Moving from Coldfusion to PHP

I've been a Coldfusion Developer for as long as I've been developing web-based applications. I've always dabbled in other languages (Ruby on Rails, PHP, ASP.NET) but in the end I've always moved back to Coldfusion because no other language could help me develop applications as quickly as Coldfusion did. Coldfusion is the best at doing what it does: allowing a single developer to create web-based applications with advanced functionality quickly, but not necessarily effeciently. Coldfusion has always had a problem churning out spaghetti code developers.

I've always kept a close eye on PHP, with its continous improvements, cross-platform capabilities, and ease of installation it has always been something that I've been interested in learning, but as of the Blackstone release (Coldfusion MX 7), Coldfusion again offered more in terms of built in functionality.

Another gripe I've always had about Coldfusion is the need to define your settings and Database Connections in the Coldfusion Administrator. This makes it hard to develop apps to the general market as it requires knowledge by the end user on how to configure the Coldfusion Datasources, as well as any other mappings that may be required. Not really the ease-of-use that you want for your customer.

And again, another downside is the cost outlay. If you want to develop in Coldfusion for your organization, be expected to use a free alternative like BlueDragon (which doesn't fully support all the bonus stuff in CFMX7), or fork out a good wad of cash to get the Standard Server edition. This is where PHP intrigues me. It's both free, and has a ton of resources available for free online.

Recently I've also created an application using PHP's QCodo framework which was created by a genius named Mike Ho. This framework does what I've been trying to do with Coldfusion for ages, simplify the MVC layout by making access to things your controllers and databases pretty transparent. I was able to create a full Ajax style application for recording and managing my bands instrument and backline settings in a day and a half. Quite complex and yet, so easy to develop, one page, less than 1000 lines of code (which I could probably trim down if I went through and removed duplicate and created generic functions) and I didn't even have to worry about the database or how to get child tables, counts, controls, etc. QCodo already did it for me.

This now begs the question, can PHP with QCodo replace my current Coldfusion with Model-Glue/Reactor/Coldspring framework, I think the answer is yes, which only begs a few other nagging problems. What about my current LDAP integration, no problem, PHP has LDAP integration, and if you're using WAMP as your server, it's only 2 mouse clicks away from activated, plus, PHP allowed me to run on encrypted Port 636 where in Coldfusion, too many factors played into getting ecrypted data to work.

What about PDF generation on the fly? No worries, PHP also offers many free alternatives for creating PDF from HTML on the fly, and many work without a hitch and minimal configuration.

Okay, so that's two major benefits of Coldfusion that PHP can handle. But here's a good one for ya, scheduled tasks. Since PHP doesn't have an Administrator like Coldfusion, how exactly are you going to run scheduled tasks on PHP scripts? Easy! WGet is the answer. And the bonus is, WGet is a cross-platform command line utility which means that any system administrator can set up WGet to run as a Windows/Linux/Unix Scheduled Task to run at specified intervals. So where does that leave my opinion of Coldfusion vs. PHP, pretty much tied, except that PHP is free, widely used in the community, has a ton of documentation and forums, tools, user-scripts, and overall, is closer to real programming languages like C, rather than tag based as Coldfusion is to HTML.

I don't know where I'm going to go from here, but I do know that PHP is a serious competitor, and I going to be spending the next week taking a serious look at converting my current web-app from Coldfusion to PHP... for the benefit of all! ;)