ColdFusion leaves me cold

2005 Dec 4 at 01:47 » Tagged as :

I am trying out Cold Fusion for the very first time. There was a big fuss many years ago about cold fusion of Hydrogen. It turned out to be a damp squib. Coldfusion software leaves me a bit cold. The download is a whopping 276Mb. There are complete linux distros that include JVMs and GCC that happen to be smaller.

You would expect a product with such a gigantic download to have a GUI installer. In the case of Macromedia, the company famous for their UIs, they haev simply overlooked this point.

A huge portion of that installer seems to be taken up by a JVM, which is more than a bit silly because an update date version of the JVM can be downloaded separately by those who do not have it.

The EULA seems to take up a fair precentage of those 276 Mega bytes as well. There are so many pages to scroll through, you get the impression that this is an attempt to confuse even the most seasoned lawyer.

Finally, the installer took me to the next step where it contained about not been able to find C++ compatibility library. It's looking for an old 2.2.5.x while what comes with Fedora Core 4 is 2.3.5.x

The next step you see another reason why the installer is so bloated; the same installer works for three different editions of Cold Fusion. This is even more lame than old versions of Jbuilder wherethe only difference between the free and the enterprise editions were in the license key.

Just when you get fed up with the whole thing it tells you a joke, just to lighten your day. After presenting a list of choices in a (text only ) menu, you are asked to 'Please select one of the following options'.

After answering another half a dozen questions the installer finally copied the files to the HD. It takes up all of 400 MB. Windows users may think nothing of it but on linux we don't use bloatware.