SSL market share, longevity, etc.

I am in the process of starting a site with a buddy of mine. We've gotten an initial prototype up using WordPress and some homegrown PHP, but as we start to consider fleshing out the more advanced features we want to provide, we are considering other options for server-side development.

I suggested perhaps going with ColdFusion since I am the primary developer on this project at this point, and that is my strength when it comes to the server side. I have little reservation about how to do much of the proposed functionality in ColdFusion, but not so much confidence yet with PHP.

My friend and cohort in this endeavor is concerned about ColdFusion's longevity. I think it's fairly well established, and Macromedia doesn't seem like it's going anywhere anytime soon, but nonetheless, I thought some statistics might be interesting. My friend suggests ASP.NET, but then again he's a little bit of an MS-whore. Just a little...

So yes, I did a little searching with not much luck. I guess I'm not sure what strings to search for. If anybody could point me to some relevant resources, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!



Edit: Ooh! Almost forgot... I'd be especially interested in any insights into the development communities around particular languages. Their perceived strengths, weaknesses, proliferation, etc.

Well from your last perspective, PHP is the only framework of the three you've mentioned that isn't tied to the commercial interest of a particular company, so the community is gonna be much stronger. But of couse commercial products come with commercial build-rigour and support, and maybe that's more important to you.

There are other options as well - if you use XML and XSLT then the server side scripting will only need to be minimal - scripts to control sessions and do XML parsing, basically. You could also try Python, which runs in the same unix/apache framework [as PHP], but it's faster.

Yeah, I assumed the PHP community is the strongest and most prolific, but I just don't have much insight into other communities either. The issue of the interest of a business being at ALL tied to this project is of considerable concern, as the project is political in nature. We want as unbiased and foundation as possible, no questionable interests, etc. This is, again, and obvious tally for PHP.

It is looking like we might be ditching one of our hasty short term goals which would give us much more time, meaning I could dig into PHP more and get up to my CF speed on that.

I would still be interested in some stats on market share and any other opinions or reactions to what I've mentioned here, if nothing else, for my own curiosity.

Thanks, br0cake for the swift reply.

I work specifically in .net and have never had any problems locating resources or help. I really do not think I could say which community is stronger since I have not worked in both. I also think you can be unbiased and use a MS product. There are developers who have ported the .net framework to Linux (mono). .net itself is a great development platform and one should not let their m$ attitude get in the way of a professional decision.

Absolutely, allida, which is why I was considering ColdFusion. The issue with .net is that I don't know it at ALL. ;) But good points, you do make.

whilst trying not to be too evangelical for PHP .. first off see how most of the web is *nix (which does not entirely negate .NET , nor does mono do otherwise, since it is a long way from production quality)

web server market share (http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200410/index.html)

then look at the apache module share (http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.200410/apachemods.html)

Other contenders would be ...
Python which is certainly growing in popularity (and can $x000 google scripts be wrong ? ;) (but `faster than PHP` requires benchmarks at best)
Ruby ... well its a great language but mod_ruby never really got off the ground.
And of course PERL , mod_perl that is , its fast , powerful & has a great user base.

I forsee turbulence for PHP as the V4 to V5 changeover will not be as smooth as some would have liked, but I doubt it will do too much damage to overall usage.

All I know about cold fusion is that I don't like it, but thats just me , thing is that if I were shackled to win32 platform I would use .NET over CF without blinking.

err & there is JAVA , but I don't like to talk about that :D .

And brothercake , all respect dude but I think the XSL comment was daft :thumbsup: (I do expect XSL/XML to become a much larger part of our lives but not that much!)