Even though I’m kind of happily based here in London, now, I still kind of refer to the town of Helensburgh as my “home” – perhaps it’s always that way with the place you grew up.
Anyhow, I’m off home later this week to attend the wedding of my good friends Stuart and Audrey – I’m hoping it’s a great day for them.
Today I went to a free Cold Fusion seminar in London. It was held by Macromedia, who have become the corporation behind the server side technology since their merger with Allaire in May.
I’ve never used the language before, although I had a rough idea of what went on, but I can say that I was very impressed by how easy it was to create database driven pages very swiftly. Certainly it looked much quicker than what I use, PHP – although that’s to be expected when PHP is free and Cold Fusion has a 1200 dollar price tag for the development studio alone.
Most hilarious though was the part of the seminar when the constantly Ummming and Emmming “Sales Engineer” showed a slide that had Cold Fusion doing a db query and output in four lines of code compared to 20-odd lines in PHP. It was total bullshit, as the CF code had no error handling, graceful failure, or page formatting code in there when the PHP code did – yet the Sales Engineer was presenting it like for like.
I pointed this out – saying I was slightly annoyed and that he didn’t have to tell lies to convince me that CF was a great looking product. Several Ummm’s and Emmm’s later he admitted that it was wrong to compare code from one language with that of another, and that the ASP code they showed was slightly bloated too. So why did he do it!?
My trip to LA was one of the best holidays I’ve ever had. The car rental people, Alamo were fantastic and deserve a special mention!
Our Chevrolet Malibu seemed to be running fine, but when the engine warning light came on we took it back to see if they could fix it. There were no questions asked, no extra charges, no blame implied – they just told us to go and pick up a new car. This turned out to be a Pontiac Grand Am with 4 miles on the clock. Fantastic service if you ask me!