Slashdot Mirror

Aak, bad link. Sorry. Kawa is here. I actually wasn't gonna even give a link. But since I gave it wrong, I'll fix it.

Well.... cold fusion is already commercially available

Macromedia's ColdFusion Server can be configured in this manner. The instructions for Version 5 can be downloaded here. The instructions for Version 4.51 can be downloaded here (Linux/Solaris) and here (NT). There is a performance hit in configuring this way, though I don't have specific benchmarks.

Macromedia's ColdFusion Server can be configured in this manner. The instructions for Version 5 can be downloaded here. The instructions for Version 4.51 can be downloaded here (Linux/Solaris) and here (NT). There is a performance hit in configuring this way, though I don't have specific benchmarks.

Macromedia's ColdFusion Server can be configured in this manner. The instructions for Version 5 can be downloaded here. The instructions for Version 4.51 can be downloaded here (Linux/Solaris) and here (NT). There is a performance hit in configuring this way, though I don't have specific benchmarks.

Dug up our performance white papers and benchmarks on this. Doesn't include Tomcat 4.0 or 3.3, but does include 3.2. For now you'll have to take my word on the relative performance of 3.3 and 4.0.

JRun Server Performance Reports

JRun is commercial, from Allaire/Macromedia. You can download it for free, though, at Allaire. They have several different versions to download. Professional and Enterprise are the full version of the product, but with a 30-day time limit. You'll need a license key. The difference between them is that Enterprise supports EJB, JTA, and JMS, which are Java API's for building complex applications on the server. Tomcat is like Professional in that it supports JSP and servlets, which are similar to PHP and CGI Perl for all you non-java slashdotters.

I actually don't have performance numbers for Tomcat 4.0 and JRun 3.1, since Catalina just got GA'd. If you can live without the support for JRun from Macromedia, and you want to save about a thousand bucks a server, give Tomcat a chance. You're probably not using EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) anyway, since they were only supported in JRun 3.x.

I'm very interested in seeing someone get a positive result replicating this, don't care much about negative results becuase it's probably fairly touchy, like semicondutors, superconductors, cold fusion, etc.

We're currently using Resin, because it uses an open source-style license, and we liked its implementation. Also, Resin compiles Javascript to Java bytecodes, which actually outperforms ASP.

I agree, Javascript is nice - small but powerful. In the JSP environment, having full access to the entire suite of Java class libraries makes it even more useful. And we don't have to embed Java code in web pages, where it doesn't belong.

Not to be nitpicky, but you mention providing marketable skills & performance isn't the issue. If Java is a slow performer, wouldn't it tend to hurt students more learning a language that is slow, and klunky? Last I checked, there were plenty of jobs available for C & C++ programmers. I have a feeling that Java may be a fad, and C/C++ will be around and fall back in favor unless Java really takes off.

Java lets you do some cool stuff, and it lets you do some really klunky stuff, but it isn't designed for performance. Any industry that is CPU bound (Simulation, number crunching, gaming, local applications, etc.) needs to be coded to run fast. Industries that are network bound (ISP's, ASP's, Portals, etc.) don't really care about how much the CPU is choking because the network is the bottleneck. I have a feeling, once the network is no longer the bottleneck, Java either better get fast quick, or it's going to be going back to C/C++ for speed.

1. Java's not slow and klunky. I don't know when the last time you looked at Java was (it must have been years ago), but it is fast and getting faster. There are some optimization tricks you can do to code at runtime that can't work with a static compiler.
2. C++ lets you do some really klunky stuff, too - more, I would argue. There's no cure for incompetent programming.
3. Java isn't just taking off, it's already taken off. The base of Java developers and companies using Java for enterprise-critical applications is growing in direct proportion to C++'s falloff rate. Java isn't a fad, it's the language of the future. You can bury your head in the sand all you want, but that's the way it is. I'm sure lots of COBOL programmers thought C was just a fad, too.
4. Java's making huge inroads in graphics performance and I/O speed, which is where it's always been slowest, especially in the upcoming Merlin release (J2SE 1.4). I won't pretend that you could write Quake III in Java yet, but you could probably write Quake I. Computation speed has never really been the problem. After all, even Fortran has great number-crunching capability, but nobody would use it for serious enterprise-type applications.
5. Java's great strengths are binary portability, syntactic simplicity, and standard, supported APIs for everything under the sun. C++ doesn't even have an ABI standard that everyone plays with yet, let alone standard networking, graphics, and GUI libraries. Any industry that doesn't want portable, maintainable, extensible code is better off out of business.

Obligatory flamebait disclaimer: I don't think C and C++ are going away, or that Java is the One True Language. However, it is ridiculous to assert that Java is slow, poorly adopted, or unsuited to real-world applications in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Very serious companies like Oracle, Sybase, IBM, Macromedia/Allaire, Borland and of course Sun, are banking lots of money on Java's success, recognizing that it's a mature, robust, stable, fast language for very serious development.

