Macromedia ColdFusion MX

The latest incarnations of Macromedia's Web-development tools - Flash MX (see Reviews, issue 92, p140), Dreamweaver MX (see Reviews, p138) and ColdFusion MX - are so interlinked, building on each other's strengths, that they should be considered as a complete solution. Given this, it's difficult to consider ColdFusion MX on its own, which is why there are so many references to the other components in this review.

It's important to realise how they all work together and how they enable you to deliver the sort of Web applications you may have been struggling to implement with .NET. Macromedia has brought to the marketplace a system that will allow you to develop Web applications that talk to Web Services running on either single servers or farms. It's beaten Microsoft to this Holy Grail as, while it has the coding and arguably the debugging tools, Microsoft is severely lacking any good design and Web front-end development programs.

The code for ColdFusion has been rewritten to run on the Java platform and includes a J2EE-compliant Java Application Server. This means ColdFusion MX will work on a variety of platforms with different Web servers, including IIS, Apache, Netscape, JRun, WebSphere, iPlanet Application Server and Web Logic Servers. It will also run on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX or any J2EE application server, as well as having support for type IV JDBC, LDAP, COM, CORBA and JavaBeans/EJB.

This ability to bridge the gap between the different camps will appeal to many developers, as it means you can now develop a Web application and then implement it on virtually any Web server. The process is simplified further, as ColdFusion MX has the ability - as in previous versions - to wrap up all the server-side code and settings into a deployment package that can then be run on a remote server with all the configurations done by the program. This functionality is more important as server-side solutions become increasingly complex.

In common with most new programs, ColdFusion MX has full support for XML and makes the building of Web Services easy - one extra line of code is all that's required. This, along with Dreamweaver MX's ability to discover the properties of a Web Service from its WSDL file and automatically generate a Web proxy before displaying it graphically for you to drag and drop its data onto your page, means we're at the stage where you don't have to be a top programmer to use Web Services. ColdFusion MX has built-in XML parsing and supports XSL transformations, so data from XML can simply be parsed and the data extracted from it server-side. The data in, say, HTML form is then passed to the client to be used in a Web site or Web application.

Java, .NET/COM and CORBA objects are all supported too. It's great to see support for these technologies, particularly as we're constantly told that XML is the future. That said, implementing solutions can be tricky, especially in a world of short development times, where the luxury of time to implement such things, even if it is the 'way to go', often isn't there. After all, the user and/or client only sees a Web site in finished form and doesn't care how it was produced, so long as it was done quickly and its performance is excellent. On this last point, Macromedia has added a system of page compilation and made some changes to the locking mechanism, which should increase the performance even further.

Flash integration

The integration of Flash MX with ColdFusion MX has seen several major improvements. Macromedia obviously sees ColdFusion MX being leveraged as the back-end solution for Flash developers. This is most obvious in the implementation of Flash's programming language ActionScript in ColdFusion MX, so that ColdFusion server-side code can now be written in ColdFusion's own tags or in ActionScript's JavaScript-like language. This will help remove the resistance of having to learn another language to implement the back-end requirements.