Are there too many choices in ColdFusion?
posted under category: ColdFusion on April 2, 2010 by Nathan
Too many choices is both a way to fail and a way to succeed. The choices make it undoubtedly more difficult to choose your development path. Let's talk about some of these choices.
IDEs: CFEclipse or ColdFusion Builder for Eclipse lovers. Dreamweaver and HomeSite for the traditional people. And then there is the plethora of other multi-purpose-but-supports-CF notepad replacements, including but not limited to: TextMate, Notepad++ and jEdit.
Front Controller Frameworks. Fusebox, Mach-II, Model-Glue, ColdBox, OnTap and CFWheels, not to mention the newer minimal frameworks, FB3Lite, LiteFront and FW/1.
ORM tools, from Transfer to Reactor, CFWheels' built-in ORM and Hibernate via CF9's ORM.
Bean Factory / Dependency Injection Frameworks, including ColdSpring, ColdSpring Lite and LightWire.
Servers: Adobe ColdFusion 8 or 9, in demo, developer, professional or enterprise flavors. BlueDragon JX, Java or .NET in enterprise or standard and Open BlueDragon, and Railo regular, express with Jetty, express with Resin or custom.
And that's leaving out most of the alternatives that are pure crap, as well as not even thinking about entire categories of applications like CMS', Blogs, Wikis, and so on.
There are a lot of things a new developer has to weed through. How do you choose?
This is sort of an abrupt ending, so I'll try to hit this again tomorrow.