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Macromedia
Cold Fusion is a web scripting language which is amazingly successful
considering that it is neither Microsoft made nor is it Open Sourced. Further
Macromedia does not make cheap tools.
I've just started working with CF5. CFMX is the
current version. Briefly, CFMX supports SOAP
and web services and appears to be Java plumbed. The core commands (i.e. CF
Tags and CF
Functions) have not changed much.
Why is Cold Fusion popular?
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It makes doing simple things easy. You have
to go through agony to work with Microsoft's Dot Net
System.DirectoryServices to query LDAP servers. Not CF - the CFLDAP
tag makes things very easy.
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Although ASP, php and CF are tag based
interpreted scripting languages for server side web development, CF has been
much simplified (i.e. rich) that you don't have to build libraries of
routines to do simple jobs. For example, <CFOUTPUT>
is laughably simple. Notice you can't find i=i+1 or i++ increments. Or
arrays or recordset.movenet. You don't need them if you use <CFOUTPUT>.
With CF, you write much less code.
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CF arrays have only to be declared for
dimension, not for number of elements. The array grows by itself as you add
new elements and you can ArrayDeleteAt
an element in the center and the array renumbers. You can also sort (without
coding a bubble sort routine) and find (without a loop routine). Arrays are
useful but CF also has List
Management and Data
Structures. These three data storage types account for work with
name+value pairs so often used in web work and resultsets from database
retrievals.
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Although CF is not platform agnostic, your
code can be ported between Unix/Apache and IIS. Of course, there are some
differences - with IIS, you could rely on MS XML parser and call COM
objects. With Unix/Apache, you don't have those facilities but you could
call Java servlets.
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Unlike VBScript in ASP, CF has good error
handling mechanisms with Try...Catch
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The error output from the parser is quite
clear and unambiguous unlike the VBScript - Windows Error Messages (e.g.
Code:800405) or the over verbose and yet insufficiently explicit DOT.NET
error displays.
CF Development environments
You could go and buy the Development Studio that Macromedia
sells. But CF development can be carried out quite well with just a text editor
that can colour syntax your CF code. (You aren't using notepad?) You don't need
Visual Studio .NET with remote machine debugging, SQL Server Explorer and
zooming Toolboxes.
Possible editors are:
CF Resources
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