CF to PHP?

[nvmdhar]

Hello,
I've a newbie question. How easy is it to shift a web-interface
written in Cold Fusion to PHP? Is it advisable to do so?

I'm a grad student and I've extensive programming experience in C and
Java. I've never used php or cold fusion.
Currently, I am extending a web-based tool (in java). The
web-interface hosting this s/w is written in Cold Fusion(to allow
registration and basic security features). I need to modify this
web-interface to accomodate the new additions to my s/w tool. The
catch is that this web-interface was developed by a consultant. So we
don't have the devpt. environment to modify cold fusion.
The cold fusion code developed is very "patchy". I know what the
web-interface is supposed to do.

Also, currently we are running our s/w is runnign on a system running
IIS and MS-SQL on Windows Server. Eventually I plan to migrate the s/w
to a system running Apache, My-SQL on Linux server.

Any help or pointers would be appreciated.
tia,
Murai.

[Matthew Woodward]

Re: CF to PHP?

On 7/16/04 12:25 AM, in article
ff9d8c3.0407152 125.36aa2949@po sting.google.co m, "nvmdhar"
<dhar_ash@hotma il.com> wrote:
[color=blue]
> Hello,
> I've a newbie question. How easy is it to shift a web-interface
> written in Cold Fusion to PHP? Is it advisable to do so?[/color]

I've worked with both PHP and ColdFusion pretty extensively, and if you know
both languages pretty well it shouldn't be that difficult. If you're using
Java for part of the application, however, I'd really recommend you consider
looking into CF further before just converting everything to PHP. CFMX is
J2EE under the hood, so the interoperabilit y between CF and Java is really
phenomenal. You can even deploy applications written in CF on any J2EE
server.
[color=blue]
> I'm a grad student and I've extensive programming experience in C and
> Java. I've never used php or cold fusion.[/color]

If you're used to Java you may find the syntax and overall way PHP works to
be more familiar to you, but if you haven't worked with PHP or CF, I'd say
go with CF if for no other reason than you can build a lot of your
application in Java and leverage it directly from your CF code. Building
your backend components in Java and using CF for the middle to front-end can
make for a great application architecture.
[color=blue]
> Currently, I am extending a web-based tool (in java). The
> web-interface hosting this s/w is written in Cold Fusion(to allow
> registration and basic security features). I need to modify this
> web-interface to accomodate the new additions to my s/w tool. The
> catch is that this web-interface was developed by a consultant. So we
> don't have the devpt. environment to modify cold fusion.[/color]

The developer edition of CFMX is free, the only catch is that after 30 days
it becomes a single IP server. It's still fully functional however, so that
shouldn't slow down your development. For production you just have to buy
Macromedia CFMX, or a company called New Atlanta has a really nice CFML
engine called BlueDragon that you can use in production for free.

http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon

[color=blue]
> The cold fusion code developed is very "patchy". I know what the
> web-interface is supposed to do.
> Also, currently we are running our s/w is runnign on a system running
> IIS and MS-SQL on Windows Server. Eventually I plan to migrate the s/w
> to a system running Apache, My-SQL on Linux server.[/color]

Either CFMX or BlueDragon will run great on Linux and either one can
interface with MySQL quite easily.

Hope that helps--if you have further questions fire away!

Matt