Re: Cold Fusion/Oracle DESPERATE!

joelracicot_at_home.com (Joel Racicot) wrote in <38E2AC7A.CCF0CE26_at_home.com>:

>Van,
>
>I installed an eval copy of Cold Fusion on our departmental web server
>using Oracle 8.0.5 and IIS. My experiences were very positive.
>
>I was able to quickly develop an application that retrieved data from
>the database and displayed it in a hierarchical manner (with drill down
>to the children) to four levels. I was also able to build in data
>editing and creation capabilities. I did all this with no experience
>using CFML ( Cold Fusion Markup Language) tags in about 1 day. The only
>help I had was the online reference docs.
>
>Based on that experience and the fact that my bosses liked the output,
>we went ahead and purchased it.
>
>As far as Apache goes, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.
>Allaire says it works with their product and for once, I can say that I
>believe them.
>
>Hope this helps.
>
>Joel
>
>Van Messner wrote:
>
>> I'm the DBA at a large company. Installed OAS a month or so
>> ago but the sysadmins had trouble making it work smoothly with
>> Apache. OAS worked fine with Oracle's web server and all other
>> pieces worked well.

Oddly, I've got the opposite problem...I've been using ColdFusion 4.0.1 successfully for a while now, but the managers are demanding PL/SQL. Another day, another language. :)

>> I'd like feedback from anyone who's used the product. Do you
>> like it? How does it compare with OAS? What do you think of the
>> interactions between Oracle/Cold Fusion/Apache? Any other input?

Depends on the version of ColdFusion you get. The enterprise version comes with the standard ODBC capabilities, but you ALSO get native drivers for Oracle, Sybase, and Sql7 that are very effective (we're using 8i for the back end). The language itself is easy to learn, well-supported, and (IMHO) far better-suited to web development, having been designed for that purpose from the start. It's very extensible, supports most internet-related and all filesystem-related functions internally, and there's probably a freeware add-on available for whatever functionality ISN'T there. I could go on, but I'd start to sound like an Allaire shill. ;) Which brings us to:

Oracle-specific Downside: CF has some problems with the execution of Oracle stored procedures; if you can get the functionality you need from basic SQL statements, you're fine, and CF assumes you'll be handling much of the procedural requirements from within the ColdFusion engine anyway. However, if you're looking to implement most of your business rules from within PL/SQL stored procs, you might want to consider other options until they get this sorted out.

HTH. HAND.

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