scripts available as well.

[dvduval]

Servers running Cold Fusion do cost a little more, but I have found Cold Fusion much easier to learn. For the last 6 month, I have been learning both PHP and Cold Fusion. It seems I can "figure things out myself" much easier in Cold Fusion.

PHP is really cool because there are so many pre-written scripts available. If you need to accomplish a specific task, the chances are good that someone else has written a script to do it already.

It's also common to see people learn both PHP and Cold Fusion, because there are many similarities.

[gordon]

Thanks for the info. With all that said, I have decided to start with PHP. It seems to be as robust as cold fusionand the web hosting is more reasonable.

I will play around with Cold Fusion locally but not pay the big bucks for Cold Fusion hosting unless I get a client that really needs it.