those points aside, an excellent article though.

These language features have nothing to do with OO.

Overloading really doesn’t make sense in an untyped language because you cannot perform overload resolution in any meaningful way (and certainly not in a performant way!).

Static is a holdover from C – where it is a storage class on a variable that controls the lifecycle of that variable and it is a linkage specifier on a function that restricts visibility to a single compilation unit. C++ expanded those meanings somewhat but it was still about lifecycle and linkage.

You could argue that an OO language “needs” class variables/methods (in addition to instance variables/methods) but, whilst that may be a common feature, it certainly is not a defining feature and several OO languages address this in very different ways (look at Smalltalk and Dylan for example).

Other than that, a good, balanced comparison!

Rails running on .NET has no point if Rails does not work well on Windows. It is more important that Ruby runs on .NET.

“Ruby itself is a much more portable language that can be used to write things other than web applications.”
Yes – CFML was designed to run inside the app server which ColdFusion is.

“Overloading? Statics?”
ColdFusion (or I should say CFML) supports “poor man’s overloading” in form of duck typing. There is no magic here, less work for the compiler. I really don’t see the point of method overloading in a dynamic language. Same with statics. No need for them in an web app, they can be easily replaced with singletons.
CFML supports all fundamental concepts of an OO language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_oriented#Fundamental_concepts

“Rails is a single framework choice, but not a bad one.”
True, but following “the Rails way” is not always a good idea. Sometimes you have to bend your idea to fit into “the Rails way”.

“There is (nearly) an official IDE for ColdFusion, and there are two or three unofficial ones for Rails that work in a variety of ways”
There is also unofficial CFEclipse, TextMate support and gedit support, some people still use HomeSite, DreamWeaver and even ColdFusion Studio.

“Rails has Rake, the rough equivalent of ANT or make, but it’s written in Ruby, meaning it’s very accessible. You don’t need to write (or learn) any Java.”
I don’t have much experience with ANT but AFAIR to write an ANT task I had to write XML not Java.

“ORM wise, ActiveRecord is sweet, it’s blindingly simple and built in, whilst fairly clever. Transfer and Reactor are nice from the ColdFusion point of view, but they are working within the limitations of the language (no statics, etc)”
It is official that CF9 is going to have Hibernate support, Railo is planning this as well. You can’t beat Hibernate. And to effectively work with an ORM you don’t need statics, etc. Take a look at Hibernate but use Java to do it. You’ll see how easy and powerful it is.

Good post anyway.

@Todd – Granted, however, I’ve not been ‘unhappy’ per se of ColdFusion, I am just a very critical person with my tooling, especially if it’s not OSS where I can’t directly change things.

I would look more at OpenBD, except I don’t agree with the licensing, and Railo, but I don’t beleive the results would be that different other than the pricing issue (and some missing interoperability stuff dotted around the place)

I think based on previous blog entries, you should consider looking into OpenBD or Railo. It seems like you haven’t been happy with Adobe CF’s implementation of CFML for some time now and I think you might find the other two a breathe of fresh air. Matt Woodword and crew have been putting a lot of time into Open BD, as Gert, Michael & team with Railo. They’re very approachable teams and open to new ideas and implementations. They both follow a core and then acknowledge vendor specific new ’stuff’.

@Jay – Overloading? Statics?