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.

CFGRID Demo Video

Some of the new tags can be found using this link. Personally, I am excited about the AJAX features of cfajaximport, cflayout, cfwindow and others. This opens-up a wide variety of new CRUD interfaces to be built for slick user GUI’s and no-refresh page interaction. It would have been nice if Flash Forms wasn’t so slow and that Flex wasn’t a whole new thing to learn.  Some upgraded tags include “cfform type=HTML” which turns the whole thing into an AJAX interface and “cftextarea richtext=yes” which adds a VERY slick WYSIWYG text editor. The editor is probably one of the best I’ve seen– clean code, templates, image insertion and the ability to show your paragraph blocks. Cflayout now includes a tab navigator to create tabbed pages. Interestingly, it can also dynamically pull in another page from a remote source to fill the contents of the tab’s page.

Other tags include cfpdf, cfpresentation, and cfimage. Cfpdf makes it possible for fillable PDF form data to be pulled or stored in a database. I can think of dozens of uses for this.  Cfpresentation can be used to create dynamic Flash-Based presentations from database data. In fact, cfpresentations can be saved and reused in Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro webinars. Cfimage enables users to perform dynamic image manipulation- including the creation of CAPTCHA images. Previously we had to make use of CFX tags to accomplish this task.

CFPDF Demo Video

CFPRESENTATION Demo Video

ColdFusion 8 can now be integrated with ASP.NET. Admittedly, I know little of this but apparently you can now make use of ASP.NET objects from within your ColdFusion code. I would think this would be very useful if you need to marry two applications (.NET and CF) together.

While MySQL ColdFusion ODBC DSNs could be manually added before with some work, it’s now just a normal feature of the software and can be added through our Helm control panel system. This opens up enterprise database features previously unavailable to those without MS SQL. It also adds extended functionality for Windows ColdFusion programmers to make use of data stored in popular PHP applications (like WordPress). I can’t tell you how many times I would like to modify or extend a PHP application with some new feature but, since I am not a PHP guy, there was nothing I could do. Now, I can use CF to enhance a PHP application even if it’s not directly integrated into the application.

There are many more performance and security related upgrades to ColdFusion 8 but I am afraid that’s a topic for another day.

I hope that you plan to make use of these new technologies – I know I will!

One aspect behind our new website and this blog has been to make sure that you are aware that real-people do exist behind my company, and that we aren’t just some faceless enterprise that offers web hosting and web design. There is nothing worse to me than seeing someone get caught up in a web hosting or design situation only to find out that when times get tough, the company that was so attractive in the first place, falls short of offering any real help or advice. That’s just not how we operate.

When considering various mediums for sharing ideas with you we decided against, for now, using a forum system on the site. While a generally good idea for customers to share and exchange ideas– I’ve often seen where it becomes both a crutch and a diversion for a company. Instead of providing good customer service they become referrers of people to the forum. Instead on working on customer solutions that benefit everyone, they are fielding specifics from the handful that use the forum. Until we are able to devote the time it’s off list for now. Instead we’ll be focusing on the blog, writing helpful knowledge base articles, and producing video tutorials.

There are so many things that I have learned about the Internet and business over the last 12 years and I am excited to be able to share them with you. Please take a moment to register on the blog to get the latest posts and, most importantly, to be able to comment and share your experiences.

Best,

Joe Rebis
President
EPhost, Inc.