hello,

i am new to dynamic developments and using macromedia 8, i am not quite sure what way i should follow,some people say the coldfusion is the easiest to learn and some say php i am just stucked in the middle please share your thoughts with me...what are the advantages and disadvantages between these three languages.

asp/ php / coldfusion.

any comments help appreciated.

thanks in advance

I use ASP mostly and I have dabbled in ColdFusion. I don't know PHP.

Basically, the reason you're confused is because you need to figure out what you're trying to accomplish with each language. The best language(s) for you will be the one(s) that get you to your intended goals. There is no right or wrong answer to this question.

Advantages to ASP:

1) It works with Access (CF does too, from what I can recall, but it doesn't perform as well).

2) IF CODED PROPERLY (something most ASP-bashers never understand) then it will work very well and allow for spikes in traffic and other such issues.

3) There are knowledgeable people available that you can ask for help (such as myself and chrishirst), although there tends to be more PHP help publicly available.

4) If you're using a Windows server, it's the programming language that was built for it (that, and ASP.net but that's a whole other animal and I'm not going there.)

5) ASP will work with SQL Server.

Disadvantages of ASP:

1) Because it's an MS programming language, it generally only works best in the Windows environment which means hosting is about twice the cost. But that cost, if you learn to code it properly, is more than mitigated by speed to market/reduced development costs.

2) Some functionality (such as uploading files) requires additional component objects such as ASPUpload.

Advantages of ColdFusion:

1) It's tag-based, which is supposedly an advantage for some people. It doesn't affect me personally, and I don't consider it to be one, but you might.

Disadvantages of ColdFusion:

1) It's a Macromedia product. That means it has, as RPG-types would put it, a Suck factor of +10.

2) ColdFusion costs $2500 USD per server license. That generally makes ColdFusion hosting extremely expensive.

3) It generally doesn't perform as well as ASP when trying to work with Access databases.

4) On large-scale sites, it tends to run slowly (see Myspace.com).

That's about all I can think of right now.