ColdFusion is a rapid application development language for the
web, developed by Macromedia. It's not free, but many people say
that it's more important to them to have the development speed
that ColdFusion offers - and you can download a free 'developer
version' to experiment with before you commit to anything.
No Need for a Test Server
One of the nicer features of ColdFusion is that it comes with a
whole application to help you write it the language. While it
can be used with Apache or IIS once you're finished, this
application effectively acts as your test server while you're
writing your scripts, saving you quite a lot of trouble.
As a downside, though, ColdFusion on the web can sometimes be
unreliable and slow, mainly because it runs on a Java framework.
Its Java support does, however, make it capable of running on
many more operating systems than it otherwise would be - for
most purposes, having written a page in ColdFusion is as good as
having used Java for it, but much less difficult. Since
ColdFusion also uses the ODBC (Open Database Connectivity)
standard instead of tying itself down to one database, this
gives you a lot of choices.
In other words, you're sacrificing some of your website's speed
in exchange for more choices and compatibility, and quicker
development time.
Easy to Learn
One of the things that makes ColdFusion easy to learn is that it
isn't all that different from normal HTML: it acts more like a
set of extension tags for HTML than like trying to get a
programming language to do things and output HTML afterwards.
This is because it was designed from scratch for the web - it's
not just a normal language trying to be web-compatible.
For example, here's some code that queries a database and writes
the fields it finds to the page:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE
id = '1'
#result.field_from_query#
You can see that the 'cfquery' tag is used for sending queries
to a database, while the 'cfoutput' tag adds text to the HTML.
The text surrounded by hashes (#) is a variable. How are
variables defined, you wonder? Like this:
Once you get used to thinking in tags, it starts to feel quite
natural: ColdFusion just feels more HTML-like than other
languages do.
Despite its simplicity, though, ColdFusion is considered to
compete more with languages like JSP and ASP.Net than it does
with PHP.
CFScript
Unfortunately, trying to write dynamic web pages with nothing
but tags can start to feel restrictive quite quickly, especially
if you want to do something complicated - you end up with a
hard-to-read mass of tags, reminiscent of trying to do a page's
layout with tables. To solve this problem, Macromedia introduced
CFScript, a Javascript-like language that you can use by putting
it between tags. If you're already a programmer, you
may find CFScript easier to work with than 'real' ColdFusion
code.
Java
One ColdFusion strength is that it doesn't just run on top of
Java - it can also call Java classes using its createObject
function and use any methods it needs to, with the results being
put in ColdFusion variables. This will be very useful to you if
you have existing Java code or know of Java code that you'd like
to make use of - you'll get access to all the J2EE libraries as
well as ColdFusion's own. It's this fact that has led Macromedia
to market ColdFusion as "a scripting layer for J2EE". Of course,
whether or not that excites you is a matter of personal
preferences.
Integration with Other Macromedia Products
If you already design your pages in Dreamweaver, it can be good
to do the scripting in ColdFusion, as you get the advantages
that integration between the two gives you. You can insert
ColdFusion code into Dreamweaver files quickly and easily, and
you can even use its built-in editor to edit the code however
you want without messing up Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG view.
ColdFusion also integrates surprisingly well with Macromedia's
flagship product, Flash - but don't let that lead you into
developing nothing but ColdFusion-scripted websites with fancy
Flash interfaces, whatever you do.
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