Which Server-Side Language Is Right For You?

Cold Fusion

For the Web desginer who has never written a program before, the choice of server-side Web development platform can be a dreaded one. Whichever way you go, you're faced with an big, evil programming language to learn and your head just starts to ache... Originally created by Allaire in 1995 and recently bought out by Macromedia, Cold Fusion was designed to be different. Instead of a scripting language, Cold Fusion gives you a set of tags to learn. Yes, tags -- just like those HTML tags you've come to know and love!

Let's take the example of publishing information stored in a database on the Web. With the vast majority of server-side languages, you need to add code to your Web page to break out of HTML mode, connect to the database, request the entries from the database that you want to display, and process the results that the database sends you to display it as part of the Web page. In Cold Fusion, this common task is done with two tags: a <CFQUERY> tag, the attributes of which give the query a name and indicate what information to retrieve from which database. A second tag, <CFOUTPUT> refers to the query and lets you use standard HTML to format and display the results of the query.

To the experienced programmer, this tag-based system may sound restrictive and inflexible, but with a built-in library of over 300 tags in the latest version, and the ability to add custom tags with more traditional programming languages like C/C++ and Java, Cold Fusion is anything but restrictive. Cold Fusion 5.0 includes tags that automatically generate graphs from database data, seamlessly provide search facilities on your Website, and even generate HTML forms with full JavaScript validation code. For the desginer who is forced to acquire server-side skills, Cold Fusion comes with the utopian promise of only having to learn a few new tags!

Like ASP, Cold Fusion is a commercial server platform, which means it will cost you money to run it whether you set up your own server or rent space on a Web hosting provider. Unlike ASP, however, Cold Fusion is not tied to the Windows platform. Cold Fusion can integrate just as easily with Apache running under Linux as it can with IIS on Windows 2000.

Advantages:

• Extremely easy to learn -- no programming required!
• Powerful and very scalable (latest version has support for both software- and hardware-based server clustering).
• Professional Support from Macromedia.
• Cross platform.

Drawbacks:

• Expensive to set up your own server: Cold Fusion Server Professional 5.0 costs $1,295
• Programmers may not like the tag-based development methods.

Target Developer:

Web designers who are comfortable with HTML but need to add server-side skills to their repertoire without having to learn a programming language. From the average developer's point of view, learning Cold Fusion is just like learning some new tags. Non-designers are also likely to warm up to the neatness of server-side programming with tags, so if you're tired of debugging your server-side scripts, Cold Fusion might be worth a look!