Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

bdcravens·

> All you need to know is SQL, and some HTML

So it's a reimagined ColdFusion? :-)

View on HN

I admit, I don't use CF.

I looked at the Wikipedia entry for it and I see its heavy on server side programming. Envelope replaces server side programming.

CF uses server side programming to make components whereas Envelope uses Javascript web components on the client side.

Their seems to be a lot of overlap in expected use cases. Internal apps, data-driven apps.

I apologize, I can't really assert much else do to lack of experience with CF.

Aside from implementation details, I think the premise is the same: simple data access using SQL and rendering using familiar HTML-like syntax for markup and logic. CF of course came about at a time when browsers were far less capable (1995), so rendering is of course on server. Additionally, I think CF probably has more middleware, but I really haven't given Envelope much of a look (you really need a standard docs page)

Check out the live demo. The docs are very extensive, but they work best inside the IDE.

Having worked on CF, it's not as bad as people made it out to be.

I actually worked with CF most of my career, spoke at some CF conferences, and still run the Houston CF user group. Don't use it as much as I used to (moved mostly to Rails for the ecosystem), but it's still a very capable language.

As someone who is still, 17 years later, running a large-ish production CF site on a daily basis, and still teaching new hires and interns to use CF every summer, I'm happy to see a little (!) CF love on HN.

I've built production apps in Rails, PHP, and CF, and I've tinkered with Go, Python, etc. I still haven't found a language that gets interns from "don't know HTML" to "working dynamic web thing" faster than ColdFusion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com