I am a web developer so, if you are interested, here are some good web development resources. First, try the World Wide Web consortium for a lot of good web and XML reference/background stuff. For using java on the web, check out Sun's Java Server Pages , with lots of tutorials. Sun is now using the FREE Apache Tomcat JSP Server . There is also a free jsp server in Allaire's JRUN Server 3.1. Interestingly, the JRUN Eval. Edition server has no expiration date, on purpose. Have fun!

In all seriousness - if development time is really your number one priority, shouldn't you be using something like ColdFusion?

I have hopes for Tomcat 4.0. But just because the 3.x series is shaky doesn't mean you should drop Java; there are a whole variety of servlet containers out there that should be able to run your servlets.

I'm pretty pleased with Allaire's JRun; I use it to serve an application that gets a half-million hits a day without problems. It's pretty zippy; on a single-processor PIII 800 MHz box we could serve two or three times the traffic we handle now. And they offer a free developer version, so it's well worth trying out if Tomcat doesn't meet your needs.

I have hopes for Tomcat 4.0. But just because the 3.x series is shaky doesn't mean you should drop Java; there are a whole variety of servlet containers out there that should be able to run your servlets.

I'm pretty pleased with Allaire's JRun; I use it to serve an application that gets a half-million hits a day without problems. It's pretty zippy; on a single-processor PIII 800 MHz box we could serve two or three times the traffic we handle now. And they offer a free developer version, so it's well worth trying out if Tomcat doesn't meet your needs.

Oops, you missed the fact that it runs on Windows, Linux, HP/UX, and Solaris. Hardly "locked into a Windows world".

ColdFusion System Requirements

Well, I can use Perl, PHP, or Java for free, or I can drop several thousand dollars on a fractionally powerful template engine. I think I'll pass. CF on Unix is a terrible mismatch of environments, imnsho.

I've seen CF tie into JavaScript a lot, yeah. However, this brings with it the requirement that JavaScript be present. While I realize JavaScript being present is a safe assumption for most users, I don't consider it a safe assumption in web app development. Even if it is there, it's very difficult to do anything meaningful in JS without writing it once for each browser you want to support.

I've also seen whole application suites written in CF (A first mistake) that use _only_ JavaScript for data validation (A second mistake). As a result, if JavaScript is off, or if it isn't written correctly for each browser, the app either simply breaks, or data gets send to the queries (Or in this case, sprocs) unvalidated, creating messy DB error messages.

CF does have one last gasp at a future, though. They're working on converting the language into a set of JSP custom tags, which would free it of the poorly designed CF server, and tie it to a language that does have a solid future (Regardless of if we like it or not, Java is indeed not going anywhere for quite awhile).

You have missed out two of the best Editors for Windows, both of which have features he's looking for. Home Site Has FTP built in, syntax highlighting, you can map your files locally through Apache. You can Have Code Snippets of often used code. I think someone has added the PHP manual to the built in help (look at the contributed area on the Allaire website). Also there's Edit Plus which has FTP built in & syntax highlighting. I've been using this more recently, mainly because my laptop is only a Pentium 120 which is to slow for Home site. But Edit Plus still flys. Neil

PHP has a debugger built into it, if you check the PHP online manual, you'll see that the following directives can be set in php.ini:

Debugger Configuration Directives

debugger.host string
DNS name or IP address of host used by the debugger.

debugger.port string
Port number used by the debugger.

debugger.enabled boolean
Whether the debugger is enabled

Additionally, make sure you have the following set correctly.

display_errors boolean
This determines whether errors should be printed to the screen as part of the HTML output or not.

error_log string
Name of file where script errors should be logged. If the special value syslog is used, the errors are sent to the system logger instead. On UNIX, this means syslog(3) and on Windows NT it means the event log. The system logger is not supported on Windows 95.

error_reporting integer
Set the error reporting level. The parameter is an integer representing a bit field. Add the values of the error reporting levels you want.

Table 3-1. Error Reporting Levels

bit value enabled reporting
1 normal errors
2 normal warnings
4 parser errors
8 non-critical style-related warnings

The default value for this directive is 7 (normal errors, normal warnings and parser errors are shown).

For windows development I recommend a local instance of IIS or Apache w/ PHP (easy to setup - read the INSTALL file in the root of the win32 distribution).

A good editor is Homesite from Allaire - you can map a directory to your www server root, and when you preview pages it will get passed through the interpretor and generate error messages etc. The editor also does correct color coding for many different languages (javascript, cfml, asp, php, html, xml etc).

Jakarta/Tomcat is a nice servlet container with jsp support. jserv is another servlet container. I personally prefer Tomcat because it's quite a bit easier to set up. For a full CORBA implementation, hook either container into ORBit, the Gnome ORB.

