If you are a professional web developer or an amateur looking to spice up their website you should know there are more options than PHP or ASP.NET to script interactive web pages. Adobe ColdFusion has been around for more than 10 years and is ideally suited to all levels of skill. I am pretty passionate about this topic because of the way ColdFusion has changed my life. I went from playing around with HTML to professionally building complex web based applications in a short period of time. Some of the stuff anyone can do with ColdFusion is amazing and simply a standard feature of the software.
End-users are sometimes intimidated by the ominous sounding name, and naturally have some objections. To clear things up here some some facts:
- It’s free for the end-user.
- It’s supported by most major hosts.
- There are many ColdFusion Web Developers.
- The developers that use ColdFusion are passionate about it.
To clear up some things for developers:
- It’s free for the web developer.
- It’s VERY easy to learn and can applications can be developed fast.
- It includes all of the tools you need now and the in the future. e.g. AJAX without having to learn Javascript!
- It’s made by Adobe and has built-in hooks with many of their products.
To address the last item in more detail Adobe makes Flash, PDF, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop. Almost every web developer has one, if not all, of these core web development tools. Why not use the scripting tool made by the same company?
What makes ColdFusion so special is that it’s tag based. While more advanced methods of scripting are available in ColdFusion, most developers (pro’s or not) use ColdFusion tags to accomplish most tasks. In a nutshell they have incorporated all of the behind-the-scenes scripting into an easy-to-use tag.
For example, if you want to send an email using ColdFusion you write:
< cfmail to="someone@someplace.com" from="me@somewhere.com" subject="My Email Subject" >
Hello this is an email sent from ColdFusion!
< /cfmail >
Wow! That’s easy compared to PHP or ASP.NET. Generally it’s substantially less text to write- but in most cases it’s just plain intuitive compared to other scripting languages. Note: spaces have been added after the greater-than and less-than signs so it will display in this blog post.
For those of you who are current ASP.NET or PHP developers you’ll find this is the case with almost all tasks. If you are thinking that equals less abilities or less sophistication you’ll be surprised to learn about the plethora of available tag parameters, integration of OOP techniques, and web service components that are also available.
For amateur web developers this is an excellent way to jump right in and get the job-at-hand completed without learning complicated scripting techniques.
To learn more about ColdFusion visit Adobe’s website:
http://www.adobe.com/coldfusion
* Remember that that you don’t have to buy, or even download ColdFusion to try it, it’s already enabled in your EPhost web hosting account and ready to try today.
