ColdFusion Product Overview

ColdFusion, from Allaire, provides an application development platform suitable for network software. Although it's not as glamorous as, say, cold fusion nuclear energy, ColdFusion does include some exciting technology in its own right.

In a nutshell, ColdFusion provides components that enable the creation of dynamic, database-powered Web applications. By "Web applications," I mean software applications and services built with Web technologies -- both public Internet and intranet software. Examples of potential ColdFusion applications on the intranet in particular include business process automation, training, content management, and bulletin board conferencing. On the Internet, ColdFusion can play a role in ecommerce sites just to name one example.

ColdFusion possesses a number of features that make it potentially appealing for Web development. It offers a high-level programming model not drastically different from the HTML files and editors that many Webmasters already know. It has been designed to allow for the integration of custom modules -- important for organizations looking to tailor software to fit their specific needs. And it supports connectivity to databases.

ColdFusion Studio 4.5 (click to enlarge)

More specifically, the designers of ColdFusion built the product with these four goals in mind:

• rapid application development
• scalability
• integration
• security

Rapid application development, or RAD, is a relative thing. In this case, the term refers to ColdFusion's visual tools and high-level interfaces. Instead of writing server software in a system programming language like Java or C++, developers can use the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) that has syntax very similar to HTML, XML and other-tag based formats. The product also includes visual debugging and administration tools.

Scalability is also relative... a matter of degree. ColdFusion's main scalability feature is support for dynamic load balancing and automatic fail-over in clustered environments. In other words, the product can be configured to use and divide work amongst multiple servers. For high-traffic, very dynamic environments, this may provide substantial benefit.

ColdFusion offers a number of different integration mechanisms for external services: EJB, COM, and CORBA, for example. On the database side, ColdFusion also includes support for SQL and ODBC. By supporting this much alphabet soup, ColdFusion tries to accommodate a wide range of environments.

Overall, the product consists of these three key components:

• ColdFusion Studio
• ColdFusion Server
• ColdFusion Administrator

Studio is the product's integrated development environment (IDE). Its HTML editor is based to a large extent on Allaire's HomeSite product. Server is the product's run-time environment. And Administrator includes the tools for administration and remote debugging.

ColdFusion offers network software creators another alternative to home-grown client-server application development. The product has been existence since 1995; it was also one of the first commercial application servers available for the Linux operating system. Depending on the version and edition chosen, the total cost for ColdFusion is unlikely to exceed a few thousand dollars (USD).

Database-driven network software development continues to be a hot area of activity. ColdFusion, then, might be worth considering in your future plans.

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