shtml and coldfusion

thegeldingthegelding
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
planning on re-doing our hospital website...i'm told they do most everything in, and i quote: shtml (server side html) or ColdFusion....



easy to work with?? sites i should skim over before i hang with the geeks at IT and make a fool of myself?



thanks



g



can i do them on a mac?



edit--opps google and webmonkey are your friend.... here is a start i guess





is it bad that i want to spank my webmonkey?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    johnqjohnq Posts: 2,763member
    I can only speak for ColdFusion:



    You can get the developer version of ColdFusion and install it on your Mac, for free from Macromedia. You will need their JRUN also (and you should try to get your Java up-to-date from Apple)



    (Look around Macromedia for any pertinent JRUN or CF updates too, not sure lately.)



    Install JRUN then ColdFusion. It's fairly simple install. Ask if you have problems.



    This will let you write Coldfusion code and test it on your local machine. It's not meant for serving content permanently or at a large scale, just development.



    If it works on my G3 iBook then it should work on your setup.



    I typically do 100% of my development on an iBook, believe it or not. Flash/Photoshop/BBEdit/DreamWeaver/Transmit FTP/CF/JRUN and preview in Safari. I could do MySQL too but typically it's MS SQL Server and that's out of my hands (although I could use Remote Desktop Connection to a PC).



    As far as the language itself it is a very nice scripting environment. Very succinct. ColdFusion code, as compared to nearly any other scripting language typically results in far less lines of code than say ASP, Perl, PHP.



    It is tag-based and is very easy to read as well. It has most everything you'll want in a robust scripting language, perhaps not all the deep stuff Perl or PHP might have. But then ColdFusion has benefits the others don't have, namely not looking like the dog chased a cat across your keyboard, i.e. readability.



    Dreamweaver is fairly tight with CF now...but BBEdit is fine too, just not as many CF-specific niceties. (The 3rd party CF Glossary is just ok)



    Compare this CF code:

    http://99-bottles-of-beer.ls-la.net/c.html#Cold-Fusion



    ...to this ASP code:

    http://99-bottles-of-beer.ls-la.net/a.html#ASP



    Both do the same thing but CF is arguably clearer to read and understand.



    --



    Since shtml is not a programming language (nor is html) it can't really be compared to CF. CF is a programming language with variables and expressions and conditionals whereas shtml/html is just text with markup tags. SHTML is basically HTML but which uses server side includes (SSI) to allow for leaving content in multiple exterior files. If the server sees .shtml it knows to grab the text from any include tags listed in the .shtml document.



    CF relies heavily on includes as well, but let's you do logic, conditionals, etc and is a fairly real programming language...ok, "scripting" language, anyway!
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