Macromedia ColdFusion MX

When developing a front end with something like a Flash object on the client talking to a back-end server-side process, debugging can become very tricky. The debugging in ColdFusion MX has been excellent for some time, putting many competing products to shame. In this version, the debugging capabilities have been extended even further with the addition of the NetConnect Debugger. This application shows you the data being sent back and forth between the client and the Web server, which is a great way of picking up on incorrectly formed queries and the like.

According to Macromedia, the way forward when building Web applications (rather than Web sites, which may contain many such applications) is to use Flash MX as the User Interface builder and implementer, talking to data and business processes held server-side and provided by ColdFusion MX or other Web Services. These conversations are done in a variety of ways including SOAP and HTTP, but an interesting method is to use Macromedia's own Action Message Format. This is a secure, high-performance binary transfer between Flash MX and ColdFusion MX via HTTP. This concept of building Web applications has phenomenal possibilities. Macromedia hasn't forgotten traditional Web sites either, and Dreamweaver MX now includes UltraDev as a powerful tool to build these and support Flash applications and Web Services as well.

Several minor improvements include support for Unicode, which gives access to the extended character set required to fully support languages other than English. This should help with the development of multilingual Web sites, although support doesn't extend to languages that are written from right to left. Also, within ColdFusion MX you can now create Components - reusable code that can be called from other code, helping to reduce development times and simplify debugging. There's even a ColdFusion section on the excellent Macromedia Extensions site where you can download extra functionality for ColdFusion MX, written by either Macromedia or the developer community.

Finally, the already excellent charting facilities of ColdFusion MX have been improved, enabling a greater range of charts and variations to be generated, either as graphics or as Flash objects. These charts can be produced on-the-fly in response to a user's request or, if the data isn't rapidly changing, they can be batched and produced as static images to be used on the site.

ColdFusion MX comes in three main versions. The Professional edition runs on Windows and Linux, connecting to ODBC data sources as well as directly to Access, SQL Server and MySQL in the Windows version, and to SQL Server and MySQL in the Linux version. The search capability of the included Verity search engine is limited to 125,000 documents, whereas in the other editions of ColdFusion MX this maximum is 250,000. The Professional version doesn't support the advanced deployment and management of the Enterprise edition, nor load balancing and fail-over.

The Enterprise and J2EE versions are similar in their specification, both supporting direct connectivity to a large number of databases including Informix and Oracle, except that the J2EE edition doesn't support load balancing or fail-over yet. There's a free developer's version too, so it's possible to develop your application without having to invest in a full copy. Macromedia's pricing for the Professional and the Enterprise versions is based on a per-server cost, so you can host as many Web sites as you like on that server, whereas the J2EE version is licensed at a per-CPU cost. Obviously, there are various upgrade paths for existing users, so it's worth checking out the Macromedia site for full details.