Is PHP Running on Your ColdFusion Server? How to Check, and Remove It

Years ago I worked for a company that had an application, written in Delphi, running as a DLL in IIS (on Windows obviously). To more easily deliver certain features fast, open source PHP code was run in parallel, e.g. some customer wants a visitor counter, so that just got bolted on using PHP.

There are some absolutely insane systems out there.

When I was in undergrad we used CF quite a bit for the custom university applications. I cut a lot of my wed development teeth on it. But everyone hated it. So we were actually quite excited to get a PHP server. It could run open source alternatives to Blackboard after all!

I played around with PHP quite a bit in my senior year and got a job as a developer working for a PHP shop when I graduated. Boy was I absolutely disillusioned within 12 months. PHP nearly ruined my love of computers. It was an abusive relationship: I would spend my working hours writing horrible little patches to ancient systems that were made of spaghetti 10 miles long, then go home and night and weekend try to write beautiful code in PHP. The more little patches I wrote the more I felt the need to somehow make them right.

I escaped to Python and JS and have done a lot of therapy since. Doing much better these days, thankfully. My addiction to C seems like such a minor vice in comparison.

Next someone is gonna pipe up and say they used AI to enable them to continue using FrontPage extensions to keep their php+cf sites working

They're well-documented, well-supported products.

What gives me cold sweats are custom application servers that no one knows how they work.

Everything says that - look at Filemaker: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/agentic-development/

> evolving into an AI-powered, cloud-native platform

Everything is doing that.

It used by be a markup language like:

  <cfif blah="something is true">do this<cfelse>do that</cfif>

But now it has its own scripting language like:

  <cfscript>
  // scripty stuff
  </cfscript>

At least, that is how it used to be :)

I spent a good part of my career as a CF developer, but I found Homesite in the mid-90s. As a poor kid at college, carrying my editor around on a floppy to the various computer labs (yes it fit!) was very convenient.

Started with @seancorfield, he was the one behind FW/1 and the way he thought about architecture and would write about just resonated. Then he started migrating over doing these CF/Clojure things like `cfmljure` and kept reading his writing (which I recommend) and that got me to finally look into Clojure -- which led to Rich Hickey talks, and everything he talked about was everything I was overly frustrated with in programming, the mutations, over-engineered/complected objects and data modeling.

I forget which talk it is, but there is one (or more) where he goes into how we modeling the world/data in OOP and his annoyance with confusing identity, value, and state; bundling them up into mutating objects instead of having a stable identifier(label) that has an immutable fact or facts(values) at a point in time(state). And how objects act on each other instead of function working on data. I felt like someone reached into my head and said everything I was thinking in a way I was never able to express or formulate and then instead of just bitching about it he created a solution. I was sold, hook line and sinker.

It all just clicked for me, even reading clojure code (writing at first was another story) came easier than trying to follow some javascript. Maybe it was because I already had years of programming experience, but I knew nothing of Functional Programming, was skeptical of this immutable data bit but really wanted it to be real, and had never seen a Lisp before or knew anything about it (I got hired programming out of high school) -- but it all just made sense and was basically a come-to-Jesus moment that I dove into and it drastically improved my understanding of systems, architecture, data, and the like.