For full-on EJB (J2EE) support, try Allaire's JRun. Though not free in any sense of the word, it is a fully integrated EJB container and app server.

SVG specifications have been evolving for quite some time, and Adobe is one of the companies in the forefront of SVG acceptance. At Adobe's SVG website you can download the SVG plug-in (2.4meg, Win32/Mac) and then see demos of what SVG is capable of. One of the coolest things SVG can do over Flash is client-side image filters, such as marbled textures, flaming text, and embossing, without the user having to download a large raster image.

The biggest problem facing SVG going forward is the strong alliance between Microsoft and Macromedia, the makers of Flash. This alliance lead to the tight integration of Flash in Internet Explorer 5.5. Fortunately Adobe has worked out a deal with Microsoft to automatically download the SVG viewer on-demand in future releases, much like Internet Explorer automatically installs the Flash viewer now.

Personally I think the biggest strength of SVG lies in its text/xml format, because any current HTML generating tool (perl, php, cold fusion, asp) can generate SVG code just as easily.

Most of the vendors we have worked with are really good about integration, but one in particular seemed to really stand out. Have you checked out Allaire's JRun 3.0? We tried them out against BEA and really felt like they kicked WebLogic's butt. Here's Allaire's website.

I happen to be a long time Homesite user myself and I agree with Metrol. Bluefish just isn't all that close to homesite. Real time highlighting is the smallest helpful feature difference compared to homesite.

Here is a link to Allaire's website so you can take a look at Homesite yourself.

If you've ever used Cold Fusion, that's one of the most widely used products written in Pascal (well, Delphi, really).

Here's the URL for Allaire's Cold Fusion

Cold Fusion 4.0 supports Query Caching and Dynamic Page Caching for dynamic pages that don't need to be updated often. I have been programming in CF for 2 years now and enjoy its functionality and ease of development. I find it to be a very customizable and dynamic language, especially with the new functionality in CF 4.5. I have not coded much with PHP, so I can not comment on a comparison with CF at the moment, but I hope to someday master PHP as well. I recommend that you download the CFML Language Referance Guide from http://www.allaire.com/handlers/index.cfm?ID=13381 &Method=Full& Title=ColdFusion%204%2E5%20 Documentation&Cache=False

Better URLs for information about this seems to be http://www.allaire.com/products/forums/ and http://www.forumspot.org/

openspot.com doesn't look like it's related to Allaire.

Can't find related press release at http://www.allaire.com/co mpany/pressbox/pressreleases.cfm.

This story sure looks like coming from nowhere!

http://download.allaire.com

I used to respect Tognazzini a great deal. However, close reading of his writing, over an extended period of time, has led me to believe that he has questionable judgment about many issues. Just examine his article, How Programmers Stole the Web, where he claims that:

• BASIC is the paragon of computer programming languages, because it uses a "simple" state-machine paradigm (I can only assume he means programs composed of global variables and GOTOs, like a finite-state automaton).
• JavaScript is counterintuitive because it (a) resembles C++ instead of BASIC and (b) the code must be enclosed in comments (he thinks an XML-based inline programming language would have been the better choice, apparently ignorant of how bulky and clumsy pure XML-syntax programming languages like ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) have turned out.)
• Tognazzini calls it "inexplicable" that VBScript is not cross-browser and cross-platform, and seems to imply that this is due to engineers' habits of "enforced illogic" (which leads engineers to hate BASIC)---not on the Microsoft attempt to turn the Web into their proprietary fiefdom.

These are only a sample of the glaring Deep Wrongness in the article I link to above.

In addition, Tog is a relentless Apple partisan, despite his objections to the new Aqua interface. This clouds his perception of all Apple-related issues. For example, among other things, he says in the Aqua/OS X interface article that "Apple could argue, and few would deny it, that Apple was first and Microsoft is the one who made things difficult by failing to accurately copy the Mac interface." Ignoring, of course, the fact that Microsoft would have been perfectly happy to copy the Apple interface exactly, except that Apple is one of the most litigious companies in the IT industry (have you seen Microsoft threaten to sue KDE over their Windows98 theme?).

IMHO, Tognazzini has suffered from a lesser form of the same brain rot that has affected Jon Katz since becoming published on the web: free to spout off without an editor, never forced to confront dissenting opinions before publication, he has become something of an autodidact. This may seem a bit harsh, but I urge the programmers in the audience to read the "How Programmers Stole the Web" article. It reveals a great deal about the didacticism of Tognazzini's thought habits, and will probably cast a very different light on his supposedly authoritative interface design ideas.

I once respected Tog. Occasionally, he comes up with some good insights. However, don't let his impressive resume blind you to his often misled assertions.

The web is growing and changing at a pace that a band-aid fix like static indeces just wont solve. Database-driven web sites are simply more manageable, scale better, and more easily allow the separation of content creation from site design than static ones consisting of n-thousand HTML documents.

