Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Corsair on June 16, 2006, 01:22:42 pm
-
Okay, so I'm interning for a foundation right now that is trying to do a serious facelift on their website and they asked me to research the differences between php, cold fusion, and drupal. I have no idea what any of these really are so I was hoping you guys could maybe give me some help... what are these, what are the differences and the ups and downs, and what do you favor?
Thanks guys!
edited for spelling
-
ColdFusion is powerful, PHP is free and in the right hands equally as powerful. Druple, never even heard of.
-
PHP = Free, fast, open-source, long development time.
CF = Expensive, slow, closed-source, fast development time.
Druple - Do you mean Drupal? If so, never used it so I won't comment.
Anyway, out of the two I do know of, I prefer PHP. Mainly because it's free and I can readily understand the syntax due to it being quite C-like, whereas CF's syntax is rather alien to me. Plus it's faster (runs faster, to be specific), which is generally a nice thing. There is no doubt though that if you know what you're doing, you get stuff done faster with CF.
-
Yeah, I guess I did mean Drupal... like I said, I don't really know what it is.
-
http://drupal.org/about ? :)
-
Thanks, Fury. I'm curious about people's experiences with them as well though, that's why I'm asking here.
-
Drupal - A content management system. It'll save you the trouble of writing a backend to your website in PHP. However, it'll probably make your website look like a generic templated website unless you spend time customizing it.
Coldfusion - Don't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldfusion#Criticism).
PHP - A badly designed programming language. Good for small projects, horrible for large projects. Pretty good community-edited documentation.
If you're not familiar with web programming it may be a good idea to stick to a content management system or find a good web framework that'll make the programming easier (Ruby on Rails, Django, TurboGears, Zope/Plone, etc.).
-
I'm not the one who's going to be actually putting the site together... I'm just the one doing the research on the different languages because i was asked to. *shrug*
-
Out of the 3 of those, Drupal is the only actual "product". The other two are only tools for making a website, whereas Drupal is a ready-to-go system.
Like Kamikaze said, unless you are willing to spend time and effort to customize it, it's going to look like generic crap. On the other hand, whoever is doing the website would need to invest time in to it anyway, at least this way you have a solid back end. Also, the needs of the website are important to consider. If all you need is a simple presentation website that's not going to put out a lot of content on a regular basis, than your best bet is probably to just code the thing by hand.
-
Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET 2.0. Much better than any of those, although ASP.NET 2.0 will require IIS.
-
Okay, so now I've been given new marching orders: Drupal vs. Joomla? I'm checking them out but it would be helpful to have some input from anybody who's worked with either or both of them before. Thanks all.
-
You should check out opensourcecms.com (http://www.opensourcecms.com/). They have installations of various CMS suites for trial purposes.
-
Okay, so now I've been given new marching orders: Drupal vs. Joomla? I'm checking them out but it would be helpful to have some input from anybody who's worked with either or both of them before. Thanks all.
Here's a tip - look at the communities for each. Nothing beats a large, friendly, helpful community, at least where OSS is concerned.
-
PHP = Free, fast, open-source, long development time.
CF = Expensive, slow, closed-source, fast development time.
Druple - Do you mean Drupal? If so, never used it so I won't comment.
Anyway, out of the two I do know of, I prefer PHP. Mainly because it's free and I can readily understand the syntax due to it being quite C-like, whereas CF's syntax is rather alien to me. Plus it's faster (runs faster, to be specific), which is generally a nice thing. There is no doubt though that if you know what you're doing, you get stuff done faster with CF.
one error - PHP can be as fast as CF, just with extremely bad style - CF = harmful
-
PHP - A badly designed programming language. Good for small projects, horrible for large projects. Pretty good
:doubt:
hogwash - i maintain several php applications that have as many lines of code as the fs2 engine did when it was open sourced!
it's only horrible for large projects in the hands of people who don't know how to use the language
-
Most if not all languages become 'bad' in the wrong hands, and 'good' in the right ones, anyways. I don't think it's fair when people slate particular languages, usually they use criteria that are independent of the languages design and purpose, and also aside from good practice.
-
Bad design: http://tnx.nl/php (this site has some concrete numerical data to back the claims up, also links to many other critiques of PHP if you're interested)
PHP is nice for some things. It's easy to get started with and it's nice (for small projects) to be able to insert the code directly into the html via <?php>.
However, putting the code in the html isn't particularly good programming practice. It's conventional to separate presentation (the view) from the code (the controller). Hence the whole MVC buzzword.
-
So basically, if it comes down to Drupal and Joomla, it's whichever the person putting together the website will feel most comfortable with?
-
Tripod site constructor?
"runs"
-
PHP - A badly designed programming language. Good for small projects, horrible for large projects. Pretty good community-edited documentation.
How is PHP5 horible for large projects? Its object oriented and lacks the stupidity of JAVA, combine it with AJAX and your god.
also how is multiple built in functions a BAD thing? it saves you ridiculous ammounts of time writing your own crappy and slow functions, all the internal functions in PHP are written in C language which is the fastest thing on the market, so you cant compete with that
also all the arguments you specified in that link are total horse ****.
just a few here:
Documentation - PHP has probly the /best/ documentation EVER www.php.net
no hard core programmer community - hah yeah right programmer guru home -> www.devnetwork.net
-
How is PHP5 horible for large projects? Its object oriented and lacks the stupidity of JAVA, combine it with AJAX and your god.
I never said Java was any good for web either. I'm not a fan of Java at all. I prefer languages like Python or Ruby. I'd even take Perl over PHP.
also how is multiple built in functions a BAD thing? it saves you ridiculous ammounts of time writing your own crappy and slow functions, all the internal functions in PHP are written in C language which is the fastest thing on the market, so you cant compete with that
For one, because they're all in the main namespace (because PHP has *no other namespaces*). That's a stupid idea. Secondly, because many of those functions are unnecessary and can be condensed. It's pretty obvious that PHP's standard library is horribly designed if you take a look at some well-designed libraries. The STL (for C++) is a good example of a well-designed standard library. It has a lot of consistency (function naming, usage, etc.) and has a good balance of tools; not a confusing glut.