An Architect's View

7 responses so far ↓

• 1 Eric Twilegar // Mar 3, 2005 at 1:03 PM

  This is a question I ask myself over and over, and my answer is there is no reason to, not really.
  
  My biggest gripes about the current computer world is licensing, and the insanity that comes with it. Upgrades that require a key that you got 4 years ago, subscriptions, and keys just not working.
  
  It is easier to pirate a key sometimes. When it is easy to pirate then buy and install, something is wrong. Sometimes I have to do both to get past bugs. Like the code breaking because it errorantly thinks you can't do something with your key. When that happens I wish I could slap the devoloper in the face. Most of the time I just copy the cfusionmx directory from a good box, hack the registry to make it a service, and then change the key in the admin. Props to Macr for letting you change it.
  
  
  Almost everytime I hear the word enterprise thrown on to an application I'm always sceptical. CF was no exception. Usually I'm not a zealot, and don't take techincal things personally, but this gets me all worked up.
  
  The first thing is the huge price gap. We are talking thousands of bucks here. Not just a few hundred. If the price is over double, shouldn't it have double the features, or double complicated features. In almost all cases usually "enterprise" are add-ons to generate more revenue, there is nothing enterprise about the features.
  
  Let's analyze ColdFusion MX 7 and 6.1.
  
  1) Failover email servers.
  This might already be built into your infrastructure. Also the cfmail tag allows you to specify it. We have a central mail function in our apps, so we just added a setting. Save your money.
  
  2) Report threads.
  I laughed when I heard this was an "enterprise" feature. In an enterprise enviornment your report server is a seperate server. So just write your apps to point at your secondary server. Note that enterprise doesn't provide clustering and failover for the reporting. That is an enterprise feature, but with a little app coding you get the feature and the flexability.
  
  3) An enterprise manager plugin.
  Do I even need to talk about this. Shouldn't this just be standard, I mean come on.
  
  4) Event gateways.
  Hmm what a nice powerful feature that everyone could use...lets get rich..muahaamuhaa.
  The funny thing about this is if you want something to run asyn, like a job or something you want it running on an isolated server. My work around for this is to by 2 enterprise servers and cluster them to form a "job" system. Call a web server to this cluster and have it start and async job. This is the closest thing to an enterprise feature though, especially the gateways that come with it. Having gateway support should be standard, and the pre-written ones should be enterprise.
  
  5) Database drivers.
  Merchant drivers suck the big suck. Use MS's jdbc driver if you are running SQL server, it will save you a lot of headache in high load sites.
  
  6) Multiple instances
  This is a feature that I can't really comment on because personally I would never use it. For the price of enterprise versus standard you can buy another web server and standard. Talk about true isolation :) For a hosting company trying to cut back on power costs, cool.
  
  
  I could go on and on about the std v. ent editions of MS SQL server, and of ...ick.... Crystal reports. In almost all cases they stick on some good functionality, but it has tons of bugs and loose ends. If you are going to charge k's of extra cash, you'd better make the sell.
  
  My advice is work around and do what you can with std and save your cash for the hardware and for your developers. If Macromedia is listening, consider selling add-ons for each of the features so people don't end up paying for things they don't need. To your bean counters it won't matter because most "corporate" shops have huge budgets and will just bend over for you. :) Just consider it from ethical positions instead of financial ones for a least a minute or two.
  
  

• 2 Sean Corfield // Mar 3, 2005 at 1:40 PM

  If you would "never use" multiple instances, then you are seriously missing out on one of the most important enterprise features. We run multiple instances on all our production servers to take better advantage of multi-processor machines as well as provide isolation between systems.
  
  I run multiple instances locally so that I can develop multiple sites that all have different custom tag and mapping requirements.

• 3 Sean Warburton // Mar 6, 2005 at 4:19 PM

  I have a copy of JRun 4 already, can I just purchase CF MX Standard and combine that with my JRun 4 to have Enterprise?

• 4 Sean Corfield // Mar 6, 2005 at 4:28 PM

  Sean, no, CFMX Standard does not have the option to deploy on a J2EE application server - that is a feature of CFMX Enterprise.
  
  Note that the Developer Edition allows for deployment to a J2EE server (for development).

• 5 Sean Warburton // Mar 6, 2005 at 4:35 PM

  Ouch, I have a shrink wrapped version of JRun 4 with two year subscription and a shrink wrapped copy of CF MX 6.1 Standard with two year subscription sat on my bookshelf and I get a sinking feeling that I bought the wrong thing.

• 6 Sean Warburton // Mar 6, 2005 at 4:37 PM

  BTW, the Jrun4 is a 2 CPU version and cost a LOT of money for me (I'm a start-up business). I had been considering using WebObjects but I've been reading more and more about CF and was tempted by it's learning curve when compared to WebObjects.

• 7 Sean Corfield // Mar 6, 2005 at 5:02 PM

  If you want to do both Java and ColdFusion development, you can deploy JRun and CFMX Standard side-by-side and do Java development on JRun and ColdFusion development on CFMX. However CFMX Standard includes a captive version of JRun so it doesn't need the separate JRun in order to work.
  
  CFMX Enterprise also includes a full license of JRun and can be deployed in a number of ways.
  
  ColdFusion is certainly easier to learn than WebObjects!

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