Is Cold Fusion any good ?

Well it looks like the powers that be are going to try and force cold fusion on me, not good seeing as i'm a big fan of (and perfectly happy using) ASP ! Does anyone out there have any real experiance of cold fusion, at first glance it does'nt seem as flexible as ASP and some of sites i have seen tend to have lots of generated java applets and things all over them. If anyone has any good reasons why ASP is better i'd love to hear them ... it's all good ammunition to back up my case for keeping ASP as the primary development tool.

Cheers
Ian.

what is cold fusion and asp?

what i connect with cold fusion is a winamp skin, but i don't think that was what you were referring to : )

Ive used it, and its crap, its all java based code, but you program in a kind of VB, its just a little easier than ASP, but it doesnt seem worth all the extra overheads(Money, processing power) for some very small speed increases in your coding.

I have worked pretty extensively with ASP and ColdFusion.

Both offer server side scripting.

The functionality between the two is almost identical, although coldfusion has a few extra functions built in that are only available to asp with third party products such as file uploads).

CF is simpler to learn.
ASP is more popular.

CF is pretty expensive (You can develope basic CF free, as they´ve got a free download personal version but if you´re gonna publish it, you gotta pay for the CF server sw).
ASP is free.

CF uses totally proprietary tags.
ASP uses VBscript or JScript, so if you´ve any VB or Java based scripting you´ve gotta headstart.

CF can be a really good product for rapid DB driven site development, but there´s nothing ASP can´t do in a little more development time (and for free!).

Up to you, really...

Hmm...
that's a pretty comprehensive response shaunmccallig,

Where can I download the free version of the CF server from?

Its worth remembering you can use ASP in coldfusion as well... Why youd want to I dont know, but just in cas you did...

http://www.allaire.com/products/coldfusion/index.cfm

Coldfusion Express is the free "limited functionality" version, or I think you can try the full version for a limited time.

I´d advise the www.webmonkey.com coldfusion tutorials for a kickoff, If you want to get a scope for what it can do.