Wirt after John,

<original snipped>

> A lot of people think that web-based internet transactions
> are difficult to
> program up, but as John explains here, they don't need to be.

<rest snipped>

It's not rocket science - a lot depends on the tool.

As Michael Gueterman pointed out earlier -- and he turned me on to this
tool... I will use Cold Fusion whenever possible.  It handles state
management for me, so I don't have to, and it does so quite nicely.

Drawback:  CF runs on NT and Unix.  NT to the 3000 is quite speedy though.
If you took the SIGIMAGE ballot last year, you actually used a Cold Fusion
app, went through an NT box, to a 3000.  (When it was launched, the NT box
was in Washington State and the 3000 here on the East Coast - and people
were STILL getting response times that were incredible).  It's not a couple
hundred dollars though (unless you get just the runtime version, where a
developer wrote the application for you).

There are plusses and minuses in both camps:  Using an App server such as
Cold Fusion gets your application up and running faster, and provides a lot
of extras to boot.  CGI (Perl, or even COBOL) provides everything on one
box, but there are firewall considerations and so forth.

Cheers,
Joe