Andrew Binstock: ColdFusion 8 Warms Cockles - Software Development Times On The Web

Andrew Binstock: ColdFusion 8 Warms Cockles
By Andrew Binstock

September 15, 2007 — Developers’ fascination with the presentation layer has generated a profusion of Web development frameworks during the past decade. And, now RIA threatens a similar profusion.

While choice is a wonderful thing, it’s hard to argue that the wide range of Java Web frameworks has been good for the industry. A few frameworks, sure; but many, not so much.

The cost is significant: Many sites are sitting on reams of legacy code simply because they chose what was once the dominant paradigm. Consider, for example, the Apache Struts project’s release this summer of versions of Struts 1.3.x and 2.0.x. Struts 2.0 might be a surprise to some readers who expected that JavaServer Faces (JSF) would be the successor to Struts 1.x. And, in fact, it was touted as such by many people, including Craig McClanahan, the primary author of both Struts and JSF. It turns out the successor is now neither JSF nor Struts 2.0—it’s Shale, which is McClanahan’s new project based on JSF but housed inside the Struts project at Apache. Now it’s its own top-tier Apache project—unassociated with either JSF or Struts. You still following?

The situation reflects a problem I’ve touched on before: The open source software (OSS) community likes to reinvent the wheel...a lot. In some areas, this pullulation of alternatives has few costs—for example, using one of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of OSS text editors. But in frameworks, the problem is truly costly. At some point, managers start wanting a solution they can depend on long term—one that will advance with their needs, not forsake the original adopters, and have enough of a community that locating developers will not be the equivalent of finding Judge Crater.

Not a lot of OSS products make the cut, but a few commercial ones do. One that is easy to overlook is ColdFusion from Adobe (previously from Macromedia, and originally from Allaire). First released in 1995, the product has known 10 releases, the most recent being ColdFusion 8, which shipped in late July.

Even prior to this release, ColdFusion had several interesting aspects. The most prominent is its legendary ease of use. The tag-oriented language—ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML)—was one of the Web languages to make all sorts of complex user interactions easy to articulate in a purely declarative syntax. As a result, vendors could assemble sites that had considerable functionality without investing in long, painful software development projects. And scalability of ColdFusion server was not a problem—half.com, the eBay subsidiary, ran on ColdFusion. (This no longer appears to be the case, however.)

Another interesting implementation detail was added during the past few years: ColdFusion code can be converted to Java bytecodes. In fact, for the last few releases, Adobe has bundled a Java EE server, on which the Web applications could be deployed. (The server is Allaire/Macromedia’s little used but excellent JRun product. However, ColdFusion can be run on other Java EE servers, of course.)

Release 8 adds the ability to generate PDF files directly from HTML (This is, after all, an Adobe product now), and it integrates with various Adobe technologies, such as its LiveCycle workflow engine.

ColdFusion 8 also integrates with Microsoft .NET—making it one of the few platforms that can work directly with the two major enterprise runtime frameworks. (It previously offered COM, CORBA and EJB connectivity.) So, apps written in CFML can be run unchanged just about anywhere.

Despite the rich tag libraries the product bundles, ColdFusion bundles two native scripting languages: the proprietary CFscript for applications, and an ECMAscript subset called ActionScript for operations on the server.

In sum, ColdFusion is a mature Web application framework with many features—especially ease of use—that should endear it to sites struggling with the problem of which Web framework to adopt.

However, I should point out that ColdFusion is different in key ways from competing frameworks: It is neither free, nor open source. The closed source aspect I doubt makes much difference here. And given that the price of ColdFusion runs US$1,300 for the standard edition and $7,500 for the enterprise version, I doubt cost will be much of a deterrent. A free developer edition is available for download from Adobe, and several ISPs provide inexpensive CF server hosts for companies that prefer not to host on-site. Regardless of the choice, ColdFusion 8 is sure to please and solve the problem of Web frameworks for a long time to come.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.

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