Opinions please on VB.NET vs. Cold Fusion & Others........ 3

[mohrorless]

We are going to be re-writing a major app here and it will be put on our intranet. The current system was done a year ago in Visual Foxpro 6.0 and now with a new administration, they want some major changes and to have it deployed city wide (it is already across most of the city on LANs and every month the users transmit their data to a central location ).

The big tossup is whether to do it in VB.NET or in Cold Fusion. Or is there another approach we should consider?

Has anybody out there used either of them (or better yet BOTH of them )? Has anybody done anything like this in either and wants to share the experience? Is there something out there that leaves them in the dust?

Right now we are in the very prelim planning stages - still meeting with the users and don't hate them yet.

Thanks in advance!

John

 

[olichap]

I'm not too familiar with everything possible in Cold Fusion. One large difference is that, in theory, you can render pretty much the same sort of user interface capabilities with the .NET Web Forms in an ASP as you can building the forms into your typical VB application. You use the same event/object oriented programming model for web apps as with VB.NET, C#, etc. Also, when creating a .NET web-page, .NET supposedly handles the rendering of the document for support by the various browsers (IE, Netscape, and their different versions). I don't think Cold Fusion does this but am not a Cold Fusion developer.

I've not done too much UI development yet with .NET but have been very impressed so far. I've been dealing with the parsing of huge text files; .NET handles string manipulation many times better than VB6 (and much faster).

 

[andylo]

To your situation, I reckon you are better off using ColdFusion rather than ASP.NET/VB.NET.

I'm a programmer working on both environment at the moment, although I found CF is a bit hard to debug, but it is actually easier to program and configurate, a lot smaller application size, faster and better performance and Most Importantly... Very stable.

The down side... well, because it is not make by Microsoft, it's MS application support is not as strong. But if your new project is not plan to tie up with lots of MS applications, why bother.

Don't make me wrong, I don't mean .NET platform is sux... I like it very much as well. But purely for business purpose, I like ColdFusion a lot more.

By the way, consider it as a side-benefit... you will found CF's community (especially on support) is strong and well organised, through out the lifecycle of development you will find this is very helpful.

If you need more info, let me know. ^_^

Andy

 

[link9]

As far as stable goes, Microsoft has made great strides in this area.

For instance... Garbage Collection. It is able to detect and recover from memory leaks, access violations, and the like, whereas in the "old" days, these types of issues could have caused a crash.

And what happened in the "old" days when your ASP app crashed? Your webserver crashed, too. Why? Because ASP and IIS used to run in the same process. That's no longer the case. They run in separate processes now.

So in the worst case, even if your app was written so badly (nothing personal, I'm just sayin' ;-) ) that it leaked memory too fast for garbage collection to clean it up, and your app suffers a total crash, what happens?

ASP.NET engine restarts (5-10 seconds) and while it's doing it's thing over there, requests for .aspx pages are queuing up over in IIS land (not getting denied... just waiting patiently). When the engine restarts, it starts accepting requests and serving responses. The user notices a slight pause... and goes on thinking it was his/her ISP.

But wait... there's more.

VB.NET is now an object oriented language that supports, among other things, full implementation inheritance. What's this mean? It means that with a bit more initial development and planning time (to build up a toolbox), you, the developer, spend infinitely less time programming your pages on the back-end, and any other developer that comes along behind you (or beside you) can take advantage of everyone else's work. Yes, you could do this before, but no through true inheritance (at least not in the VB world), and never with so much ease.

Deployment? copy/paste/compile/forgetit

Ok, not quite that easy... but easy. LOL

Data transfer is also a breeze with XML. The dataset (a beefed up version of the recordset) has a .writeXML method -- along with the converse .readXML that makes porting data across any platform a breeze.

<disclosure>
There's my two cents, and keep in mind that I'm a bit biased having just learned alot about this new platform at a conference, so I'm a bit pumped up about it at the moment. I'm of the opinion that they've really outdone themselves this time. I have yet to come across a serious gripe, but the night is still young.
</disclosure>


paul

 

[mohrorless]

Thanks Guys!

This will really help us make out decision. We are waiting for the user to get abck to us with their final &quot;wish list&quot; for the project (they have until 5/17). Once they get back to us we will sit down ad start the full blown decision then. Your opinions/suggestions/2 cents will help us a lot when we do sit down and decide.

Thanks again!

John

 

[tdtomlins]

So what was the Answer to your delima did you go with Cold Fusion or .NET. Let us know.

Thanks
Tomlins

 

[mohrorless]

Tomlins,

I hope you haven't been holding your breath for a solution.

As is inevitable in the city agencies in NYC, people retire, get transferred or promoted. In this case all 3 happened and the project has been put on hold until the user’s office settles down from the new bosses and the budget thaws out to free up the funding for the project.

Of course this prevented a decision on anything by the inDUHvidiuals in charge in my area. If anything changes, I’ll be sure to post the decision that gets made (if any).

John