20211107-php_vs_coldfusion.txt When I was in high school, my school's website used extensions I had never seen before (and very rarely since): cfm. I came to learn it was ColdFusion (Adobe). My teacher was the webmaster and liked it well enough. Of course at the same time he was teaching my class HTML + tables layout (yikes). Understandable since HTML is a virtual necessity to understand CF anyway, and he wasn't going to teach any kid in his class how to mess with the school's website. (Sadly the school district later converted to 100% cookie-cutter school websites for uniformitiy. As usual, I am conflicted as I believe easier navigation is better, but still get sad about the loss of such a unique site.) This was before I knew what PHP was. So today out of curiosity, I was looking up PHP vs Coldfusion. It was predictably (in retrospect) littered with articles on how much better CF was than PHP, because the vast majority of people who would even compare CF to PHP would be the ones using CF (or selling it) themselves. I was a bit disappointed in my brief search for a fair comparison was naught, I did learn why CF was so rare: CF costs money and PHP is free (ironically an idiotic firm headed by some nut with an identity disorder said CF was actually cheaper "in the long run" because PHP "required" professional programs to make use of it). No wonder I found so many "Is CF dead?" posts. And no, I won't be illustrating parallels between :70 and :80 beyond this sentence as I'm sure anyone reading can see those for themselves. The best comparison I did find was a simple code comparison drawing from a MySQL + PHP database pull and a CF implementation of the same sort of db pull. Of course MySQL is totally optional to PHP, but this is not in the interests of CF apologists. PHP, despite (I'm sure) waning popularity in favor of JS frameworks, remains far ahead of CF in popularity. PHP may be a little harder to learn, but its popularity and open-source development makes it more likely to last and have more applications than CF. Unlike a debate I mentioned earlier, PHP and CF are in direct competition: Website + database design & implementation. It's a good sign that something standard and open wasn't shafted by a company with 100% control over the development of a web standard. It almost seems comical in 2021 to think that individual companies largely defined web experiences, although I still get nostalgic for those "Best viewed in at x resolution."