Last week the California Lottery site switched from the old IIS/ASP setup to an Apache/JRun/Cold Fusion setup. I applaud the first two, but what are they thinking using Cold Fusion on a site that is so heavily trafficked?

I visited the site yesterday, the day after a biweekly drawing and it was a pitiable mess. Most of the pages were unresponsive, the pages that did come up took forever, JRun errors were popping up all over the place, all the signs of a bogged down server, and one I have seen too often with Cold Fusion. Cold Fusion is just not up to the task.

So I wrote an email to the CEO of the company that performed the site redesign lambasting his choice of Server environments on a site that, as a lottery player and taxpayer, I help to pay for. I’ll paste the letter below.

“As a California taxpayer and lottery player who helps to pay your contract with the California Lottery site, I needed to write to you and question the choice of Cold Fusion as the scripting language for the California Lottery site. I am encountering JRun errors all over the site and the site is unbearably slow if not totally unresponsive.

“I realize you changed the pages last week and while the old ASP pages may have been dated, they did not completely fail like Cold Fusion is currently doing.

“As an experienced web developer I would never use Cold Fusion on a heavily trafficked site like calottery.com. It is not up to the task and never has been.

“I would urge you to switch to Java, ASP or PHP ASAP. You also might consider a distributed environment like Akamai, or generating daily static pages that don’t need to go through Cold Fusion’s horribly inefficient engine.”

As you may surmise I’ve never liked Cold Fusion. Given the (IMHO better) available options, and the fickleness of Macromedia, I would never base a project on it. Not surprisingly, the development company for the California Lottery site uses Cold Fusion for their own site, so CF is probably their language of choice.

Oh well, another pork barrel project that will have to be redone at our expense. Hey Arnold, how about scrapping this contract and restoring funding to care for the elderly poor!