Cold Fusion demo
Perhaps the prime virtue of Macromedia's Cold Fusion is its ease of maintenance.
Cold Fusion was originally described as a Rapid Page Development System, and certainly we have found that it is easy to learn, easy to write and easy to maintain. It is undubitably one of the preferred solutions for small to medium web database requirements and many of the sites we have developed at Albedo have used CF.Why use anything else then? Well, there are and were a variety of reasons. Finding a server that hosted CF at a reasonable cost used to be a major consideration, which has sometimes indicated the use of VBScript or PHP in its stead. Also, initially, CF was only available on Windows NT servers, which meant that cross-platform solutions generally required the use of Perl, VBScript, C/C++ or other technologies.
However, both of these problems have now been addressed - Cold Fusion hosting is now generally affordable and ports of the technology to Solaris and later to Linux have fixed the second problem. (We have developed CF pages using Windows that run easily on a Solaris system).
Of more contemporary concern is CF's performance under large-scale or specialised conditions. We would not advocate the use of CF for large batch updates, for example. VBScript and Visual Basic offer performance enhancements because of their direct calls to operating system modules, C/C++ is almost unparalled in its ability to handle big number-crunching applications, PHP/mysql is an excellent solution for database import/export and Perl/PerlScript appeals to many for its excellent text processing capabilities.
But there is no reason not to produce a hybrid site that incorporates one or more of these other technologies into an overall CF framework, provided the creators/maintainers can handle multiple script paradigms.
To see Cold Fusion in action with a simple database example, use the Demo form below.
Example sites (Albedo):
Internurse
Home Working Solutions
Cold Fusion links:
Macromedia