Technologies like XML and WDDX provide access to databases through standard protocols and are not difficult to implement. A few simple, scalable solutions include:

• Allaire's ColdFusion (for small websites)
• Allaire's Spectra for *huge* sites
• Apache in combo with some DB fun for those of you sage enough to use *nix

DB-Based web content has the potential to make the web more searchable then ever before through hierachy and content classification, but only if we do not try to reign it in. Instead, we should adapt the way we search to the emerging scalable, powerful web architechture that is the future of the web.

I took a 5 minute gander over at opendesk.com and saw a few interesting features. It's open-source, so perhaps you could use it as a springboard for rolling your own.

Speaking of rolling your own ... (I see a number of people have already mentioned this route ... it's too bad there isn't a full-blown package out there to give some alternatives to IBM's Lotus ... but I digress) you could check out the resources at linuxdev.net. An application server, like Enhydra, combined with an LDAP server could fit the bill. There's plenty of other application servers out there; I work with ColdFusion on daily basis. Allaire (maker of ColdFusion) has released a CF server stub for linux and a full port is on its way.

Intranet wants/needs can differ greatly from company to company. Whatever solution you end up with, it'd be nice to have the flexibility to customize. *flex coding fingers*

Try that again. It's http://www2.allaire.com/Products/Spectra/

The only closed-bits are are the security API.

It's not released yet - they expect to release in the 2nd week in Dec - but they'll support people going live with a Release Candidate.

The info's here.

• Allaire ColdFusion
• Pervasive Software's Tango (soon to support Linux)
• Macromedia Generator, which one could argue is a very specialized type of application server. (And one I'd like to see for Linux/BSD)

--

Click here for the proof

I am a web developer for a company in Fredericksburg. I would highly recommend Dreamweaver. Go Live is really only marginally better and costs a little more than Macromedia. Plus when paired with Macromedia Fireworks, DW is a very powerful tool.

One reason it is so good is that it is true WYSIWYG. I have rarely seen any browser show a page any differently than it is shown in the workspace. Als, you can customize Dreamweaver. All your object bars can be changed to add actions you use regularly. DW will also write standard simple java scripts for things like rollovers and whatnot. Fireworks (The Macromedia vector graphics tool) will also export rollovers and regular images to DW.

I would also recommend looking into Allair's Net Objects Fusion. You get a very comparable (though not as feature rich) HTML editor and you get the ability to program cold fusion apps which is a sweet deal. If you don't need CF capabilities, check out Home Site which is allaire's editor stand alone. Considerably cheaper than both the products you were asking about.

You can d/l demos of dreamweaver, Net Objects Fusion , and Home Site from each company's homesite which I have listed below. You can also check out Fireworks.

If you already use Illustrator for vector graphics. Let me sing you the web praises of Fireworks. It has the best image export utility out there, handles vector graphics as well as Illustrator, and you can get a Dreamweaver/Fireworks package for a sweet price. Not to mention, FW is very geared to WEB graphics whereas Illustrator runs the gammut and is somewhat lacking in creating web graphics with exporting images. Fireworks can strip images down to such a small size it is incredible.

Also, while Amaya has allot of potential, it is still pretty spartan compared to what DW and Fusion are capable of. I have played with fusion a bit and it is certainly powerful, however most of what it can do, DW does as well. Plus, I like the interface of DW better than any of them, very intuative and user friendly.

Hope that helped.

Macromedia
Allaire

Uhm, funny thing. A) I don't recall the "Editor Wars" of which you so authoritatively speak. B) Who declared emacs the winner? Statements like that prove nothing and serve only to hint at the age of the author. :) I would say that there are many people who prefer vi and many who prefer emacs. Each have their uses and should never be relegated to the status of winner or loser. I believe the question was one of which tool was best for site management. That itself calls for subjective opinion. Therefore, I shall give mine. I prefer Allaire's Homsite tool. I have not used any of thier other products, but this one seems to have everything I want and most importantly, the option of shutting off "features" that bug me. For those that seem to misunderstand, when you are dealing with site design, rather than a simple "Under construction, neon-flashing, here's-my-friends'-pages" mind-numbing excursion through oblivion, you need a tool to manages things like image/content/cgi trees. Such tools will follow all the links on your site and tell you if they're broken, determine the download "weight" of each page, etc. Sometimes I do show that I have an opinion...oh well. -Saint

Homesite can be located at www.allaire.com. I've used it a bit, reasonably impressed with it. I tend to use HTML editors to get the basic code laid out, then hit it with vi or jed (usually vi these days, jed is iffy on an AIX console). A guy I work with uses Homesite extensively, and is very impressed with the latest version - it has CSS editors, syntax colouring for javascript, perl, html and more. There is a 30 day trial, then it costs money.