PHP / ColdFusion are definately well suited for their tasks. But I find that the following gets a little irritating.. PHP/CF are pure web languages, it's irritating in CF to have to use a browser to debug code. PHP can be run from a command line, but it's not really a command line language.. PHP/CF has little in namespaces, making it pretty tough to write anything complex without making a mess. mod_perl has the neat ability of being this huge complex beast, or, just a simple text munging engine (See Mason, Apache::ASP, or Template::Toolkit). Slashdot's faq response in concern to PHP vs. mod_perl was a good summation. I guess it just depends on what YOU like. Both are capable of doing what you need.